The Slave Who Mapped Mammoth Cave Crossed a Bottomless Pit Alone What He Found on the Other Side Was

In 1838, a seventeen-year-old slave named Stephen Bishop was brought to the entrance of Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, and handed an oil lantern. His owner, a lawyer from Glasgow named Franklin Gorin, had just purchased the cave for five thousand dollars and wanted to turn it into a tourist attraction. Bishop was told to learn the passages and guide wealthy visitors through them. The cave had been known since 1798 when a hunter named John Houchins chased a wounded bear into the entrance. For forty years, white guides showed tourists the Rotunda, the Haunted Chambers, Steamboat Rock, all within the so-called Old Cave. Beyond the Old Cave, nobody went. Because beyond it was the Bottomless Pit. One hundred and five feet of pure darkness. When guides threw burning torches into it, the flames died before they reached the bottom. No one in four decades had crossed it. Bishop, according to a visitor who described him years later, was part mulatto and part Indian, with the look of a Spaniard, black curling hair, a long mustache, broad chest, and slightly bowed legs. He taught himself to read. Professors of geology who descended into the cave with him later said his knowledge rivaled their own. He was seventeen years old and he was the legal property of a man who had bought a hole in the ground. Bishop took a rickety wooden ladder, laid it across the Bottomless Pit, and walked to the other side. Alone. No rope.