Jim White, Ray Davis, and the Cave Nobody Believed In

Jim White was sixteen years old, working as a cowhand in the Guadalupe foothills of southeastern New Mexico, when he first climbed down into the cave in eighteen ninety-eight. What drew him was a column of what looked like smoke rising from a hole in the ground. He got close enough to realize it was not smoke. It was bats, millions of them, erupting from an underground opening in the last hour before dark. He rigged a ladder from wire and sticks and descended alone.

What he found was a chamber so large that his lantern did not reach the walls on either side. He kept returning, alone, naming features as he went: the Big Room, the King's Palace, the Green Lake Room. He told people in the nearest town, Carlsbad, what he had found. Most of them did not believe him. A cave that size, in that country, did not fit what people thought they knew about desert terrain.

The photograph changed that. Between nineteen fifteen and nineteen eighteen, a photographer named Ray V. Davis took the first photographs of the cave's Scenic Rooms and Big Room, and in nineteen twenty-three he photographed it again with White as guide. The photographs were published nationally. Within months, the cave had attracted enough attention that President Calvin Coolidge declared it a national monument in nineteen twenty-three. Congress designated it a national park in nineteen thirty.

White was eventually hired by the Park Service as the park's first chief ranger. He spent most of the rest of his working life in a cave he had explored alone as a teenager, now leading parties of thousands through rooms he had named before anyone believed they existed.

The original entrance White used, a rough slot in the desert floor, is still there. The elevator the park built later descends seven hundred and fifty feet in about a minute. White made that descent with a wire ladder.