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The First Media Circus: The Rescue Mission That Built Mammoth Cave National Park (Sleep Story) · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hello, and welcome back to Sleepless History, the show where we tell you true stories from long ago.
• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight, we are traveling to the limestone hills of Central Kentucky in the winter of 1925 to a narrow dripping crack in the earth that the locals called Sand Cave.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the story of a quiet, almost legendary cave explorer named Floyd Collins, and of the 17 days that followed the afternoon, he became trapped 55 feet beneath the surface of the ground.
• 0:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a story that, for a few strange weeks, stopped an entire nation in its tracks.
• 0:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: It pulled in tens of thousands of spectators, hundreds of newspaper reporters, radio broadcasters using a technology that was barely five years old, and eventually soldiers carrying rifles.
• 0:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a story of extraordinary courage and selflessness.
• 1:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: but also of greed, carnival barkers, hot dog stands, and bureaucratic stubbornness all tangled together in the dark.
• 1:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is in its own way one of the strangest true stories in American history and yet so very few people today have ever heard it.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So settle in and let us go back together to a cold morning in late January in the limestone hills of Kentucky.
• 1:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: When a small, exhausted newspaper reporter named William Burke Miller, who everyone called skits, lowered his slender frame into the mouth of a cave that the local people
• 1:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: the cave wars and the fatal dissent.
• 1:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: picture total darkness, not the darkness of a bedroom at night where your eyes are just and shapes slowly emerge from the gloom.
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a darkness with no bottom to it, the kind of darkness that exists only a few places on earth, deep underground, where no sunlight has ever travelled, not once in the whole history of the planet.
• 2:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the night of February 1st, 1925, a young reporter named William Burke Miller, folded himself backward into a shoot of wet sandstone, barely eight inches wide, eight inches.
• 2:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hold your hands up in front of you right now, if you like, and measure that gap between your palms.
• 2:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not a tunnel a person walks through, or even crawls through on hands and knees.
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a tunnel a person must become smaller to enter, exhaling the air from their lungs, twisting their hips at an angle, feeling the cold, gritty stone scrape against their chest and their spine at the very same time.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Miller weighed perhaps 110 pounds.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was a small man, almost delicate in build, and the other reporters at the scene had taken to calling him skits, short for mosquito, because of how slight he looks standing next to the miners and farm hands.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: who had gathered above ground, but it was that very slightness, that smallness, that made him one of the only human beings on the entire mountain capable of reaching the man trapped below, as Miller eased himself down through the freezing mud, inch by inch.
• 3:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: the passage narrowing and twisting around him, like the throat of some sleeping animal, he heard it.
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: A voice.
• 3:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Calling out from somewhere deeper in the rock.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Horse.
• 3:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Week.
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But unmistakably alive.
• 4:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: That voice belonged to Floyd Collins.
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And by the time Miller reached him that night.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd had already been trapped in that exact position.
• 4:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: on his back in the cold and the wet and the absolute dark for more than two full days.
• 4:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Miller would later describe that first sight of Floyd, lit only by the small flashlight he carried, as something he never quite forgot for the rest of his life.
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: A pale, exhausted face turned toward him in the gloom.
• 4:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: A man who had been talking to no one, hearing nothing but dripping water and his own heartbeat, for the better part of 48 hours, suddenly hearing
• 4:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth pausing here in the dark beside the two of them before we rewind the story and explain exactly how either one of them came to be in that cave at all.
• 5:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: To understand how a man came to be buried alive 55 feet beneath a Kentucky hillside, and why an entire nation would soon be holding its breath over his fate, we have to go back further than that February night.
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have to go back to the strange, restless decade, in which Floyd Collins lived his whole short life.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: and to a chapter of American history that most people have never been taught.
• 5:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Kentucky Cave Wars.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the 1920s, the automobile was remaking the country.
• 5:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rhodes that had once been little more than wagon ruts, were being widened, graded, and in some places paved, and ordinary families who had never traveled more than a day's journey from home.
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: were suddenly climbing into forward automobiles and setting out to see the sights of America.
• 5:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in South Central Kentucky, the sights people wanted to see were underground.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was the era of the Model T, an automobile cheap enough and simple enough that for the first time in American history,
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: a working-class family might actually own one, where a trip of even 50 miles had once been a significant undertaking, requiring an overnight stay and a great deal of planning.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was now something a family might do on an ordinary Saturday, just to see something new.
• 6:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Road maps, gas stations, and roadside diners were all relatively novel inventions at this
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: to serve this entirely new category of traveller, the casual, weekend, automobile tourist, with money in their pocket, and no particular obligation to spend it wisely.
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The region sat atop one of the largest networks of limestone caves on the entire planet, a hidden world of caverns, sinkholes, and underground rivers carved out over millions of years.
• 7:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The most famous of these mammoth cave had already been drawing visitors for more than a century ever since the early 1800s when it had been mined for a mineral called salt Peter and then almost immediately discovered to be a tourist curiosity unlike anything else in the young country.
• 7:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the dusty little towns surrounding it, places like cave city and horse cave, found themselves sitting on top of something every bit as valuable as gold.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: If only they could find a way to dig it out from underneath their more famous neighbour.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so began a competition unlike almost anything else in American business history.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: A competition that the people who lived through it would later call
• 8:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: local farmers who happen to own land with even a small hole in the ground began advertising their property as a cave, regardless of how small, how unremarkable, or how genuinely unsafe that cave might be.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Families set up roadside stands and crude wooden signs along the main highways.
• 8:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: each one trying to outdo the last.
• 8:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some signs simply lied outright, claiming that a smaller, lesser cave, a few miles down a side road, was in fact mammoth cave itself, or was somehow connected to it, in hopes of luring exhausted tourists away from their actual destination.
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were stories repeated for decades afterward around Kentucky dinner tables, of locals literally standing at crossroads in costume, pretending to be lost travelers, flagging down cars, and offering to guide unsuspecting families to a cave that was conveniently the one their own
• 9:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: all conducted in the gravel parking lots and dirt roads of rural Kentucky.
• 9:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: With whole extended families competing fiercely against their own neighbours, sometimes their own cousins for the contents of a tourist's wallet.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The men who worked the roadside on behalf of these smaller caves, even had their own nickname.
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Locals called them cappers, and their job, such as it was, involved a great deal of charm and a complete absence of scruples.
• 9:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: A capper might step out into the road waving his arms at an approaching automobile, flagging the driver down with grave news.
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mammoth Cave, he would explain, his voice full of regret, was closed today, flooded, or overrun with a sudden outbreak of something unpleasant.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: But he happened to know, of a wonderful, perfectly safe alternative, just up the road.
• 10:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Other cappers were bolder still.
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Actually climbing up onto the running board of a moving automobile.
• 10:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The narrow metal step mounted along the side of 1920's cars.
• 10:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: riding alongside the vehicle as it slowed, talking fast, talking persuasively, doing whatever it took to redirect a confused tourist family toward a cave that was not the one they had spent all morning driving to see.
• 10:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: This rivalry was not always playful either.
• 10:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: In one especially dark episode from the early 1920s, a dispute between two men involved in competing
• 11:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Men who drove visitors between the train depot and the various showcaves of the region, ended with one shooting the other dead in broad daylight.
• 11:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over what was at its heart, nothing more than an argument about whose customers belong to whom.
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is the kind of pressure and the kind of desperation.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the cave walls had created in this particular corner of Kentucky by the time Floyd Collins came of age.
• 11:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a world where a hole in the ground was not simply a hole in the ground.
• 11:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a livelihood, a rivalry, and sometimes apparently a matter worth dying over.
• 11:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Into this strange, competitive cave-obsessed world Floyd Collins had been born in 1887.
• 11:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: the son of a farmer named Lee Collins.
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: From an early age, Floyd showed an unusual gift, almost an instinct for the underground.
• 12:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: While other young men in the area were content to farm the unforgiving Kentucky hillside, Floyd was drawn again and again beneath them.
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: He explored crevices that other men refused to even approach.
• 12:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He squeezed through gaps that seemed to anyone watching far too narrow for a human body.
• 12:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: He developed what people around him described, with a mixture of admiration and unease as a kind of underground sense, an ability to read the shape and danger of unmapped passages the way another man might read a familiar road.
• 12:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the time he reached his middle 30s, Floyd Collins was not simply a local curiosity.
• 12:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Among the small, tightly-knit community of serious Kentucky cavers, the men who actually understood what it meant to navigate, unmapped, unstable passages, far below the surface.
• 13:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd had earned something close to a legendary reputation.
• 13:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was known for an almost unnerving calm underground, a willingness to push deeper into an unexplored passage than anyone else would dare, trusting his own hands and his own slow, careful instincts, rather than any map or rope.
• 13:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Other caveers spoke of him the way climbers might speak of a mountaineer, who routinely went without oxygen, with a mixture of genuine admiration and a quiet, nervous sense that sooner or later that kind of confidence was bound to meet its match.
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a quieter, saddest story behind that obsession too, one that helps explain why a man might come to feel more at home in absolute darkness than in his own farmhouse.
• 13:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd's mother, Martha, had died of tuberculosis when he was still a young man.
• 14:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And a few years later, one of his older brothers had died as well, taken by typhoid fever.
• 14:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd himself never married, and the people who knew him described him less as unfriendly.
• 14:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: than simply elsewhere.
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some where most people couldn't follow, most comfortable alone, in tight, silent spaces, doing slow, careful, deliberate work that asked nothing of him except patience and a steady hand.
• 14:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Caving was not just an ambition for Floyd Collins.
• 14:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was also in its own way, a refuge.
• 14:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1917, that gift paid off.
• 14:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd discovered an enormous, beautifully decorated cavern on his family's own property, full of delicate limestone formations, a place he named Great Crystal Cave.
• 14:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was, by every account, a spectacular find, the kind of underground cathedral that should have made the Collins family rich.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd commercialized it almost immediately, building a small tourist operation, charging admission, leading visitors through its winding chambers by lantern light.
• 15:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there was a
• 15:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Crystal Cave was simply too far from the main road.
• 15:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The highways that carried automobile tourists toward mammoth cave passed nowhere near the Collins family farm and visitors faced with a long bumpy detour down unmarked country lanes, mostly chose not to bother.
• 15:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd had discovered one of the most beautiful caves in the entire region and almost nobody came to see it.
• 15:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the early 1920s, Floyd Collins had become a somewhat solitary figure, reclusive by nature.
• 16:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: More comfortable underground than he ever seemed to be in ordinary daylight conversation.
• 16:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was unmarried, dedicated almost entirely to caving.
• 16:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: and consumed by a single persistent dream.
• 16:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere out there, closer to the busy main highway, there had to be another cave, an undiscovered cave.
• 16:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: One that could finally bring him the kind of tourist money that Crystal Cave never had.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had the skill to find it.
• 16:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: He simply needed to look in the right place.
• 16:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: That right place he came to believe was a modest, unremarkable rock-over-hang on a neighbor's farm.
• 16:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: A place local people had always called Sand Cave.
• 16:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the middle of January of 1925, Floyd struck a deal with the landowners, a man named Doyle and another named Estes, agreeing to explore the cave and split any future profits if it turned out to be commercially worthwhile.
• 17:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sand Cave had never been seriously explored before.
• 17:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had a reputation among those who knew the area as tight, unpleasant and unstable.
• 17:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing at all like the clean, solid, limestone passages of crystal cave or mammoth cave itself.
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Where those caves were carved from hard, dependable rock that had stood for thousands of years without shifting.
• 17:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sand Cave was cut through loose crumbling sandstone.
• 17:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The kind of stone that could slump, slide and collapse with very little warning at all.
• 17:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It helps here to understand a little bit about what limestone caves are actually like and why sand cave was so different.
• 17:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most of the great caverns of central Kentucky, including mammoth cave and Floyd's own crystal cave, were carved slowly over millions of years, by acidic groundwater dissolving solid limestone bedrock.
• 18:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: the same patient chemical process, repeated for ages that produces the smooth walls, soaring ceilings, and wide, breathable chambers that make those caves relatively comfortable, even majestic, to walk through.
• 18:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sand Cave was a different kind of geological accident all together,
• 18:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: that had never been smoothed and strengthened by that same slow process.
• 18:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its passages did not open into grand rooms, they narrowed and narrowed again, and the walls and ceiling were made of stone that could shift under the weight of a single careless footstep.
• 18:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than stone that had been quietly hardening into permanence since before human beings ever existed.
• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sand Cave was closer to a half collapsed mine shaft that nature had dug for itself and then abandoned, unfinished and unstable.
• 19:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: For reasons that would soon become devastatingly clear, Floyd did not care.
• 19:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had a vision of a cave entrance positioned right along the busy road, drawing car load after car load of curious tourists.
• 19:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: and that vision pulled him back to Sand Cave, again and again, throughout the final weeks of January, working alone by lantern light, widening the narrowest passages with his bare hands and a small set of tools, squeezing through gaps that by some accounts were no taller than nine inches.
• 19:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: His persistence had, in fact,
• 19:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Already paid off, at least partially, after days of slow, careful digging through those impossibly tight openings, Floyd had broken through into a genuinely large underground chamber, a real grotto hidden behind all that narrow, unpromising rock.
• 20:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It must have felt, in that moment, like vindication, like proof that his instincts had been right all along, that there really was something worthwhile waiting beneath this unremarkable hillside.
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: The only problem left,
• 20:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: as Floyd saw it, was making the entrance itself wide enough and safe enough for ordinary paying tourists to actually use.
• 20:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than the narrow, demanding cruel way that only a determined explorer like himself could manage.
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: That, more than anything else, is why he kept returning to Sand Cave day after day through the final week of January.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: not to explore the unknown anymore, but to perform the slow, unglomerous work of turning a discovery into a business.
• 21:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: One shovelful of loosened sandstone at a time.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the morning of January 30, 1925, at around 10 o'clock, Floyd Collins entered Sand Cave for what would turn out to be the final time.
• 21:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had been working his way deeper into the cave for hours
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: carrying a single small carousine lamp as his only source of light.
• 21:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was no electric lantern, no backup light, no rope tied to the surface, no partner waiting nearby.
• 21:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the same way Floyd had always worked, alone, trusting his own instincts, and his own hard one knowledge of how rock behaved underground.
• 21:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: That small carousine lamp was, in a very real sense, the only thing standing between Floyd and the kind of total, suffocating darkness most of us will never experience in our entire lives.
• 22:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its flame would have thrown a small flickering circle of orange light onto the wet stone walls pressing in close around him just enough to see his own hands.
• 22:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The dirt he was clearing, the narrow path ahead and almost nothing else.
• 22:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: outside that small circle, everything else simply did not exist, visually speaking.
• 22:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Swallowed completely by a blackness with no edges and no end.
• 22:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is the kind of working environment that very few professions on earth have ever demanded of an ordinary person.
• 22:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alone, underground, lit by a single flame, performing slow, physical labor in a space barely wide enough to move in, hour after hour, with the nearest other human being, potentially hundreds of feet away through solid rock, as the hours passed.
• 23:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: His lamp began to run low on fuel, the flame grew thin and dim, and floored, recognizing the danger of being caught underground with no lighter tool, started to make his way back out toward the surface.
• 23:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was in that moment, in the narrow, twisting, cruel way he had to pass through to escape that everything went wrong.
• 23:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the dim, failing light, Floyd's foot came down on a section of the passage wall that looked solid, but was not.
• 23:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some accounts say he not the lamp itself in the panic of trying to catch his footing, snuffing out his only light completely.
• 23:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whatever the precise sequence, the result was the same, as Floyd shifted his weight.
• 23:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: A section of the unstable sandstone ceiling let go above him.
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: A single large rock, weighing perhaps 27 pounds, came down first, followed immediately by a slide of loose gravel and debris.
• 24:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it landed directly across Floyd's left ankle, wedging his leg firmly against the floor of the passage.
• 24:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was 55 feet below the surface of the ground, roughly 150 feet from the cave's narrow entrance, lying on his back in a passage so tight, it pressed against his chest with every breath.
• 24:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: His left leg pinned beneath stone, he could not see,
• 24:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the total darkness that followed could barely even reach, Floyd Collins shouted into the blackness.
• 24:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was no one there to hear him.
• 24:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 2 The initial responses and skates Miller.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you are starting to feel your eyelids grow heavy, that is perfectly all right.
• 24:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is nothing urgent about this story anymore, not for you, here, safe and warm.
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The events themselves happened a hundred years ago.
• 25:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd Collins' fate was decided long before either of us was born, so let your breathing slow down and let's continue gently into the second day for the better part of 24 hours.
• 25:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: nobody on the surface knew that anything was wrong.
• 25:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd had a habit of working alone for long stretches.
• 25:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes staying underground for most of a day and his absence on the evening of January 30th did not at first alarm anyone.
• 25:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was only the following day when a local boy wanted near the mouth of Sand Cave and noticed Floyd's coat and one of his shoes lying abandoned
• 25:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the first quiet alarm began to spread through the nearby farms.
• 25:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Word reached Floyd's family quickly.
• 25:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: His brother Homer, only in his early twenties at the time, rushed to the cave the moment he heard, along with another brother, Marshall.
• 26:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: What Homer found when he finally managed to squeeze his own body down into the narrow passage, must have been one of the worst moments of his young life.
• 26:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: his older brother, a live, conscious, talking.
• 26:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: But utterly and completely trapped, his leg crushed beneath stone 55 feet underground.
• 26:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a passage so narrow that there was no possible way to simply reach down and pull him free.
• 26:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is worth pausing on, because it is the detail that made the next 17 days so agonizing for everyone involved.
• 26:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most people
• 26:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hearing that a man was trapped underground with his leg under a rock, imagine something like a person caught beneath a fallen tree branch in their backyard.
• 26:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Surely you might think.
• 26:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: A group of strong men could simply lift the rock and pull him out.
• 27:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: but sand cave offered no such mercy.
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The passage leading down to Floyd twisted sharply, multiple times, at angles that made it nearly impossible for more than one person to be near him at any given moment.
• 27:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let alone several strong men working together with tools or leverage.
• 27:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Anyone trying to reach Floyd had to crawl on their belly through freezing mud and standing water.
• 27:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: In passages so tight that simply turning around required real effort, let alone applying force to a stubborn boulder wedged against a man's leg.
• 27:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was no room to swing a pick.
• 27:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was barely room to extend an arm.
• 27:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The very geology that it made sand cave so appealing to Floyd in the first place, its tightness, its intimacy, the same qualities that might have made it a thrilling little tourist attraction.
• 27:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: were now the precise qualities standing between him and rescue.
• 28:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: In those very first hours, before the wider world had even heard Floyd's name, a long, exhausting parade of ordinary local men took their turn crawling down toward him.
• 28:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each one hoping to be the person who finally cleared away enough dirt and gravel to slide that boulder free.
• 28:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Almost all of them came back up again disappointed.
• 28:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soaked through, shaking with cold, having managed to dislodge only a handful of small stones for every hour spent down there.
• 28:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: A few, in their exhaustion and their desperate wish to bring good news back up to the surface.
• 28:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: told the gathered crowd that Floyd was doing better than he actually was, that he had eaten well, that he seemed in decent spirits.
• 28:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: When in truth, almost nobody besides Homer had even reached him at all in those earliest hours.
• 29:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was an understandable kind of dishonesty, born out of hope rather than malice, but it meant that nobody on the surface, including Floyd's own exhausted family, had a fully accurate picture of just how dire his situation truly was.
• 29:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Homer Collins did not wait for anyone's permission or expertise.
• 29:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over those first critical hours, he crawled down into that tight, freezing passage again and again, scraping away dirt and gravel from around his brother's pinned leg with nothing but his bare hands.
• 29:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: because there was no other tool that would fit in the space available to him.
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: He brought Floyd, what food and water he could manage to pass down through the twisting crawlway.
• 29:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Although even this simple act of mercy was its own kind of ordeal.
• 29:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Requiring Homer to carry small containers balanced carefully against his body, while contorting himself through gaps barely wide enough for his shoulders.
• 30:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It quickly became clear, even to the local farmers and neighbours who gathered at the scene in those first hours, that this was beyond anything they had the tools or the expertise to solve quickly.
• 30:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And among the people that were reached was a quiet, slightly built newspaper reporter, working for the Korea Journal newspaper out of Louisville.
• 30:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: A young man in his middle 20s named William Burke Miller.
• 30:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Miller had been sent down to Cave City to check out what initially sounded like a minor, local human interest story.
• 30:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: A farmer trapped in a hole somewhere out in
• 30:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: When he arrived at the scene and approached Homer Collins for information, the exhausted, suspicious brother, eyeing Miller's neat report as clothing, reportedly told him, with no shortage of irritation, that if he wanted information so badly, there was the cave entrance right there, and he was welcome to climb down and find out for himself.
• 31:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was, in hindsight, one of the more consequential pieces of sarcasm, in American journalism history, because Miller did exactly that.
• 31:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: What nobody at the scene initially understood was just how perfectly suited Miller's small frame was for the task at hand.
• 31:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: at barely 110 pounds and standing only a little over 5 feet tall.
• 31:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Miller was one of the very few adult human beings present who could actually fit through the tightest sections of the crawlway leading down to Floyd.
• 31:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sections that had already turned away grown miners.
• 31:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: and farm hands built along more ordinary lines.
• 32:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Almost by accident, the eager young reporter who had come to the scene only to write a story, found himself transformed into one of the most important rescuers on the entire mountain.
• 32:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Miller was still a relatively young man at the time, only a few years into his newspaper career, and nothing in his life up to that point had prepared him for what he was about to do, and yet he kept going back down, trip after trip, day after day, long after any ordinary reporter would have stayed safely at the surface, phoning in updates from a comfortable distance.
• 32:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The experience would mark the rest of his life.
• 32:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the years that followed, Miller moved away from daily newspaper reporting and built a long career in the still new world of radio broadcasting, eventually rising to a senior position.
• 32:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: with one of the major national networks, a quiet, steady professional life that gave very little outward sign of the few astonishing days he had once spent crawling through freezing mud to sit beside a dying stranger.
• 33:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over the days that followed, Miller made repeated trips down into the cave to reach Floyd directly, descending through that same eight inch shoot we described at the very beginning of tonight's story into the same total darkness.
• 33:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: to sit beside a man whose leg was pinned under stone in a space barely wider than his own shoulders.
• 33:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: What happened in those underground meetings is even a century later, almost unbearably moving to read about.
• 33:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Miller brought Floyd, small amounts of food, holding cups of coffee to his lips, since Floyd's arms had almost no room to move on their own.
• 33:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wrapped pieces of burlap, sacking around Floyd's exposed skin, in a small, desperate attempt to keep him warm against the relentless underground cold.
• 34:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: a cold that sits year round, somewhere in the fifties, but feels far colder still to a body that cannot move, lying in standing water, hour after hour.
• 34:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Miller held a small flashlight steady so that Floyd for at least a few minutes at a time was not left entirely alone in the absolute dark that had swallowed his lamp on that first
• 34:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was in the truest sense, an act of simple, human companionship, offered in one of the least comfortable places imaginable by a stranger who had only meant to write a story and instead found himself unable to leave.
• 34:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, as Miller crouched there beside him, he asked questions.
• 35:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Gentle ones, at first, and then, gradually, the kind of questions a reporter asks, how does it feel?
• 35:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: What do you think about lying here?
• 35:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Are you afraid?
• 35:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Floyd, weakened, frightened, but apparently still possessed of a certain dry, plain spoken Kentucky composure, answered him.
• 35:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd spoke about the cold most of all.
• 35:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The way it settled into his bones and never really left, even during the brief minutes when Miller's body pressed close beside his own in that narrow space, offered some small measure of shared warmth.
• 35:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: He spoke about the strange, total silence of being so far underground.
• 35:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: A silence broken only by dripping water and his own breathing.
• 35:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now, the quiet scratch of a
• 35:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: He talked too about home, about his family, about the simple ordinary details of a life that must have felt from where he lay, impossibly far away, even though it was happening only 55 feet above his head.
• 36:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Miller later described Floyd as remarkably calm given the circumstances.
• 36:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lucid for long stretches, frightened, but never quite hysterical.
• 36:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: A man doing his best to hold himself together through sheer.
• 36:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: quiet determination, the same determination that had carried him through years of solitary cave exploration before this particular passage had finally refused to let him go.
• 36:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Miller carried those answers back up to the surface and turned them into newspaper dispatches, vivid, intimate, almost unbearably human accounts of what it felt like to be trapped, conscious, and alive.
• 36:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: in absolute darkness, 55 feet beneath the earth.
• 37:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those dispatches were wired out across the telegraph lines to newspapers across the entire country and in some cases beyond it.
• 37:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: For perhaps the first time in American history,
• 37:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ordinary people, sitting at their breakfast tables in cities that had never heard of cave city Kentucky, found themselves emotionally and personally invested in the fate of one specific individual stranger, a quiet cave explorer none of them had ever met.
• 37:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Simply because a small, brave reporter had been willing to climb down into the dark to ask him how he was doing.
• 37:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Around this same time, in the first days of February, a different kind of rescuer arrived on the scene with a very different idea.
• 37:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: A police left tenant named Robert Berden, accustomed to emergencies of a more conventional kind, proposed simply pulling Floyd free using brute force, a harness looped under his arms, connected to a rope, hauled by the combined strength of several men positioned up the crawlway.
• 38:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a plan built on the same instinct that makes any of us hearing about a man trapped under a rock.
• 38:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Imagine that surely enough strong arms could simply lift him out.
• 38:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: On February the 2nd, the rope was lowered, the harness secured, and the men above began to pull.
• 38:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It did not work.
• 38:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd's body.
• 38:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wedged at an angle in that narrow, twisting passage could not move the way a body moves when it has room to be pulled in a straight line.
• 38:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, the force of the rope dragged his chest and shoulders directly upward against the unforgiving stone ceiling pressing down just above him, crushing the breath out of him and very nearly breaking him in the attempt.
• 38:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd cried out in agony.
• 39:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the rescuers, horrified at what they were doing to him, called off the attempt almost immediately.
• 39:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would be the last time anyone tried to simply pull Floyd Collins out of sand cave by force.
• 39:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whatever was going to save him now, brute strength alone clearly was not going to be it.
• 39:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would not be long before that public fascination turned into something else entirely.
• 39:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: something much stranger, much louder, and in its own way, much more troubling, because while Floyd Collins lay alone in the cold and the dark, the world above him was about to turn into a circus.
• 39:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 3, Carney Town on the surface.
• 39:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is no need to keep track of any of this.
• 39:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: If your mind is already drifting, drifting is exactly what it should be doing.
• 39:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just let the next part of the story settle over you.
• 40:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The way fog settles over a hillside at dusk, slow and quiet, and a little bit strange.
• 40:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within just a few days of Floyd Collins becoming trapped, something began happening on the surface above Sand Cave that nobody, least of all Floyd's own family, could have predicted.
• 40:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The story, carried by Telegraph Wire, and by the brand new technology of radio broadcasting, began to spread far beyond the borders of Kentucky.
• 40:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it spread with a speed that, for the 1920s, was almost unprecedented.
• 40:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Newspapers in cities that had never once mentioned cave city, Kentucky, in their entire publishing history, suddenly found themselves running front-page updates on the condition of a single trapped cave explorer.
• 40:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: families gathered around their radio sets in the evening, the way they might have gathered decades later, around a television, waiting for the next bulletin from the cave.
• 41:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth remembering just how new radio broadcasting actually was at this point.
• 41:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The very first commercial radio station in the country had only gone on the air a few years earlier.
• 41:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And by 1925, the technology was still something of a novelty in many households.
• 41:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: A glowing wooden box in the corner of the living room that could pull voices and music out of thin air from hundreds of miles away.
• 41:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Floyd Collins story became one of the earliest examples of that new medium's particular power.
• 41:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ability to deliver a sense of breaking, ongoing crisis directly into people's homes, in something close to real time, rather than waiting for the next morning's newspaper.
• 41:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a small but meaningful way, the trapped cave explorer in rural Kentucky helped teach an entire country what it felt like to follow a single unfolding tragedy together, as one nationwide audience, a habit of shared, anxious listening that would only grow stronger in the decades that followed.
• 42:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as the story spread, people began to come.
• 42:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Curious people, restless people, people with automobiles and a free weekend and nothing in particular keeping them at home.
• 42:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within roughly a week, by some estimates, as many as 10,000 people had descended on the narrow country roads surrounding Sand Cave.
• 42:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: On a single day that locals
• 42:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: and half with embarrassment, as Carnival Sunday, 10,000 people, picture that for a moment.
• 42:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Picture the quiet, rotted dirt roads of rural Kentucky, roads built for the occasional horse cart and farm wagon, suddenly choked bumper to bumper, with automobiles from half a dozen different states.
• 43:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: parked at odd angles in every farmer's field for miles around and where there are 10,000 restless, curious people gathered in one place for an entire day.
• 43:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1925, just as surely as today, there is money to be made.
• 43:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It did not take long for the scene at San Cave to transform from a rescue effort into something closer to a country fair.
• 43:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd's own neighbors in a detail that still makes people uncomfortable a century later began selling hamburgers to the gathered crowds for 25 cents a piece.
• 43:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: openly advertised at some stands as Floyd Collin's Burgers, as though his suffering had become almost overnight, a kind of regional specialty.
• 44:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Other vendors set up stands selling hot dogs, roasted peanuts, soft drinks, and cheap souvenirs to commemorate a tragedy that was at that very moment.
• 44:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Still unfolding less than a few hundred feet beneath their feet.
• 44:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was, of course, also the era of nationwide alcohol prohibition, and that did very little to stop a steady, quiet trade in moonshine whiskey from circulating through the crowd.
• 44:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sold out of the backs of wagons and automobiles to a population that had, by midday, settled into something resembling a holiday mood, rather than a vigil.
• 44:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Pick pockets.
• 44:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Naturally, found the crowded, distracted scene, an excellent place to work, and reports from the time describe wallets and watches disappearing from the pockets of distracted spectators who had come of all things to watch a man's rescue.
• 45:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even before the national guard formally took charge of the operation, small detachments had already been placed on standby nearby.
• 45:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: dozens of guardsmen and a handful of officers waiting in a neighboring town, ready to be called in the moment.
• 45:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Local authorities lost their grip on the swelling crowds.
• 45:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It says something about how quickly this had escalated that within little more than a week of a single farmer going missing in a hole in the ground, a state government found itself
• 45:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Imagine standing at the edge of that crowd yourself.
• 45:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The cold January air, thick with wood smoke, from dozens of small campfires people had built to keep warm while they waited.
• 45:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The smell of frying onions and cheap coffee mixing with the smell of damp earth and gasoline.
• 46:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Children running between parked cars while their parents argued over the best vantage point.
• 46:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere, a radio reporter speaking in low, urgent tones into a microphone, wired back to a station miles away, and somewhere far below all of it, in absolute silence and absolute darkness.
• 46:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: a man whose name everyone present knew, but almost none of them had ever actually met.
• 46:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lying with his leg pinned beneath a stone he could not see.
• 46:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a small, almost unbearably ironic detail buried in this part of the story, and it has to do with those very campfires.
• 46:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rescueers had, by this point, managed to run a length of electrical wire down into the cave, rigging up a small light bulb near Floyd to give him at least a little warmth and a little relief from the absolute dark.
• 47:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the dozens of campfires burning continuously on the surface, lit by tourists simply trying to keep warm while they waited for news.
• 47:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: were doing something nobody had quite anticipated.
• 47:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The heat was reaching down into the frozen ground around the cave entrance, thawing pockets of ice that had sat undisturbed in that stone for years, and the melt water was finding its way down into the passage below, pooling.
• 47:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: dripping, soaking into the same cramped space where Floyd lay a mobile.
• 47:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The crowd that had gathered to watch his rescue was, without realising it, slowly flooding the floor of his prison.
• 47:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was, by nearly every contemporary account, one of the strangest and most unsettling scenes in American memory, a genuine human tragedy transformed, almost entirely without anyone intending
• 47:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: into a kind of grim countryside entertainment.
• 48:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some later historians would describe it as the third largest media event of the entire period between the two world wars, surpassed in scale only by news coverage of Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight, and
• 48:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: years later, the kidnapping of Linberg's own infant son, newspapers themselves of course, were not exactly innocent bystanders in all of this.
• 48:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: dozens of reporters beyond skits Miller descended on the scene as the story grew, representing papers from Louisville, from Chicago, from New York, all competing fiercely with one another for the most vivid, most exclusive details of Floyd's condition, photographers set up near the cave entrance, capturing images of the rescue effort, the crowds,
• 48:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the gathered family that would run on front pages across the country the following morning.
• 49:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was, in its own way, simply another front in the same kind of competition that had defined the cave wars for years.
• 49:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Except now, the prize being fought over was not a tourist car ride, but a newspaper reader's attention, and the currency being spent was a dying man's final days.
• 49:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yet, underneath all of that competition and exploitation, there was something genuine happening as well, something that should not be entirely dismissed.
• 49:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ordinary people across the country, reading those newspaper dispatches or listening to those radio bulletins, found themselves genuinely moved by Floyd's situation, hoping
• 49:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: for some kind of miracle.
• 49:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Children, wrote letters, strangers offered prayers in churches that had no connection whatsoever to Kentucky.
• 50:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: For a brief strange moment in the winter of 1925,
• 50:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: an entire country divided by region, by class, by every ordinary difference that usually kept people from caring much about a stranger's troubles.
• 50:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Found itself united in simply wanting one quiet, unremarkable cave explorer to survive.
• 50:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the surface above Sand Cave was not only crowded with tourists and hot dog vendors.
• 50:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was also, increasingly, crowded with a different and far more consequential kind of conflict.
• 50:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: One that would prove to be just as damaging to Floyd's chances of survival as any single bolder.
• 50:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the earliest hours after Floyd became trapped, the people working to rescue him had been almost exclusively local men, farmers and neighbours who had grown up exploring these same hills, men who understood, in their bones, the particular unstable character of Kentucky Sandstone.
• 51:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Men like Floyd's own brothers, and a local cave guide named Johnny Gerald, who quickly took charge of the rescue effort, on instinct, and on hard one local knowledge.
• 51:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: But as the story grew larger, and as the eyes of the entire country turned toward that one narrow cave entrance, outside authorities began arriving as well, and they did not
• 51:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mining engineers were brought in from out of state, men with formal technical training, but very little understanding of this particular cave's temperament.
• 51:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: railroad engineers arrived, accustomed to working with heavy machinery and large-scale excavation, but unfamiliar with the delicate, almost surgical caution that a crumbling sandstone passage demanded.
• 52:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: State officials descended on the scene as well, eager to be seen taking charge of what had quickly become
• 52:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: a matter of state pride and national attention.
• 52:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And before long, the Kentucky National Guard arrived too, initially in small numbers, intended mainly to help manage the swelling, increasingly unruly crowds, but destined before the story was finished, to take over the entire operation.
• 52:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each new group of arrivals seemed to bring its own preferred theory about how best to proceed, and those theories did not always agree.
• 52:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some argued for continuing to clear the original natural passage by hand.
• 52:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Certain that with enough patient digging, the old route to Floyd could still be widened safely.
• 52:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Others insisted that route was a lost cause already,
• 53:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: and pushed instead for an entirely new approach from the very start.
• 53:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Precious hours, even days, were spent debating these competing plans, rather than committing fully to any single one of them.
• 53:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each faction convinced that it's own outside expertise, or it's own local knowledge.
• 53:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: was the answer the others were too stubborn or too inexperienced to see.
• 53:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The result of all this overlapping authority was predictably friction.
• 53:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The local men who knew the rock and who had already risked their own lives crawling down to reach Floyd found themselves increasingly pushed aside by outside experts.
• 53:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: who arrived with official titles and confident plans.
• 53:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: But without the particular hard earned instinct, for how Sand Cave's loose sandstone actually behaved under pressure.
• 53:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Arguments broke out over which approach to try next.
• 54:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Accusations flew in both directions about competence, about motive, and before long, about something far darker.
• 54:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wispers that certain people closer to the rescue effort might actually have a financial interest in delaying Floyd's rescue.
• 54:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Since the ongoing crisis was drawing exactly
• 54:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the entire cave was competition had always been fought over in the first place.
• 54:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether or not those accusations held any truth, they added yet another layer of suspicion and dysfunction to an already chaotic, overcrowded, badly coordinated rescue effort.
• 54:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: one in which different factions of well-meaning, but mutually distrustful men were quite literally, working at cross purposes just a few dozen feet apart.
• 54:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The friction between Lieutenant burden, who had attempted the failed harness rescue,
• 55:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: and Johnny Gerald, the local cave guide, who had taken early charge of the rescue effort, grew especially bitter.
• 55:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Exhausted, frustrated, and convinced that Gerald's caution was costing Floyd his life.
• 55:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Burden began telling reporters, in plain and furious language that he believed Gerald was guilty of nothing less than murder.
• 55:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: since Gerald, burden claimed, had a financial stake in Crystal Cave, and therefore stood to benefit from Floyd's death, rather than his rescue.
• 55:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was an explosive accusation to make, in the middle of a national news story.
• 55:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it would not simply fade away once temp is cooled.
• 55:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would resurface again, formally in the days that followed, once a different kind of authority arrived at Sand Cave to take charge of the entire operation.
• 56:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, in the first days of February, exactly the kind of disaster that the local cavers had been quietly fearing all along finally happened.
• 56:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The structure of Sand Cave had never been forgiving.
• 56:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Unlike the hard, dependable limestone of mammoth cave, or Floyd's own beloved Crystal Cave, Sand Cave was carved through loose, crumbling sandstone.
• 56:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: A kind of rock that geologists describe as fundamentally unstable, prone to shifting and slumping with very little warning.
• 56:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every single person who climbed down into that crawlway to bring fluid, food or water or simply comfort.
• 56:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: added their own body heat and their own physical pressure to walls and a ceiling that were already under strain.
• 56:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each trip in, each trip out, each scrape of a shoulder against stone.
• 57:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: it all added up slowly, invisibly, the way small pressures so often do, until the rock simply could not hold any longer.
• 57:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some time around February the 4th, with rescuers still making their slow, repeated trips down to Floyd's position.
• 57:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: a section of the passage ceiling directly above him, let go.
• 57:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not an enormous collapse, not the kind of dramatic cave in you might picture from a film, but it did not need to be enormous.
• 57:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: A modest slide of rock and loose dirt was more than enough to completely jam the narrow natural shoot that had until that moment, being the only way anyone could physically reach Floyd Collins at all.
• 57:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every avenue of food, water, warmth, and simple human contact that had existed for Floyd over those first difficult days was sealed off completely.
• 58:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Homer Collins could no longer crawl down to bring his brother coffee.
• 58:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Skit's Miller could no longer descend to hold a flashlight steady or wrap fresh burlap around Floyd's shoulders.
• 58:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The voice that had cried out into the darkness on that very first night was, once again, utterly alone.
• 58:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Only now separated from the rest of the world, not merely by distance and difficulty, but by an actual wall of fallen rock that no human body could possibly squeeze past.
• 58:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The natural passage down to Floyd Collins was finished.
• 58:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: If anyone was going to reach him now, they were going to have to find an entirely different way in.
• 58:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4.
• 58:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The shaft and the final days.
• 58:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you've been drifting in and out while listening, that's completely fine.
• 59:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: You haven't missed anything important.
• 59:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: A man is trapped underground in Kentucky.
• 59:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The cave above him has just collapsed, and now,
• 59:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: on the surface in the cold first week of February.
• 59:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: A small army of engineers, miners and soldiers are about to attempt something almost unthinkably difficult.
• 59:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let your eyes stay closed.
• 59:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: and let's keep going slowly.
• 59:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: With the original passage to Floyd Collins completely blocked by fallen rock, the men running the rescue effort were left with only one remaining option, and it was a desperate, slow and genuinely dangerous one.
• 59:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: If they could no longer travel down through the existing crawlway to reach him, they would have to dig an entirely new opening, a vertical shaft, straight down through solid rock, aiming to intercept the cave passage somewhere behind the spot where Floyd lay pinned.
• 1:00:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth taking a moment to really picture what this meant in practice, because on
• 1:00:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: In reality, it was one of the most agonisingly slow and uncertain engineering problems imaginable.
• 1:00:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the shaft ascended, foot by foot, the walls around it had to be braced continuously with heavy wooden timbers.
• 1:00:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: the same way a coal mine shaft would be short up.
• 1:00:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: To keep the surrounding earth from simply sliding back in on top of the men digging at the bottom, groundwater seeped in steadily as the whole deepened and had to be hauled back up to the surface in buckets alongside the broken rock and dirt.
• 1:00:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: One more slow, repetitive task added to an already exhausting routine.
• 1:00:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The men worked in rotating shifts around the clock.
• 1:01:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Climbing down a narrow wooden ladder, lashed to the timber bracing, swinging a pick in a space barely wide enough for their shoulders, then climbing back out again, frozen and spent.
• 1:01:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: To be replaced by the next exhausted volunteer.
• 1:01:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The engineers had to choose a precise location on the surface, based on imperfect hand-drawn estimates of where the underground passage actually ran, 55 feet below ground, in rock that had never been properly surveyed.
• 1:01:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Get the position wrong by even a small margin.
• 1:01:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the shaft might miss the passage entirely, or worse.
• 1:01:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Break through directly on top of the very ceiling that had already collapsed once, triggering a second, larger collapse that could crush Floyd completely, or seal him away forever, where no one could ever reach him again, and then there was the matter of speed, or rather the complete absence of it.
• 1:02:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: In an ordinary mining operation, a shaft like this might have been dug in a matter of hours using heavy excavation equipment, steam-powered drills or dynamite to blast through stubborn rock.
• 1:02:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: None of that was an option here.
• 1:02:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The vibrations from heavy machinery that can cuss if shock of any kind of blasting, risked shaking loose the same kind of unstable sandstone ceiling that had already come down once
• 1:02:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: A second collapse triggered by the very rescue effort meant to save him, could end the story instantly, and everyone on the surface knew it, so the shaft had to be dug almost entirely by hand, pickaxes, shovels, buckets hauled up on ropes, one load of broken rock and dirt at a time, and
• 1:02:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: hour after hour, day after day, by exhausted men working in shifts around the clock, in the cold, in occasional rain, under floodlights, brought in to allow the digging to continue through the night.
• 1:03:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The men who actually swung those picks were a strange and varied mix.
• 1:03:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some were professional coal miners, brought in specifically for their experience working underground
• 1:03:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Others were simple volunteers, local farmers and laborers with no mining background at all, who showed up at the site, picked up a shovel, and worked to shift, simply because a neighbour needed help, and they happened to be strong enough to give it.
• 1:03:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: still others were curious bystanders who had originally come only to watch and found themselves almost without deciding to, rolling up their sleeves and climbing down into the shaft to relieve an exhausted stranger for an hour.
• 1:04:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was very little formal organisation to any of it in those early days.
• 1:04:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: No payroll, no shift schedule written down on paper, just a constant informal rotation of whoever was rested enough and willing enough to take the next turn.
• 1:04:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think for a moment about what that kind of labour actually feels like.
• 1:04:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The repetitive strain in the shoulders and the lower back, the way blisters form, break, and reform across the palms within the very first day, and simply have to be worked through, hour after hour, because stopping is not really an option when a man's life is hanging in the balance, somewhere beneath your boots.
• 1:04:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The way the cold seeps into wet gloves and wet socks,
• 1:04:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: even when you climb out of the shaft for a few minutes to warm your hands by a fire before climbing right back down again.
• 1:04:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was the reality of the rescue effort for nearly two full weeks, not dramatic cinematic heroics, but exhausting, monotonous, bone-deep physical labour, performed by ordinary men who simply kept digging.
• 1:05:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: because the alternative was unthinkable.
• 1:05:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, on the surface, the situation that had already begun spiraling out of control during Carnival Sunday continued to worsen.
• 1:05:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The crowds did not shrink as the rescue dragged on.
• 1:05:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: If anything, the prolonged drama fed by daily newspaper updates and radio bulletins only drew more people to the scene.
• 1:05:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Local authorities overwhelmed by the sheer number of spectators, vehicles, and increasingly unruly behavior, eventually appealed to the governor of Kentucky for help and the governor responded by placing the entire operation.
• 1:05:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: under the authority of the Kentucky National Guard.
• 1:06:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: A general named Henry Denhart arrived to take formal command, and under his authority, the area around Sand Cave was effectively placed under a form of martial law.
• 1:06:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Armed guardsmen were posted around the site to control the crowds, to keep curious onlookers and souvenir hunters away from the active dig, and to maintain at least the appearance of order in a situation that had, for days, felt completely chaotic.
• 1:06:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was an unusual and too many observers at the time, and almost surreal sight.
• 1:06:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Armed soldiers standing guard over what had begun, only days earlier, as a simple farm accident.
• 1:06:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Under the new military authority, access to the immediate area around the shaft was restricted to people with a genuine reason to be there.
• 1:06:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rescue workers, engineers, a small number of approved reporters, and family.
• 1:07:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Checkpoints were established along the approach roads, soldiers patrolled the perimeter of the sight at all hours, a presence that brought a kind of grim order to the worst of the chaos.
• 1:07:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even as the carnival atmosphere continued to thrive just outside the restricted zone,
• 1:07:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Vendors and onlookers simply setting up shop a little farther back from where the guardsman's authority began.
• 1:07:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a strange split scene.
• 1:07:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: A tightly controlled, almost military operation digging through solid rock at the centre, surrounded by the same loose, freewheeling circus of hot dog stands and moonshine peddlers
• 1:07:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: the two existing side by side, separated by little more than a line of soldiers, and a sense of who was and was not allowed to pass.
• 1:08:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The arrival of military authority did bring a measure of order to the surface, but it could not bring order to the rumours that by this point had spread just as widely as the original news of Floyd's entrapment.
• 1:08:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: as the days dragged on without a rescue, and as the public's fascination with the story showed no sign of fading, a different and uglier kind of story began to circulate in certain newspapers, and among certain segments of the gathered crowd.
• 1:08:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The suggestion that the entire entrapment might somehow be a hoax.
• 1:08:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: A publicity stunt, cooked up by the Collins family, or by local cave promoters, designed to draw exactly the kind of national attention that an ordinary rural cave, struggling for tourist dollars in the brutal competition of the cave wars, could never have hoped to attract on its own.
• 1:08:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a strange and uncomfortable thing to consider a century later.
• 1:09:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: that some Americans in 1925, genuinely believed a man might be willingly enduring days of agony, cold, hunger, and the crushing weight of stone on his own leg, purely for the sake of publicity.
• 1:09:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the rumor persisted, fueled in part by the genuine, well-documented history of staged attractions, and exaggerated claims that had defined the cave walls for years before hand.
• 1:09:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The accusations grew serious enough and persistent enough that general den heart eventually convened a formal military court of inquiry.
• 1:09:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Questioning dozens of the rescuers, reporters, and local figures involved in the operation, including Homer Collins and Skates Miller themselves.
• 1:09:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: In an effort to settle, once and for all, where the negligence or worse, intentional deception had played any role in the disaster.
• 1:10:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The inquiry would ultimately uncover no evidence that anyone had deliberately caused Floyd's death.
• 1:10:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: or deliberately prolonged his suffering, though it found no shortage of confusion, poor communication, and missed opportunities among the various men and agencies who had in their own ways all been trying to help.
• 1:10:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: At one especially grim point during those final days.
• 1:10:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: with the natural passage still blocked and the new shafts still far from finished.
• 1:10:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: A small group of rescuers reportedly discussed an option almost too difficult to think about for very long, amputating Floyd's trapped leg where it lay in the dark in order to free the rest of his body and pull him out.
• 1:10:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The idea did not get very far.
• 1:10:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was no way to perform even a simple surgical procedure safely in a space that cramped that filthy and that difficult to reach.
• 1:11:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let alone control the bleeding or manage the aftermath of such an operation on a man already weakened by days of cold and starvation.
• 1:11:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the idea was set aside almost as quickly as it had been raised.
• 1:11:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It remains one of the darker, lesser known footnotes of the entire rescue effort.
• 1:11:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: A measure of just how few options were actually left on the table by that point.
• 1:11:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: While that inquiry unfolded above ground, the shaft kept descending, foot by agonizing foot, day after day, through the first two weeks of February, 12 days.
• 1:11:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Picture 12 full days, each one beginning before sunrise, and ending well after dark, of careful hand-dug excavation through solid Kentucky limestone.
• 1:12:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every single foot of progress measured against the constant unbearable question of whether the man below was still breathing.
• 1:12:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Finally, on February the 16th, after those 12 grueling days of digging, the shaft broke through.
• 1:12:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: By that point, the entire operation had developed its own grim rhythm.
• 1:12:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Word would travel up the shaft, every so often that the diggers were getting close, and a hush would fall over whatever portion of the crowd remained, followed inevitably, by another quiet.
• 1:12:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Disappointing update that progress remained slow, that there was still more rock ahead than anyone had hoped.
• 1:12:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the 16th, after 12 days of that same exhausting cycle of hope and disappointment,
• 1:12:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Almost everyone on the surface had learned not to expect good news too quickly, which made what happened next all the more startling.
• 1:13:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: A minor working at the bottom of the new excavation, a man named Ed Brenner felt the wall in front of him give way into open space rather than solid rock.
• 1:13:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The shaft had found the cave passage.
• 1:13:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: After so many days of effort, so many setbacks, so much grief and frustration and exhausted hope among the men who had been digging in shifts around the clock.
• 1:13:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: the connection had finally been made.
• 1:13:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Brenner crawled forward through the narrow gap into the passage beyond.
• 1:13:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Into the same absolute darkness that had swallowed Floyd Collins more than two weeks earlier, and made his way toward the spot where Floyd had been lying, pinned for all that time.
• 1:13:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: He found him there.
• 1:13:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: still in the same position.
• 1:13:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Still beneath the same stone.
• 1:13:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Floyd Collins was dead.
• 1:13:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The medical examiner's who later assessed his condition, estimated that Floyd had survived roughly 14 of the 17 days he had spent trapped underground, likely succumbing some time around February the 13th.
• 1:14:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just three agonizing days before the rescuers finally broke through
• 1:14:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The official cause given was exposure and starvation.
• 1:14:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The slow, merciless combination of relentless underground cold, the total absence of food and warmth following the collapse that had sealed off the original passage.
• 1:14:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the simple, crushing helplessness of a body that could no longer move, no longer fight, no longer do anything at all, except wait, alone in the dark, for an end that was now, finally, only days away.
• 1:14:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rescue effort that had captivated an entire nation that had drawn tens of thousands of spectators and dozens of newspaper reporters,
• 1:14:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: and an entire detachment of national guard soldiers that had cost two weeks of brutal, hand dug excavation through solid rock, ended not with the rescue at all, but with the simple quiet confirmation of what many of the exhausted men on the surface had already, privately come to fear.
• 1:15:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: They remained one final, difficult decision to make.
• 1:15:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd's leg was still pinned firmly beneath the original boulder that had trapped him on that first morning.
• 1:15:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The same stone that no rescuer had ever successfully removed in over two weeks of effort.
• 1:15:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The passage around his body remained narrow, unstable, and dangerous, the same crumbling sandstone that had already collapsed once before.
• 1:15:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The engineers and officials overseeing the operation made the difficult determination that attempting to free the body and bring it back up through either the narrow original crawlway or the newly dug shaft was simply too risky.
• 1:16:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: too likely to trigger yet another collapse.
• 1:16:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: This time, with rescue workers still inside the passage.
• 1:16:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, after 17 days that had transformed a quiet, reclusive cave explorer into a household name across the entire country,
• 1:16:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The decision was made to leave Floyd Collins exactly where he had fallen.
• 1:16:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The new shaft was sealed.
• 1:16:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The crowds, after so many days of vigil and carnival and rumour, finally began to disperse and go home.
• 1:16:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the story of Floyd Collins, for the moment at least,
• 1:16:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: seem to have reached its quiet, grim conclusion.
• 1:16:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: 55 feet beneath the Kentucky hillside.
• 1:16:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not however the end of his story, not even close.
• 1:17:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 5 The Serial Aftermath
• 1:17:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can let go of any tension you might still be holding in your shoulders right now, because the hardest part of tonight's story is already behind us.
• 1:17:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: What comes next is strange, and a little unsettling in its own quiet way, but there is no more suffering left in it for Floyd Collins.
• 1:17:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: From this point forward, this is a story about everyone left standing above ground.
• 1:17:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: about what they chose to do with the body and the memory of the man they had all in their own different ways failed to save in time.
• 1:17:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the days immediately following the discovery of Floyd's body, the engineers in charge of the rescue had judged it too dangerous to attempt to recovery.
• 1:17:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The shaft was sealed, the crowds dispersed.
• 1:17:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The official chapter of the rescue effort was closed.
• 1:18:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: For most of the people who had stood in that cold Kentucky field over the previous two and a half weeks, the story was finished, a tragedy to be remembered, written about, and slowly, gradually, set aside.
• 1:18:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Floyd's younger brother Homer could not let it go quite so easily.
• 1:18:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Homer Collins had spent days crawling through freezing mud with his bare hands, trying desperately to free his older brother before the cave ever took him.
• 1:18:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had been one of the very few people, Floyd had spoken to clearly and repeatedly during those early days underground, and the idea that Floyd's body would simply remain indefinitely, sealed inside an abandoned mine shaft beneath a stranger's farm, rather than resting somewhere the family could visit, sit with, and properly grieve.
• 1:18:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: was not something Homer was willing to accept.
• 1:19:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, roughly two months later, in April of 1925, Homer organized a small crew of miners and friends and returned to the site.
• 1:19:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than risk reopening the same unstable passage that had already collapsed once,
• 1:19:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The new team dug an additional connecting tunnel, approaching the cave chamber from a different angle entirely, working carefully, deliberately, this time with the luxury of not racing against a ticking clock of survival.
• 1:19:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: On April 23, 1925, they finally succeeded in reaching Floyd's remains and bringing
• 1:19:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: out of the cave that had held him for nearly three full months since the day he had first become trapped.
• 1:19:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is something worth sitting with in the simple fact that it was Homer of all people who insisted on this.
• 1:19:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Homer had already given more of himself to this story than almost anyone else involved, more than the engineers, more than the reporters,
• 1:20:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had crawled through that freezing passage with his bare hands in the very first hours, long before anyone understood how serious the situation truly was.
• 1:20:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had sat with the formal military inquiry, answering questions about decisions made under pressure that no one should ever have had to make.
• 1:20:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now, two months after the rest of the country had largely moved on to other headlines.
• 1:20:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was Homer who organized one final, quiet, determined effort, not to save his brother's life this time, since that was no longer possible, but simply to bring him home.
• 1:20:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd's body was taken that same day to a funeral home in nearby cave city for embarming.
• 1:20:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: After a brief two-day visitation period, allowing friends, neighbors and the curious public one-last opportunity to pay their respects.
• 1:21:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The family laid Floyd Collins to rest on April 26, 1925.
• 1:21:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: in a quiet, dignified burial on the family's own farm, on the very hillside that sat directly above the entrance to Great Crystal Cave.
• 1:21:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The beautiful Cavern Floyd himself had discovered back in 1917.
• 1:21:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The discovery that had, in many ways, set the entire chain of events of his life and eventually his death into motion.
• 1:21:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: For a brief time, it seemed as though that quiet hillside grave might finally be the end of Floyd Collins' strange and very public story.
• 1:21:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not.
• 1:21:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Roughly two years later, in 1927, Floyd's father, Lee Collins, made the decision to sell the family homestead, including Crystal Cave itself, to a dentist named Dr. Harry Thomas, a man who already owned and operated several other show caves in the surrounding region.
• 1:22:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: it was on its surface an ordinary real estate transaction.
• 1:22:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The kind of property sale that happens every day in every corner of the country.
• 1:22:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Dr. Thomas had inherited something rather more unusual along with the cave.
• 1:22:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: A famous grave sitting on a hillside that thousands of curious tourists
• 1:22:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: drawn by the very same newspaper coverage that had made Floyd's name a household word two years earlier, were already eager to visit.
• 1:22:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dr Thomas, recognizing an opportunity that the entire history of the Kentucky Cave Wars had practically trained the region to recognize.
• 1:22:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: made a decision that strikes most people today, a full century later, as almost unbelievable.
• 1:23:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had Floyd Collins's body exhumed from its quiet hillside grave, placed inside a specially made coffin with a glass viewing panel set into the lid, and brought down into crystal cave itself.
• 1:23:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The very cave Floyd had discovered,
• 1:23:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: There, in a dim underground chamber, lit by lantern light, the body of Floyd Collins became quite literally, the cave's main tourist attraction, displayed for visitors who paid admission to walk through Crystal Cave.
• 1:23:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the very same way that countless other Kentucky cave owners locked for years in that brutal competitive struggle of the cave wars, had once dreamed of
• 1:23:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: that might finally set their own cave apart from all the others.
• 1:23:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth sitting with that image for a moment, strange and uncomfortable as it is, because it tells you something important about how Americans of that era understood Floyd's death, and about how thoroughly the entire saga had already blurred the line between genuine human tragedy and pure, unapologetic spectacle.
• 1:24:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd Collins, in life, had spent years searching desperately for some attraction remarkable enough to draw paying tourists away from mammoth caves shadow.
• 1:24:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: In death, without ever intending it, without ever having any say in the matter at all, he had finally become exactly that.
• 1:24:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: For years, visitors to Crystal Cave filed past that glass-topped coffin, peering down at the preserved remains of the man whose final agonizing days had once gripped the entire nation.
• 1:24:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Among those visitors, inevitably, were people whose intentions were considerably less respectful than simple historical curiosity.
• 1:25:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1929, just two years after the body's relocation into the cave, Floyd Collins' remains were stolen.
• 1:25:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The details of exactly who carried out the theft and precisely why were never fully resolved.
• 1:25:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: the kind of small, strange, historical mystery that tends to accumulate around any story already touched by this much tragedy and this much spectacle.
• 1:25:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is known is that the body was eventually recovered not far from the cave abandoned in a nearby field, but it was not recovered whole.
• 1:25:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: When Floyd's remains were finally found and returned, his left leg, the very same leg that had been crushed and pinned beneath that single boulder back in January of 1925, the leg that had ultimately cost him his life was missing.
• 1:26:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was never found.
• 1:26:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd's body, leg or no leg, was returned to its glass-topped
• 1:26:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: and continued to be displayed inside Crystal Cave for years afterward.
• 1:26:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: An unsettling fixture of the Show Cave business that had once consumed so much of his own ambition while he was alive.
• 1:26:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a particular kind of sadness in that detail that is worth letting settle for a moment.
• 1:26:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: A man who, in life, had simply wanted to find something remarkable enough underground to support his family.
• 1:26:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: ended up after death, becoming the remarkable thing itself, displayed stolen and incomplete.
• 1:26:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: His own body.
• 1:26:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: absorbed into the very industry of spectacle that the cave walls had built around the region's caves for decades.
• 1:27:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is hard to imagine a stranger or a more uncomfortable kind of legacy.
• 1:27:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would take more than six decades, finally, for Floyd Collins to be allowed a permanent undisturbed rest.
• 1:27:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: by the latter half of the 20th century, attitudes toward the public display of human remains.
• 1:27:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even remains belonging to a local legend had shifted considerably, and the National Park Service, which by then had absorbed crystal cave and the surrounding land into the boundaries of mammoth cave National Park.
• 1:27:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: made the decision to finally, formally, lay Floyd Collins to rest, as any other person might be laid to rest.
• 1:27:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Out of public display, in consecrated ground, in 1989, more than 60 years after his death.
• 1:27:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Floyd Collins was buried for the final time in the cemetery of the mammoth cave Baptist Church.
• 1:28:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: His coffin sealed and secured, this time with a heavy metal lock, a small but deliberate gesture meant to ensure that the strange indignities his body had already suffered.
• 1:28:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The exclamation, the public display, the theft, the missing leg, would never happen to him again.
• 1:28:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was in its own quiet way, the closing of a circle that had taken sixty-four years to finally complete.
• 1:28:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that is the strange sprawling, almost unbelievable epilogue to Floyd Collins' death.
• 1:28:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: A man who spent his life searching the dark for a cave remarkable enough to make his family's fortune ended up after his own death, becoming an attraction himself.
• 1:28:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: stolen, partially lost, and finally, mercifully, allowed to rest.
• 1:28:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there is one more part of this story worth sitting with before we close tonight's chapter, and it has to do with everything that happened above ground in the years that followed, as a direct consequence of those 17 days at Sand Cave.
• 1:29:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: William Burke Miller, the small determined reporter who had folded his body down through that eight inch shoot to sit beside Floyd in the freezing dark, who had fed him coffee and wrapped him in burlap and carried his voice back up to a waiting nation, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the rescue, one of journalism's highest honours.
• 1:29:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: earned not from the safety of a newsroom desk, but from inside the very passage where a man was slowly dying.
• 1:29:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It remains, even today, one of the most remarkable origin stories behind any Pulitzer Prize ever awarded.
• 1:29:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: a piece of reporting inseparable from an act of genuine, physical courage.
• 1:30:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The story also reached into corners of American culture you might not expect.
• 1:30:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later that same year, a singer named Vernon Dalhardt, already one of the very first stars of the brand new recording genre.
• 1:30:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: that would eventually become known as country music.
• 1:30:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Recorded a mournful ballad simply titled The Death of Floyd Collins.
• 1:30:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It became one of the best selling records of the entire decade in its genre, reportedly moving several hundred thousand copies.
• 1:30:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sung in farmhouses and parlours across the country, by people who had never been anywhere near Kentucky, turning Floyd's final days underground into something closer to American folklore than ordinary news.
• 1:30:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Decades later.
• 1:30:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: His story would even be adapted into a stage musical, a strange and fitting afterlife for a man who in his own lifetime never could have imagined that his death would end up being sung about in living rooms from coast to coast and the broader story of Floyd Collins.
• 1:31:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the chaotic, overcrowded, badly coordinated rescue effort that had struggled so visibly to save him, also left a lasting mark on the region itself, and on the future of the Kentucky Cave Wars more broadly.
• 1:31:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The spectacle at Sand Cave had exposed in front of the entire nation,
• 1:31:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: exactly how dangerous and disorganized the unregulated competition among private cave owners had become.
• 1:31:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Families fighting over tourist dollars with false signs and exaggerated claims.
• 1:31:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: While basic safety, basic coordination and basic oversight remained almost entirely absent.
• 1:32:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth being honest about exactly how that story ended though, because it was not quite the simple, tidy resolution it might sound like at first.
• 1:32:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the very year of Floyd's death, a group of prominent Kentuckians moved in part by the publicity surrounding the rescue, formed an association dedicated to turning the entire mammoth cave region into a national park.
• 1:32:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Congress authorized the project the following year in 1926.
• 1:32:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: But actually creating the park meant acquiring tens of thousands of acres of land from hundreds of separate families and landowners.
• 1:32:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of whom had spent their entire lives and their parents' lives before them, working that same rocky, unforgiving soil.
• 1:32:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of that land was purchased outright using donated funds.
• 1:32:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: A great deal of it, however, was acquired through eminent domain, the legal process that allows a government to force the sale of private property, whether the owner wishes to sell or not.
• 1:33:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thousands of people, families who had farm those hills for generations,
• 1:33:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: were ultimately required to leave their homes to make way for the park.
• 1:33:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It took 15 more years of slow, often painful legal proceedings before mammoth cave national park was finally formally established.
• 1:33:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: On July 1st, 1941, even then,
• 1:33:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The cave wars did not vanish overnight.
• 1:33:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Several of the smaller, privately owned show caves, including Floyd's own beloved Crystal Cave.
• 1:33:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Continued operating in direct competition with the new National Park for years afterward.
• 1:33:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The old rivalries and old grudges, fading only gradually, in fits and starts.
• 1:34:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Until by some time in the 1960s, most of the old competitors had finally closed their doors, or found ways to cooperate, rather than compete.
• 1:34:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a slower, messier, and more bittersweet ending than the story usually gets credited with.
• 1:34:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: a national park born out of tragedy and built in part on land that many of its original owners never wanted to give up.
• 1:34:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it did eventually bring an end to the worst of the old roadside deception and the worst of the old hostility and it did finally protect permanently.
• 1:34:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The very caves that had once defined an entire region's strange, desperate, fiercely competitive way of life.
• 1:34:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you were to drive through that same stretch of South Central Kentucky today, you would find a landscape almost unrecognizable from the one Floyd Collins' new.
• 1:35:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mammoth Cave National Park now draws well over half a million visitors every single year, exploring a connected cave system that has since been measured at more than 400 miles long.
• 1:35:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The longest known cave system anywhere on the planet far longer than anyone in the 1920s could have guessed.
• 1:35:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: A handful of the old independent showcaves still survive here and there.
• 1:35:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Operating quietly alongside the national park, rather than against it.
• 1:35:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: While most of the others have simply faded back into the hillside,
• 1:35:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: their painted roadside signs long since rotted away.
• 1:35:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And somewhere within the boundaries of that same park, sealed off from public view, lies sand cave itself.
• 1:35:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The narrow, unstable crack in the earth that took Floyd Collins's life.
• 1:36:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now marked only by a small interpretive sign and a quiet observation deck where visitors can stand, look down at the unremarkable opening in the rock and try, usually without much success, to imagine what once happened 55 feet below their feet.
• 1:36:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a strange and almost poetic way,
• 1:36:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He never lived to see it, and the path that led there was far more tragic than anything he could ever have imagined on that cold January morning when he first squeezed his way into sand cave.
• 1:36:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the caves of his childhood, the same hills where he had spent his whole short life chasing the dream of a single great discovery that might finally pull steady streams
• 1:36:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Eventually did become one of the most visited, most carefully protected, most genuinely cherished natural landmarks in the entire country.
• 1:37:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Drawing visitors not for one single summer's new cycle, but for generation after generation afterward.
• 1:37:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending this time with sleepless history tonight.
• 1:37:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: If this story helped carry you towards sleep, consider letting us know and consider coming back again tomorrow night.
• 1:37:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: When we will travel somewhere else, some time else, to another quiet corner of the past, another story slow enough to help you rest.
• 1:37:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Until then, sleep well and we will see you again soon.