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From Primedia Publications
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Carlsbad Caverns
Shedding light on New Mexico's dark national park.

By Richard F. Selcer

Carlsbad's vast galleries of stalactites have prompted many to dub the caverns the "Eighth Wonder of the World."
For thousands of years, local Native Americans knew of this big hole in the ground but refused to enter it. Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca failed to discover it when he passed nearby in 1535. In 1583, Antonio Espejo rafted down the Pecos River and likewise missed it. While on a military survey through the Permian Basin in 1854, Captain John Pope of the U.S. Army never realized it was there.

There is some dispute over when the first white man entered the caverns, but the best claim seems to belong to Roth Sublett, a 12-year-old boy whose father lowered him into the cave on a rope in 1883. The nervous lad proceeded only a little way into the pitch blackness, and the true "discovery" of the cave had to wait for a more intrepid explorer near the turn of the century.



Called by some the Eighth Wonder of the World, Carlsbad is surrounded by some of the most beautiful and unspoiled country in the West, including Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, and Lincoln National Forest.

Carlsbad is also a town, but it wasn't always called Carlsbad. Until 1899 the little town on the south bank of the Pecos River was named Eddy after the Eddy-Bissell Cattle Company that owned thousands of acres of the local range. On March 23, 1899, the townspeople voted to change the name to the Old-World-flavored Carlsbad because of the nearby mineral spring that somebody likened to the world-famous Karlsbad Spa in the Czech region of greater Bohemia. Like those of its namesake, the waters of the local spring were said to have healing qualities. But the caverns, not the spring, are what draw people to town.

It all started some 200 million years ago when southern New Mexico was part of a great inland sea connected to the Gulf of Mexico. Over several million years the sea dried up, leaving behind a 400-mile-long, horseshoe-shaped reef. After that, geologic shifts and the effects of dripping water on the soft limestone created vast underground chambers. The entrance to the caves was formed some 900,000 years ago. Today, as you descend into the earth, the rock strata get older and older while the cave itself gets younger and younger in geologic time.

About 17,000 years ago, colonies of Mexican free-tail bats took up residence in the caverns and over time left waste deposits some 40 feet deep in places. Of all the things that have sparked exploration in our history, it was bat guano that prompted humans to investigate the caverns. In 1903 Abijah Long filed a placer claim to mine the phosphate-rich waste. He blasted shafts into the cavern and started up large-scale commercial mining in 1905. During the next 20 years some 100,000 tons of guano were hauled out of the giant hole in the ground.

More important to the long-term development of the caverns was the arrival of Jim White, a local cowboy, handyman, roustabout, and sometime guano miner who put Carlsbad Caverns on the map. For many years it was thought that White first explored the cave in 1901, but the recent discovery of a stone deep inside the caverns bearing the faint inscription "J. White, 1898" has caused park officials to push that date back. White wasn't a scientist or a promoter when he started, but he had more natural curiosity and dogged determination than anybody before him. He soon knew the caves better than any other man and began taking down tours of skeptical locals, all the time singing the praises of the site. For the next 40-plus years the caves were his obsession, and he promoted them tirelessly, eventually becoming the chief park ranger there.

In 1923 Robert Holley, an inspector for the U.S. Government's General Land Office, and Willis T. Lee, a famed geologist on assignment for National Geographic, made separate visits to Carlsbad. Both concluded it should be turned into a national park. That same year, on October 25, President Calvin Coolidge created Carlsbad Cave National Monument by executive proclamation. Seven years later Congress designated it a national park.

By then the development of the site was already underway. In 1927 the government granted a contract to a private company to operate concessions inside the cave. One result, still there, unfortunately, is the Underground Lunch Room in the Big Cavern.




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Dr. Richard F. Selcer, a professor of history at Northlake College in Dallas, Texas, and occasionally at International Christian University in Vienna, Austria, writes about Civil War and Western History.