The Kentucky Cave Wars

In the early nineteen hundreds, the roads around Mammoth Cave became a battlefield fought with lies. As automobile tourists poured through this valley, rival cave owners fought a dirty economic war for their dollars. It came to be called the Kentucky Cave Wars.

Owners of smaller caves hired men called cappers, who wore official-looking uniforms and flagged down cars on the highway. They would lie without blinking, telling drivers that Mammoth Cave was closed, quarantined, or filled with choking smoke, and steer them instead toward a rival cave with a name chosen to sound just as grand, places called Great Onyx Cave or Crystal Cave. Some cappers jumped onto the running boards of moving cars to make their pitch.

Rivals sabotaged each other's signs, blocked access roads with boulders, and reportedly paid cash bounties to burn down competitors' ticket booths. By some accounts, the feud turned violent more than once. The ruthlessness and the swindling gave the whole region a bad name, and that chaos became one of the main reasons the federal government finally stepped in to make Mammoth Cave a national park.