Fantastic Caverns

Fantastic Caverns is the cave America drives through — the only ride-through cave on the continent, the Jeep trams following the bed of the underground river that carved it. John Knox found it in 1862 when his dog chased a rabbit into a hole and didn't come out; Knox kept the cave quiet through the war years rather than let either army mine it for saltpeter.

The exploration story is better than the legend — the cave advertises the twelve women of the Springfield Women's Athletic Club as its first explorers, and the record is more interesting: they went in on February 27, 1867, two weeks after the actual first party, equipped with ropes and ladders and lamp-light, and carved their names in the Hall of Giants. The myth made them first; the newspaper made them famous — the women's names are still on the rock they signed.

The cave's résumé is the strangest in the file — a Prohibition-era speakeasy, a concert hall, a mushroom farm in the soil beds, and now the tram tour that preserves the floor by never letting visitors walk on it. The file keeps the cave's argument: that the best way to save a cave is to keep feet off it — the drive-through as conservation, and the names of twelve women from 1867 still on the wall.

Fantastic Caverns is the archive's ride-through file — the Missouri cave Knox hid through the Civil War, explored by twelve women who carved their names in the Hall of Giants, now toured by tram to keep the floor untouched.