Perhaps the first adventurer was a mulatto slave named Stephen Bishop, born about 1820: ‘slight, graceful, and very handsome’; a ‘quick, daring, enthusiastic’ guide to the Mammoth Cave in the Kentucky karst. The story of the Cave is a curious microcosm of American history. Its discovery is a matter of legend dating back to the 1790s; it is said that a hunter, John Houchin, pursued a wounded bear to a large pit near the Green River and stumbled upon the entrance. The entrance was thick with bats and by the War of 1812 was intensively mined for guano, dissolved into nitrate vats to make saltpetre for gunpowder. After the war prices fell; but the Cave became a minor side-show when a dessicated Indian mummy was found nearby, sitting upright in a stone coffin, surrounded by talismans. In 1815, Fawn Hoof, as she was nicknamed after one of the charms, was taken away by a circus, drawing crowds across America (a tour rather reminiscent of Don McLean’s song `The Legend of Andrew McCrew’). She ended up in the Smithsonian but by the 1820s the Cave was being called one of the wonders of the world, largely due to her posthumous efforts.
By the early nineteenth century European caves were big tourist attractions, but hardly anyone visited the Mammoth, ‘wonder of the world’ or not. Nor was it then especially large (the name was a leftover from the miners, who boasted of their mammoth yields of guano). In 1838, Stephen Bishop’s owner bought up the Cave. Stephen, as (being a slave) he was invariably called, was by any standards a remarkable man: self-educated in Latin and Greek, he became famous as the `chief ruler’ of his underground realm. He explored and named much of the layout in his spare time, doubling the known map in a year. The distinctive flavour of the Cave’s names – half-homespun American, half-classical – started with Stephen: the River Styx, the Snowball Room, Little Bat Avenue, the Giant Dome. Stephen found strange blind fish, snakes, silent crickets, the remains of cave bears (savage, playful creatures, five feet long and four high, which became extinct at the end of the last Ice Age), centuries-old Indian gypsum workings and ever more cave. His 1842 map, drafted entirely from memory, was still in use forty years later.
As a tourist attraction (and, since Stephen’s owner was a philanthropist, briefly a sanatorium for tuberculosis, owing to a hopeless medical theory) the Cave became big business: for decades nearby caves were hotly seized and legal title endlessly challenged. The neighbouring chain, across Houchins Valley in the Flint Ridge, opened the Great Onyx Cave in 1912. By the 1920s, the Kentucky Cave Wars were in full swing. Rival owners diverted tourists with fake policemen, employed stooges to heckle each other’s guided tours, burned down ticket huts, put out libellous and forged advertisements. Cave exploration became so dangerous and secretive that finally in 1941 the U.S. Government stepped in, made much of the area a National Park and effectively banned caving. The gold rush of tourists was, in any case, waning.
Convinced that the Mammoth and Flint Ridge caves were all linked in a huge chain, explorers tried secret entrances for years, eventually winning official backing. Throughout the 1960s all connections from Flint Ridge – difficult and water-filled tunnels – ended frustratingly in chokes of boulders. A `reed-thin’ physicist, Patricia Crowther, made the breakthrough in 1972 when she got through the Tight Spot and found a muddy passage: it was a hidden way into the Mammoth Cave.
Under the terms of his owner’s will, Stephen Bishop was freed in 1856, at which time the cave boasted 226 avenues, 47 domes, 23 pits and 8 waterfalls. He died a year later, before he could buy his wife and son. In the 1970s, Crowther’s muddy passage was found on his map.
The Mammoth Cave is huge, its full extent still a matter of speculation (estimates vary from 300 to 500 miles). Although this game has often been called “Colossal Cave”, it is actually a simulation of the Bedquilt Cave region. Here is Will Crowther’s story of how it came about:
"I had been involved in a non-computer role-playing game called Dungeons and Dragons at the time, and also I had been actively exploring in caves – Mammoth Cave in Kentucky in particular. Suddenly, I got involved in a divorce, and that left me a bit pulled apart in various ways. In particular I was missing my kids. Also the caving had stopped, because that had become awkward, so I decided I would fool around and write a program that was a re-creation in fantasy of my caving, and also would be a game for the kids, and perhaps some aspects of the Dungeons and Dragons that I had been playing.
“My idea was that it would be a computer game that would not be intimidating to non-computer people, and that was one of the reasons why I made it so that the player directs the game with natural language input, instead of more standardized commands. My kids thought it was a lot of fun.” [Quoted in “Genesis II: Creation and Recreation with Computers”, Dale Peterson (1983).
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The game’s language is loaded with references to caving, to ‘domes’ and ‘crawls’. A ‘slab room’, for instance, is a very old cave whose roof has begun to break away into sharp flakes which litter the floor in a crazy heap. The program’s use of the word ‘room’ for all manner of caves and places seems slightly sloppy in everyday English, but is widespread in American caving and goes back as far as Stephen Bishop: so the Adventure-games usage of the word ‘room’ to mean `place’ may even be bequeathed from him.