How I Wrote This Book:
A Note to Readers

When I was studying to be a newspaper reporter in college, I learned how to ask all the questions a reader might have about a story. Who was involved? What happened? When and where did it happen? Why? How?

So when I decided to write about Stephen Bishop, those are the questions I wanted to answer. Of course there was no one alive I could interview about Stephen—he was born around 1821 and died in 1857. But Stephen guided hundreds of people through Mammoth Cave, and some of them wrote about him afterwards. Their books and articles became my sources of information.

For one whole summer, the New York City Public Library was my home away from home. As often as I could, I went there and requested to see their very old books about Mammoth Cave. The old volumes don’t sit out on shelves like most library books. They are stored under special conditions so that they won’t fade or fall apart (or be stolen). To read them at the New York Public Library, you have to fill out a request form, which goes down to the basement storage area. The books are collected and sent back upstairs by means of a dumbwaiter (a little elevator used to transport books). You can’t take them out of the library, or even out of the research room. You have to take notes right there while you read.

Some of the books I looked at were so old that they were held together with string. I had to be very careful opening them up and flipping through them. I also read books about cave exploration during the 1800s and books about what life was like in Kentucky during slave times.

Later I took at trip to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. There I looked at newspapers from the 1840s and ’50s, hoping to find stories about Mammoth Cave. I didn’t find any, unfortunately. But I did discover something else. The front pages of the papers I looked at were covered not with the most important news stories of the day, but with ads for slaves on sale and notices about runaway slaves. Wow.

Stephen Bishop made many important discoveries, and enough people wrote about him that I was able to complete this book. Please note that the dialogue is not reproduced from any source. People writing about Stephen’s discoveries never quoted Stephen himself. Sometimes he was referred to by name; more often he was called simply “the guide.”

However, the writers who followed Stephen through the cave were obviously impressed by him. They often mentioned Stephen’s lively personality, his quiet self-confidence and sense of humor, and his deep knowledge of the cave.

There were a few things I had to guess at. For example, how did Stephen learn to read? Where did he meet his wife? We know that he could read, and we know he was married, but no one ever wrote down the details. So I had to do the best I could in telling his story.

The author would like to thank Mammoth Park ranger/guides Joy Medley Lyons and Charles DeCroix, historian Bob Ward, and Vickie Carson of the Mammoth Cave Public Information Office for their contributions to this manuscript and its accuracy. Any errors herein are the author’s, not theirs. In addition, thank you to the National Speleological Society for access to its videotape collection.

Here are a few of the reference books I used.

Rambles in the Mammoth Cave: during the year 1844, by A Visiter. Generally attributed to A. Bullitt. Also attributed to John Croghan, owner of Mammoth Cave. 1845.

A guide manual to the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky. By Charles W. Wright, 1860.

The Mammoth Cave and its denizens; a complete descriptive guide. By A. D. Binkerd, 1869.

Pictorial guide to the Mammoth cave, Kentucky. A complete historic, descriptive and scientific account of the greatest subterranean wonder of the western world. By A. D. Binkerd, M.D., 1888.