Today, Stephen Bishop is remembered as America’s first great cave explorer.
Others of exploration, six brave cavers discovered the underground connection. They started from a cave on Flint Ridge. For twelve exhausting hours they pushed through tight holes, crawled under low ceilings, and waded through water. Finally, they emerged in Mammoth Cave.
They found themselves standing in a passageway Stephen Bishop had discovered and drawn on his map. If Stephen had only had more time, he might have made the connection to Flint Ridge himself!
Today, Mammoth Cave has more than 400 miles of explored passageways. Scientists and cavers guess that there may be hundreds more miles of tunnel just waiting to be found.
In 1941, Mammoth Cave was named a national park, and forty years later was added to the list of World Heritage Sites, which also includes such places as the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal. Today it receives about 650,000 visitors a year. Park rangers guide the tours now, and the trails are lit by electricity. Visitors can see for themselves the stone huts where tuberculosis patients lived, the beautiful Snowball Room—where they can have lunch in an underground cafeteria!—and many other sights that Stephen Bishop showed to visitors in his own time. There are no more boat rides on the Echo River, because the park wants to protect the delicate ecology of the river and its creatures. But a video of the blind cave fish is on display in the visitor center.
If you visit Mammoth Cave, be sure to contact the visitor center in advance and make reservations for the tours you choose, because spaces can fill up early. The website is www.nps.gov/maca/index.htm and the telephone number is 270-758-2180.
One of the most popular tours is the Violet City Lantern Tour, offered during the busy season. The lantern tour does not use electrical light. Instead the guides hand out kerosene lanterns, and the three-hour trip is conducted very much as it was in Stephen’s time.
To find out how real cavers explore, take the Introduction to Caving Tour. Visitors stoop, bend, and crawl through passages away from the traditional tour routes. You must be at least ten years old to take this tour. Expect to get muddy and tired!
The Historic Tour takes visitors to many of the places Stephen Bishop showed his visitors: the Wooden Bowl Room, Bottomless Pit, the Little Bat Room, and Mammoth Dome. Steamboat Rock is now called the Giant’s Coffin.
There are many other tours to choose from. The cave is open year-round except for Christmas Day.
At the Old Guides’ Cemetery near the historic entrance to the cave, you can see Stephen Bishop’s grave. His headstone was donated by a Pittsburgh businessman named James Mellon, but it has the wrong date of death on it—1859 instead of 1857. In the visitor center, a brochure describes Stephen Bishop as the greatest explorer of Mammoth Cave. No other person, in his time or later, discovered more miles of passageways there. Without Stephen Bishop’s brave explorer’s spirit, Mammoth Cave would not have become the place of wonder it is today.