Trying the Dark: Mammoth Cave and the Racial Imagination,
1839-1869
Peter West, Adelphi University
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Mandeville Thum, Mouth
of the Cave, Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, 1876-1877.
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Abstract:
In the middle decades of the nineteenth century,
Kentucky's Mammoth Cave was a popular tourist destination for
travelers from around the United States and beyond. The cave also
functioned during
these years as a dynamic symbol in the national imagination, appearing
in travel books, lyric poems, private diaries, love letters, gothic
novels, and even a moving panorama. Peter West examines this diverse
body of cultural
artifacts against the backdrop of Mammoth Cave as a site of American
slavery. As this essay reveals, black slaves
such as Stephen Bishop were the cave's most popular guides
and its most celebrated explorers.
While writers have often depicted Bishop and his fellow guides as heroic figures of slave self-determination and power, West complicates this interpretation by revealing how the symbolic authority of the Mammoth Cave slaves served the white imagination. The theatricality of antebellum cave tourism — which included costumes, optical illusions, sing-alongs, and complex games of racial and sexual role-playing — emerges here as a way of containing the haunting spectacle of black authority and reaffirming conventions of white domination.
While writers have often depicted Bishop and his fellow guides as heroic figures of slave self-determination and power, West complicates this interpretation by revealing how the symbolic authority of the Mammoth Cave slaves served the white imagination. The theatricality of antebellum cave tourism — which included costumes, optical illusions, sing-alongs, and complex games of racial and sexual role-playing — emerges here as a way of containing the haunting spectacle of black authority and reaffirming conventions of white domination.
Essay Sections:
Introduction | The Cave as Gothic Theater | "Trying the Dark" | The Staging of White Masculinity |
The Literary Invention of Mammoth Cave | Conclusion | Notes | Recommended Resources
The Literary Invention of Mammoth Cave | Conclusion | Notes | Recommended Resources
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Introduction:
Geologically, Mammoth Cave is a network of underground caverns in central Kentucky believed to be the world's largest cave system. Understanding Mammoth Cave as a social and political space, however, means grappling with its singular place in the history of American slavery. During the War of 1812, the cave was an important source of saltpeter (used in the manufacturing of gunpowder), and African American slaves provided the principal labor for its mining and extraction. Following the war, when the price of saltpeter dropped dramatically, mining became unviable. In the decades that followed, as the cave emerged as a popular tourist destination for U.S. and European travelers, its economic value continued to depend on slave labor.1 Though it was by no means unusual that male and female slaves worked as cooks, laundresses, porters, and chambermaids in the hotel located near the cave entrance, Mammoth Cave slavery was noteworthy: the guides who led visitors on tours of the cave during the antebellum era were black men either owned by the cave's proprietor or leased out by a neighboring slaveholder. In a compelling racial scenario largely overlooked by historians, these slaves were responsible for the conduct and well-being of the many white men and women who journeyed through the cave in the decades leading up to the Civil War.2
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Stephen Bishop, Map of Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, 1845.
From Alexander Clark Bullitt's Rambles in Mammoth Cave. Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society. |
By far the most famous of these cave guides
was Stephen
Bishop, who began working at Mammoth Cave when his owner, Franklin Gorin,
purchased the property above the cave in 1838. The next year, in 1839, Gorin
sold the property, along with Bishop and another slave, to Louisville physician
Dr. John Croghan.3 Until his death in 1857, Bishop
accompanied thousands of visitors on cave tours, explored miles of the cave's
passages and chambers, and produced detailed maps of the caverns still lauded
for their accuracy. In the dozens of first-hand cave narratives that appeared
in the 1840s and 50s, Bishop was often celebrated for his handsome and exotic
appearance, his extensive knowledge of the cave's topography and history, and
his
bravery and winsome personality. Today, Bishop continues to capture the imagination,
appearing as a central figure in a 2000 Yale Younger Poets volume of poetry,
a 2004 children's novel, and a work of historical fiction.4
Recent treatments
of Bishop tend to represent the celebrated guide and explorer much as
he is depicted on the cover of Roger W. Brucker's 2009 Grand,
Gloomy and Peculiar — as a forgotten romantic hero of
the nineteenth century, a figure of black accomplishment and self-determination
who overcame the dehumanization of slavery. In truth, the complex nature
of slavery inside Mammoth Cave defies easy categorizations. Despite
the fact that Bishop was often labeled the "Christopher Columbus
of the underground," the exploits of he and his fellow cave explorers
were always in the service of the cave's development as a capitalist
venture — so that his celebrated accomplishments must also
be understood as a form of slave labor. Similar contradictions
defined the slave's role as cave guide. Given the treacherous nature
of the underground landscape, guides held practical authority over white
tourists, even as their status as legal and social inferiors was acknowledged.
When Bishop famously traversed a giant chasm in the cave floor known
as the "Bottomless Pit," was he a brave adventurer in a national
tradition, or was he providing labor according to his status? When admonishing
a visitor attempting to remove a piece of the cavern wall for a souvenir,
was Bishop asserting authority, or protecting his master's property? |
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Roger W. Brucker,
Cover Image, Grand, Gloomy, and Peculiar, 2009.
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This essay examines how racial dynamics shaped Mammoth Cave in the mid-nineteenth-century national imagination. Throughout the 1840s and 50s, as tourism flourished, Mammoth Cave emerged as a popular and dynamic literary symbol. Lyric poems invoked the cave's "deep gloom" and ruminated on the "Indian mummy" supposedly taken from the cave by Nahum Ward in 1816; pseudo-archeological narratives described long-lost civilizations of human or near-human races living deep underground; ghost stories and legends told of Indian spirits haunting the cave after it had been used as a Native American burial ground; and gothic novels used the cave as a setting for sensational stories of murder, sexual betrayal, and revenge.5 Mammoth Cave appears in the work of two of the era's most canonical writers: Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Illusions" includes an extended description of the cave's "Star Chamber," and, in chapter LXXIV of Melville's Moby-Dick, Ishmael imagines taking his reader "with a lantern [. . .] into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave" of the Sperm Whale's stomach to have a look around.
Because the archive I am working with exclusively comprises the work of white authors, it is problematic to use these documents to reconstruct Bishop and other cave guides as avatars of slave self-empowerment. While these historical figures found ways of confusing the behavioral codes of slavery in their everyday interactions with cave visitors, my ultimate subject is the way that the mid-nineteenth-century consciousness witnessed and imagined Mammoth Cave as a racial, sexual, regional, and national space. As I trace a "white" way of seeing Mammoth Cave during these years — or, rather, as I chart the shifting, slippery, but persistent effort to delimit such a category — whiteness stands as a rhetorical fabrication bound up in the political contingencies of the age; for what makes these varied, even contradictory texts "white" is the way each articulates the cave as a darkened space that threatens the integrity and survival of the non-dark subject.
Ultimately, there is no one "Mammoth Cave" contained by these words and images. While the illustrations that appeared in antebellum travel books take a wide-angle perspective in portraying a space where human figures are seen from a distance, if at all, many of the narratives rely on a close first-person point-of-view, presenting cave travel as an intense psychological drama. In written accounts, the guides play a central role: manipulating torchlight to produce the cave's famous effects, instructing tourists how to crawl through narrow corridors, or carrying men and women on their backs across shallow rivers. Visual representations of the cave, however, sought a broader frame of authority than that of the cave guides, implying a mode of national spectatorship that transcended the fraught model of white subjectivity enacted by cave tourism.
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In
dozens of mid-century writings about the cave —published travel
narratives, short stories, unpublished diaries, private letters —the
subjection of white tourists to the guides' practical authority
embodied a range of social, political, and economic meanings.6 Writers
invoked Mammoth Cave to articulate white anxieties about the instability
of racial distinctions, to enact melodramatic fantasies of white
supremacy, and to envision apocalyptic nightmares of racial revolution.
Faced with the disorienting spectacle of black authority, celebrity,
and heroism, some portrayed the tourist environment of the cave
as gothic theater, where identities could be slipped in and out
of without apparent social or political consequences. Others fictionalized
the cave in sensationalistic novels and stories that imagined the
United States as an exclusively white republic unthreatened by the
linked nightmares of industrialization and racial equality. Still
other writers sought to efface any trace of slavery from their representations
of Mammoth Cave, even as their work retained the racial logic that
saw the cave as a realm of besieged white subjectivity. |
Horace Martin, Gothic Chapel, Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, 1851. Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society. |
Because the archive I am working with exclusively comprises the work of white authors, it is problematic to use these documents to reconstruct Bishop and other cave guides as avatars of slave self-empowerment. While these historical figures found ways of confusing the behavioral codes of slavery in their everyday interactions with cave visitors, my ultimate subject is the way that the mid-nineteenth-century consciousness witnessed and imagined Mammoth Cave as a racial, sexual, regional, and national space. As I trace a "white" way of seeing Mammoth Cave during these years — or, rather, as I chart the shifting, slippery, but persistent effort to delimit such a category — whiteness stands as a rhetorical fabrication bound up in the political contingencies of the age; for what makes these varied, even contradictory texts "white" is the way each articulates the cave as a darkened space that threatens the integrity and survival of the non-dark subject.
Ultimately, there is no one "Mammoth Cave" contained by these words and images. While the illustrations that appeared in antebellum travel books take a wide-angle perspective in portraying a space where human figures are seen from a distance, if at all, many of the narratives rely on a close first-person point-of-view, presenting cave travel as an intense psychological drama. In written accounts, the guides play a central role: manipulating torchlight to produce the cave's famous effects, instructing tourists how to crawl through narrow corridors, or carrying men and women on their backs across shallow rivers. Visual representations of the cave, however, sought a broader frame of authority than that of the cave guides, implying a mode of national spectatorship that transcended the fraught model of white subjectivity enacted by cave tourism.
A work such as George Brewer's moving panorama of Mammoth Cave and other "American wonders" (including Niagara Falls) staked a claim to national representativeness by subsuming the knowledge and authority of cave guides. An 1850 exhibition pamphlet is careful to report that these sites of national importance were "transferred to the glowing canvas . . . by an American artist."7 While the canvas does not survive, a broadside states that the cave "was illuminated by 500 lamps, burners and torches" to allow Brewer to capture the caverns with an unprecedented fidelity and realism. Such illumination opposes what the pamphlet describes as the limited perspective of the firsthand tourist: "The dim torch which the visitor takes with him into that inky darkness, does little more than render the darkness visible; it falls far short of dispersing the gloom, so as to enable the spectator to form anything like an adequate idea of its great dimensions, its various halls, or the singularity of the objects they contain" (4). Ultimately, the pamphlet declares that "we can therefore form a more correct opinion of the form and appearance of the different chambers, avenues and halls, by an inspection of this Panorama, than can be obtained by a visit to the Cave itself" (5).
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Broadside advertising, George
Brewer's Panorama of Mammoth
Cave, c. 1849. Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society.
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By turning on the lights, Brewer asserts the authority of his own "great
national production" over the perspective of visitors who travel under the
authority of a cave guide. In the panorama, Bishop becomes merely one of the
dozens of cave sites: "Stephen," the pamphlet reads, "the most
complete of guides, the presiding genius of this territory . . . deserves more
than passing notice" (33). Yet, passing notice in the panorama is what Bishop
gets, even as we are told that "his services are quite indispensable" (34).
Typical of panoramic exhibitions, Brewer's narration utilizes the present-tense
second person ("The Cave is about two hundred paces from the Hotel. As you
advance towards it you pass down a beautiful and picturesque dell" [18]).
Such an approach invites his audience to experience this "national production" depicting "great
national objects" as part of a "we" looking on in unity.
As in many depictions of Mammoth Cave from this era, Brewer's panorama renders Bishop's authority as entertainment for white consumption. The panorama asserts the racist logic of U.S. slavery by making black labor "indispensible" to the nation. This use of Bishop as symbol complicates any celebration of the cave guides as figures of black agency and autonomy, opening up a more nuanced approach to Mammoth Cave history —one that attends carefully to the place the cave held in the nineteenth-century imagination. As we shall see, Mammoth Cave was continually re-imagined in ways expressive of racist logic at a time of great social and political upheaval.
As in many depictions of Mammoth Cave from this era, Brewer's panorama renders Bishop's authority as entertainment for white consumption. The panorama asserts the racist logic of U.S. slavery by making black labor "indispensible" to the nation. This use of Bishop as symbol complicates any celebration of the cave guides as figures of black agency and autonomy, opening up a more nuanced approach to Mammoth Cave history —one that attends carefully to the place the cave held in the nineteenth-century imagination. As we shall see, Mammoth Cave was continually re-imagined in ways expressive of racist logic at a time of great social and political upheaval.
Essay Sections:
Introduction | The Cave as Gothic Theater | "Trying the Dark" | The Staging of White Masculinity |
The Literary Invention of Mammoth Cave | Conclusion | Notes | Recommended Resources
The Literary Invention of Mammoth Cave | Conclusion | Notes | Recommended Resources
