The Missouri Ozarks has more than [its] share of caves and caverns, many of them unexplored. Though she may not have the largest caves in the world, Missouri makes up for lack of size with number and variety.
—A. C. BURRILL, Curator, Missouri State Museum in Circular No. 125, 1925
The twentieth century saw the dawn of a new kind of interest and appreciation for Missouri caves. What began to change was public attitudes and perspectives toward cave resources. Some of this came about because of the emergence of the show cave industry.
Show cave owners did not use and abuse the resource. They exhibited the resource, calling attention to the natural beauty and mystique of caves. Here was indescribable beauty that should be cherished, beauty created by underground water flow over unthinkable amounts of geologic time. Because of variations in their floor plans and the arrangements of their natural features, no two caves are alike in their appearance, and each is unique with its own personality. It was realized that caves were millions of years old, and rather than being inexhaustible and indestructible, they were fragile and finite.
The exhibition of show caves generated a groundswell of unanswered questions about how, why, and when the caves had been formed. For example, why were some of the animals seen in caves white and blind, while others were as colorful and keen-sighted as animals found above ground? And how many caves did Missouri have? Where were they located? How big were they? How deep into the earth did they penetrate? What was the relationship between individual caves and between caves and springs? And where did the water boiling to the surface in giant cave springs of the Missouri Ozarks come from?
The emergence of the show cave industry had also proven that caves have educational value as natural history museums. Show caves promote tourism, provide jobs, introduce people to caves, and generate dollars for the state’s economy. The recreational value of caves had certainly been made apparent during the 1890s and early 1900s.
Missourians recognized that caves were historically important because they had been so useful to American and European settlers in the Ozarks. Throughout the nineteenth century, caves had been used in many different ways to sustain and enhance domestic life in the region. Major advances in cultural anthropology and archaeology also brought a new understanding to the significance of the Native American artifacts and burials sites in Missouri caves.
Professional biologists made their first trips into Ozark caves in the 1880s and 1890s. Ruth Hoppin was the first to describe the blind cave fish that inhabit some Missouri cave streams, while Edward Drinker Cope described blind salamanders. In 1926, the American Museum of Natural History’s chair of herpetology, G. Kingsley Noble, explored a number of Missouri caves to study blind salamanders, and in the 1930s and early 1940s, Charles Moore and Carl Hubbs described blind crayfish.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Alfred Burrill, curator of the Capitol museum in Jefferson City, began collecting information about Missouri caves. He was particularly interested in show caves and archaeological sites. His displays at the state Capitol building created a great deal of curiosity about Missouri caves among museum visitors.
Burrill compiled one of the first listings of caves in Missouri, but his list was very short, containing only seventeen caves, which he called “Missouri’s better known and developed caverns.” All of the caves listed were show caves. “It is hoped that the result of making this partial list available to the general public may result in more caves being opened to visitors and the preserving of some of them for scientific study and the interest of tourists,” he said.
In the 1930s, Noel Hubbard, an assistant registrar at the Missouri School of Mines in Rolla (now Missouri University of Science and Technology), became interested in caves. He later organized a caving club on the campus, and by 1949 the Missouri School of Mines Spelunkers (MSM Spelunkers) became an official school club, with a faculty sponsor. Among the members was Willard Farrar, a young geologist who later became the first person to develop a catalog of Missouri caves, both commercial and wild. The MSM Spelunkers became the first organized caving group in Missouri whose goals and organizational structure were consistent with today’s definition for an organized caving group.
Also in the 1930s, William Morris Davis published a paper titled “The Origin of Limestone Caverns” in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, in which he challenged the accepted theory of geologic textbooks that limestone caverns are formed above the water table in the “vadose zone” of bedrock layers. This is the zone of aerated soil, loose material, and bedrock between the surface and the water table. Below the water table, all layers of bedrock are water-saturated, and this area is called the “phreatic zone.” It was his conclusion that caves were formed by water circulating in the phreatic zone, not the vadose zone.
Inspired by Davis’s theory, Dr. J Harlen Bretz, a prominent geologist at the University of Chicago, set about in 1947 to test the Davis hypothesis by conducting fieldwork in the caves of the Ozark region of southern Missouri. Bretz proved, to his satisfaction, that Davis was correct and also took up the challenge of determining the geologic history of the Ozark Plateau. Bretz was a great teacher and a challenging geologist with a fine sense of humor. His parents did not give him a first name, so he added a J before Harlen. Since it is not an abbreviation, no punctuation is needed. “Throughout all my life,” he said. “I have fought typists and printers to leave off that damned period.”
In the meantime, in 1953, Dr. Oscar Hawksley, a biology professor at Central Missouri State College (now Central Missouri State University) in Warrensburg, and faculty advisor for the college Outing Club, began corresponding with officials of the National Speleological Society (NSS). The NSS had been founded in 1941, the first national organization established for the exploration and study of caves. In 1954, Hawksley’s interest resulted in the founding of the Western Missouri Grotto (WMO Grotto), a chapter of the NSS at Warrensburg.
At first, the membership of the WMO Grotto was drawn from the college Outing Club, but it soon attracted members from throughout the state. Since caves are few and far between in the Warrensburg area, the new grotto did most of its caving in the Ozark region.
Two of the early members of WMO were Jerry Vineyard, then a graduate geology student at the University of Missouri–Columbia, and Frank Dahlgren, a metalworker in St. Louis. In 1956, Hawksley, Vineyard, and Dahlgren attended the NSS Convention in Nashville, Tennessee. Inspired by what they learned and encouraged by the NSS, they returned home to establish the Missouri Speleological Survey (MSS). The goal of the organization was to locate, record, explore, map, and study the caves of Missouri.
Fortuitously, the book Caves of Missouri, by J Harlen Bretz, was published in 1956 just as the MSS was being founded. Bretz’s book explained his theory for the origin of Missouri caves and quickly became a classic. His work inspired the members of the new cave organization and became one of the catalysts for organized caving in Missouri.
For the first time in Missouri history, caves of the state had a band of admirers who were seriously interested in them for reasons other than to plunder them for their resources or use them for a purpose other than study and preservation.