Episode 1 - Shoshone Cavern National Monument

Spirit Mountain Cave, located west of Cody, Wyoming, has an interesting story. Discovered in the early 1900s, it became the state's second National Monument in 1909. Largely ignored by the Federal Government, the cave became an issue for Cody-area residents who sought local control over the site. Their desires became a reality in 1954. However, local boosters' and concessionaries' dreams and ambitions never came to fruition, and the cave reverted back to federal control in the late 1970s.

Join Jeremy Yates and John Woodward as they explore the history of Spirit Mountain Cave and the former Shoshone Cavern National Monument.

Episode Resources
"Antiquities Act of 1906." National Park Service, Updated March 30, 2023, 2023, accessed December 25, 2023, https://www.nps.gov/subjects/archeology/antiquities-act.htm#:~:text=An%20Act%20for%20the%20Preservation,scientific%20interest%20on%20federal%20lands.

"Cedar Mountain." PeakBagger.com, 2004, accessed December 27, 2023, https://www.peakbagger.com/peak.aspx?pid=17308.

Roberts, Phil. Cody Cave: National Monuments and the Politics of Public Lands in the 20th Century West. Laramie, Wyoming: Skyline Press, 2012.

"Shoshone Cavern, Wyoming's Only Delisted National Monument." WyoHistory.Org, Wyoming Historical Society, 2015, accessed December 25, 2023, https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/shoshone-cavern-wyomings-only-delisted-national-monument.

Thanks for tuning into Buffalo Tales and exploring the tracks across Wyoming's past. You can contact us directly through our Facebook page, Buffalo Tales.

Transcript

Spirit Mountain Cave, located on Cedar Mountain west of Cody, Wyoming, is one of the few delisted national monuments in the United States.

Discovered by local rancher Ned Frost in 1909, the cave was designated a national monument nine months later by President William Taft.

The cave's preservation was championed by none other than Buffalo Bill Cody.

Shoshone Cavern National Monument became Wyoming's second national monument, but it saw far fewer visitors in the years that followed.

Local boosters began calling for state or local administration of the monument.

In 1954, President Eisenhower signed the delisting bill turning it over to the city of Cody.

After several failed attempts to capitalize on the cave, it was turned over to the Bureau of Land Management in 1977.

Welcome to Buffalo Tales.

I'm Jeremy Yates, and I'm joined by John Woodward as we share the tales, trails, and history of Wyoming.

Today, we'll be chatting about Spirit Mountain Cave and the old Shoshone Cavern National Monument.

Well, welcome, folks.

My name is John Woodward, and I'm here with Jeremy, and we're gonna be having an informal chat about Wyoming history.

Before we get started, we'd like to welcome you to our first episode.

This has been something of a passion of both of ours for a long time, and we decided to channel our interest in history and our training in history to make something special.

I actually am a museum director.

I work here in Wyoming, leading two small museums, but I've had an interest in history since I was a little kid.

I have some academic training in both history and anthropology, and my time at the University of Wyoming is where I met Jeremy a while ago.

Just to take a minute to introduce myself, I'm Jeremy.

Like John said, we met at the University of Wyoming studying history.

My background has been less in history, but I did used to teach Wyoming history at a community college.

But that was like a decade and a half ago.

So I'm here to learn about history with John and pipe in when I feel like it's necessary.

So, let's get started in talking about Wyoming's second National Monument, which is now just a gated hole in the ground outside of Cody.

Before we get to the cavern, let's settle a little bit of background.

Perfect.

So, first things first, let's talk about the Antiquities Act.

The Antiquities Act is a piece of federal legislation that was passed in 1906 with the goal of protecting America's cultural and natural resources.

These sites have to be of specific historical or scientific interest and have to be on federal land.

Most people are very familiar with our nation's first national monument, which is also located in the state of Wyoming.

If you haven't seen the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, go out and see it and you'll see our first national monument, Devil's Tower.

What's really unique about the Antiquities Act is that it provides the president of the United States the ability to create national monuments through a presidential proclamation.

So it doesn't have to go to Congress, except in two cases.

Wyoming and Alaska, right John?

That's right.

In 1950, Wyoming was exempted from that part of the Antiquities Act due to some shenanigans involving the enlargement of Grand Teton National Park, which is a great story and something we'd love to cover at a different time.

And then in 1980, Alaska was also given an exemption.

So the president can create national monuments anywhere else in US territory, except Wyoming and Alaska without congressional approval.

But our story is about the delisting and listing of the Shoshone Cavern National Monument.

And right, 11 national monuments have been delisted as of 2023, John?

Yeah, that's about right.

Now, you might think that this is kind of strange, but usually delisting means that something changed within that national monument.

In some cases, they're combined with national parks.

That happened at Grand Teton.

Yep, and other times they were sort of transmogrified into other types of federal holdings.

So it's not very common, but it has happened.

Now, so keep that in mind as we start talking about the creation of Shoshone Cavern.

So just a little bit about the geography of the area.

Shoshone Cavern National Monument was located on Cedar Mountain, which is about seven miles west of Cody, give or take.

It's also known to some of the areas as Spirit Mountain at about an elevation of 7,800 feet.

And it's part of the Absaroka Mountain Range.

Now, this is one of those Wyoming things where no one is actually sure how to pronounce Absaroka or Abserica, but I'm going with Absaroka here, and we'll get to the Grovan in a later episode.

Yeah.

For all of those folks that love Western stories written by a particular author that lives in Wyoming, they have a different name.

So, you know, as it with everything else, you know, you can leave us nasty comments later.

Yeah, please.

The other cool thing about Cedar Mountain is it was the desired burial place of Buffalo Bill Cody.

Now, as many of you know, Buffalo Bill is buried on Lookout Mountain above Denver.

But in a will that he wrote in 1906, he requested his remains be buried on Cedar Mountain overlooking the Bighorn Basin.

We will be talking about the burial of Buffalo Bill at a different time.

That is another fantastic story that involves...

Spite.

Spite.

Spite, potential theft, maybe actual theft we don't know.

But we'll get to that in a bit.

But staying on the subject of Buffalo Bill for a moment, most people are aware of Buffalo Bill Cody or Colonel William F.

Cody through his Wild West, the Wild West show that toured the world and really brought the American West into the forefront of everyone's imagination.

Cody, when he was not touring with his show, was busily improving what would become Cody Wyoming or Park County.

Should we just go ahead and mention really quick, John, that Park County is sort of like on the other edge of Yellowstone National Park, away from the Montana entrances?

That's right.

So if you think of Wyoming as a rectangle, Yellowstone National Park occupies the upper left-hand corner of that rectangle, and it includes mostly Wyoming, but little slivers of Idaho and Montana.

Now, the folks to the north like to claim that the main entrance is at the Roosevelt Arch outside of Gardner, Montana.

They're wrong.

All proper Wyomingites know that's not true.

The real entrances are at the East Gate or the South Gate.

So East Gate is just outside of Cody, about 40 miles, and then the South Gate outside of Jackson, Wyoming, not Jackson Hole.

Oh, that's another one.

That's another one.

Sorry.

When your family grows up there, when you homesteaded there, it's always going to be the Jackson Country.

It's important to remember that Wyoming is like one small town with really long streets.

So getting back to Park County, Buffalo Bill in his offseason would work to develop commercial interests throughout Wyoming.

Now, he was very involved in Sheridan, Wyoming in the early 1890s.

But by about 1895, he and several of his Sheridan area compatriots decided to invest in the Big Horn Basin, which involves, which is a very sort of arid area between the Absorkas or Absarokas.

I'll start saying Absorkas.

And the Big Horn Mountains.

The big project was to create the Shoshone Irrigation Company.

Their idea was to bring water to the desert.

So part of this was building a large dam on what was then called the Stinking Water River, now called the Shoshone River.

You'd think that stinking water might stick, but it wanted something more respectable.

Right.

You'd also always wonder about Cody being such a crazy showman, that he didn't try to change that right away.

And see, it wasn't him.

It was someone else.

Yeah, it was a booster in Cody, as I recall.

Yeah, and then they actually got the state of Wyoming to pass legislation to change the river's name, even though the state of Wyoming had no authority to do so.

But again, that's another little tidbit.

But anyway, in 1895, they founded the Shoshone Irrigation Company.

And then the following year, the city of Cody was founded.

And for the first few years, first five years, it was relatively isolated.

And then in 1901, the Burlington Railroad built a spur into Cody that allowed a lot of local development.

But within Cody, the city or town, Cody the person invested heavily in different businesses.

So for those who visited Cody, you've probably gone to the Irma Hotel, which was founded by Colonel Cody and named after his daughter.

But he was also instrumental in creating the Cody Enterprise, which is the local newspaper.

And his pride and joy was the TE.

Ranch, which was his home base, especially in those off-seasons when he wasn't touring.

Little known, he also invested in a hunting lodge, Pahaska Tepee, which is located just at the east gate of Yellowstone.

It is still there today.

It's quite a neat little place if you ever make it that far.

I've never been there.

Is it pretty cool?

I thought so.

I mean, it's the last gas stop before you get into the park.

It was right up the road from the Boy Scout camp I used to go to.

That's like right where they use that artillery to clear the to clear the avalanche danger on the road, right?

Yes, they have a big recoilless rifle to clear that when they need to.

In Wyoming, we have a lot of mountains and snow can be a real hazard.

So our people get pretty creative on how to make sure that you don't have an avalanche on at inopportune times.

So now that we sort of set the stage, let's talk about the cavern itself and how it was discovered.

So this discovery took place in January 1909 by a man named Ned Frost, which I think is kind of like a cool name.

It's like one half Nate Champion, one half Game of Thrones, Ned Stark.

I mean, thankfully, Ned Frost had a fairly full life versus either Champion or Stark, but he was actually born Albert Lee in 1881 and his family moved to Northwestern Wyoming while he was still an infant.

He grew up on a cattle ranch.

His family raised cattle and hay and then they actually built this really nice house that they made extra income from by renting rooms to travelers from The Lander to Red Lodge Stagecoach.

Ned was well known in that part of the country as a hunter and a guide.

When some of the first highways or roads were being built into the area, he provided game for the construction crews, kind of like Cody did on the rail crews.

So, you know, like many people in that part of the country, he ranched during the summer and the fall and the spring, but then in the winter, he worked to trap wolves, coyotes and bobcats, because at the time, the government was offering bounties on all of those animals.

I think a wolf was between a dollar and a dollar fifty a piece, which in 1900 was a lot of money.

Also, he was like known as like a mountain man, right?

I mean, he's like well past the like Voyager Mountain Man time, but just like really like a guy out there living that like old school Wyoming life of like, you know, raising cattle, shooting game, feeding the highway crews.

Yeah, pretty much.

So it was while he was up on Cedar Mountain in January of 1909 that he was on a bobcat hunt.

So he had a pack of dogs with him and they were trailing a bobcat about a third of the way up the mountain.

When all of a sudden the bobcat just disappears, goes behind some rocks and just completely vanishes.

Frost, as he starts to approach where that bobcat disappears, finds some rocks in a hole.

And thinking the bobcat went into the cave, he pursued into the cave entrance.

But he didn't get too far.

He didn't have a lot of equipment to go exploring.

And he reported that he kind of felt some sort of ominous presence in the back of the cave.

So I bet he was making sure he didn't corner a bobcat where he couldn't see.

So he left, but he came back the next day with a couple of his friends, Fred Richards and Ari Poley, to explore further into the caverns.

They brought ropes, they brought candles, and it says basic tools.

But what they found was several large rooms in this cavern.

It wasn't just a simple hole in the side.

It extended back quite a ways.

Now some of these rooms had high vaulted ceilings, and the walls were covered in crystallized gypsum, which created a sort of a kaleidoscope effect with all these rainbow colors.

You know, really pretty.

They didn't get too far because even they had less equipment than they expected.

So Frost came back a week later with more equipment, a few other people, and they spent about five and a half hours exploring this cave network, finding about 50 different rooms, you know, going back as far as they could before, you know, coming back out.

Now this made the local media attention, you know, right away.

Oh, Frost found a cave, a big cave.

And since this was the off season, who's one of the people that hears about it?

Well, Buffalo Bill Cody.

So Cody comes up a few days after this second big expedition into the into the cavern.

Frost isn't there.

He's off doing something else.

But cowboy stuff.

Yeah.

So one of his friends shows him around and Cody poses with along with the people he came with for a series of formal photographs at the cave entrance.

You know, the cave itself is pretty interesting.

So it was likely created by hydrogen sulfide enriched water that was moving through cracks both in Cedar Mountain and the base of the nearby Rattlesnake Mountain, which is, I think, on the other side of the stinking water from Cedar Mountain.

You know, it's been explored quite a bit in more than the century since.

And they found that it goes back somewhere around 4000 feet from the caverns entrance.

So it's a big, big cave.

And there's some ideas that, you know, as some of this network extends into Rattlesnake Mountain too, it might even be bigger.

But they run into some interesting roadblocks when it comes to exploring further.

So they got this cave.

What are they going to do with it?

What is it going to be?

Is it going to be a local wonder or is it going to be something else?

So this really falls into the hands of Buffalo Bill Cody.

Cody, or someone of quote unquote similar importance, begins pushing for the preservation of the cave shortly after Cody's visit.

So I think it was Cody.

I mean, no one else really knew about it.

I mean, he was like an avowed, you know, self-publicist, right?

He was worldwide famous on his own merits of being able to publicize himself and others.

I mean, he's a showman.

He's a booster.

I love that.

And he wants to boost this community that he's been building for the last decade or so.

So Cody, after a week or so, or a few weeks later or whatnot, is moving to New York City to help get things prepared for the 1909 tour of Buffalo Bills Wild West.

On the way, he stops in Washington, DC for personal business.

And it's likely he met with the Secretary of the Interior, James R.

Garfield, not James A.

Garfield.

That's an important distinction.

Thank you, John.

I mean, I think they're related, but a week after Cody's visit, Secretary Garfield withdraws the cave's land from any future homesteading claim.

Oh, that's interesting.

So, I mean, the Secretary of the Interior operated, he was in charge of the General Land Office, which was the government agency that sort of oversaw the land claims for homesteading.

There is no correspondence between the two, but there is this record that Cody was in Washington, so pretty sure Cody was the one who did this.

In September, September 21st, 1909, President William Howard Taft issued Proclamation 880, which created Shoshone Cavern National Monument on this land.

So this, you know, the Antiquities Act was passed in 1906, and here we are about three years later with the cavern being created a monument only nine months after its discovery.

That's pretty cool.

Is this after Devil's Tower or Bear Lodge is listed as a national monument?

Oh yeah, quite a bit.

Yeah, quite a bit.

But this is sort of the last government interest in the cavern.

Right.

Because it's so a couple other dates.

So 1909, it's created.

1916 is when the Park Service is established.

Okay.

So at this time, we have national parks, we have Yellowstone, obviously, we have Sequoia, we have a couple of others.

Yosemite.

But we don't have a Park Service to manage them.

So the California National Parks do have civilian rangers that are patrolling, keeping things in control, but not Yellowstone.

At Yellowstone, there's another agency in charge, the United States Army.

That's awesome.

So the Army is in Yellowstone until 1916, and then they hand off.

After they form the Park Service.

And this is before the Cody entrance to the Park exists, right?

Well, Pascha was there.

So Pascha Teepee is there already.

So people are coming in to Eastgate, but it's important to realize that this is the stagecoach era in Yellowstone.

It's just right, you know, they don't allow cars into the Park until a little bit later.

And this is why John is here, because he knows all the stuff.

Well, I've talked about the Army in Yellowstone, but anyway.

But, you know, once the cave is established as a monument, it sort of is in this nebulous who's in charge.

Right.

Once the Park Service is established in 1916, the monument becomes attached administratively to Yellowstone National Park.

So, I mean, it is a separate entity, but the superintendent of Yellowstone is also responsible for this cave.

And this is where like our first the first problem sort of starts showing up is like, you know, if you go to Devil's Tower, it's just a big stone monolith in the middle of the prairie, you know.

But this is to get the road up to Shoshone Cavern National Monument is is like treacherous, really uncomfortable, a really hard hike.

It's about seven miles out of town.

Even now, you'd want like a four wheel drive high clearance vehicle to do it.

And this is this sort of entrance issue becomes a huge stumbling block for this thing moving forward.

So it's important to realize that even at this point, there is no road to the cave entrance.

You know, most of the people that are going up there are hiking or they're taking horses, at least part of the way.

It's, you know, it is on the side of a mountain.

People are having a hard time getting up there.

You know, when the Park Service takes over in 1916, Congress approves, you know, $600 to build a crude trail from, you know, up to the cavern entrance.

But this would be the first and only appropriation until the 1930s.

Right.

When it becomes like involved in like a New Deal project.

You know, Yellowstone National Park personnel, you know, they're the first ones to, you know, at least in any kind of public forum, identify that access is a problem, that they can't get up there and there's, it'd be cost prohibitive to build and maintain a road to get up there.

Well, not all of us are Ned Frost, John.

You know, some of us are cowboys and mountain men and some of us aren't.

I know, you know, and, you know, at this, at this point in time, you know, the superintendent of Yellowstone and superiors in the interior department, they don't want to divert appropriations destined for the park towards this, this smaller monument.

So they really just sort of, they put it on the back burner and kind of hope that it disappears.

You know, soon after World War I descends on, on, on the United States in 1917.

And then, you know, that really puts it in the back of everyone's mind until, you know, you get into the 1920s.

Even then, the Park Service was, you know, they would send some people over every so often enough, you know, it caused enough interest that whenever this would happen, it would be reported in one of the Cody papers.

Oh, we have someone from Yellowstone coming over to look at the cave.

But this disinterest and this continued disinterest really begins to fume the people in Cody because they see this as a, the cave as a potential tourist venue for people coming in and then heading to the park.

And they think, well, if we could just, if the park service would just develop this property, we know it would be a success and it would help our, you know, help the tourism in the area.

And there are other like National Park and National Monument Caves, Mammoth Cave, Blaine Cave in South Dakota, that are quite popular like tourist attractions.

And see, you know, that idea, you know, of these other properties really is kind of encapsulated in a memo that was written by the Yellowstone Superintendent Roger Toll in 1934, which basically said that the park service should be committed to preserving the best example of natural wonders.

So if you have five caves, let's just preserve the best one, not all five.

So you can put all of those resources into one of the best like Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico versus Cody Cave.

And this really becomes park service policy, either stated or unstated, for decades to come.

But it really burned the people in Cody because they saw this as a valuable wonder and something unique to their area.

Well, it's like the spirit of the city itself, right?

Is they're always trying to get like that boosterism of William Cody is sort of like in the town even now, you know, people like trying to get visitors, trying to like improve the city through, you know, travel and stuff like that.

Yeah, so we got, you know, as we talk about local boosterism, you know, one of the key players in this is a group called the Cody Club.

They were formed around the turn of the century and then reorganized about 1909.

They weren't really a chamber of commerce so much as anything Cody.

You know, they were there to help advocate for like better roads, for increased tourism, for community development.

They didn't want to be seen as just the folks trying to encourage local business and industry, but the entire area.

And in a way, you know, they became sort of the fiscal backers for a lot of different projects because they made up some of the more influential people in the Cody community.

So a couple of projects that, you know, they helped fund or provide some support for included the Cody Stampede Rodeo, which is still going on today.

Been there?

Marched in that parade twice.

Marching Van Past reveal.

And then for people who have gone to the big museum there in Cody, they helped fund part of the purchase of the Scout Equestrian Statue of Colonel Cody.

So, I mean, in terms of local stakeholders, they were one of the biggest and most influential for pushing the Park Service to help develop a Shoshone National Monument.

And I just want to jump in here, John, and to say like these sorts of like clubs, while like still around in the United States were much, much more popular earlier in the 20th century, 21st century.

I never get that right.

Masters degree in history.

I still don't know how to do that.

So, you know, in the early 20th century, you know, like groups like Rotaries, Kiwanis clubs, clubs like the Elks, Eagles, Moose, things like that, and even like JC clubs and things like that to boost local businesses and boost local communities and economies are really like spread all over the country.

And their membership is really, really high, up until basically, you know, suburbs and subdivisions and televisions come in when people have less free time.

And that's because they're watching TV.

It's it's kind of a there's a great book on it called Bowling Alone.

But there's these clubs being like the central component of social cohesion.

But they were much, much more popular in this period than they are now.

Yeah, definitely.

So we get into World War Two.

And just like World War One, it puts the damper on any kind of turnover or any kind of movement on the cave.

It is it's important to note that during the 30s, the Park Service co-opted some of the New Deal projects to help build the road.

Yeah, I mean, it took them seven years to build this road.

I mean, the Park Service did not want to give any of their funding towards the projects.

They reached out to groups like the Civilian Works Administration, the CWA.

They tried to get some stuff out of the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps.

And so they slowly built this very primitive road up the side of Cedar Mountain, which you can still see from town today.

And I would not want to even risk it on a four-wheeler.

But it took until 1940 for the last mile to actually be laid to the cave entrance.

After it becomes like, you know, it was even discovered 31 years before that.

Or listed even.

You know what I think is awesome is, and John will know this, if you get the chance to visit Wyoming, there's all these like beautiful New Deal structures in state parks and county parks and things like that.

This is not a joke.

Wyoming has the best mountain outhouses.

And sometimes you find these things and they're like literally from the like 1930s.

They're beautiful, well constructed.

There's, we'll probably do an episode on it, like amazing beautiful structures in Guernsey.

They had artists doing murals for local museums like at Fort Casper in Casper, Wyoming.

I mean, just like, so these like, people think about like huge like Tennessee Valley authority projects when they think about some of this stuff.

But there's like little constructions all over and Wyoming is so, not empty, but like sparsely populated.

You can like get some of these things still exist.

Like you're sitting there at a picnic table, drinking a beer on a park, on a picnic table that was built by like a New Deal money in 1938.

It's really great.

Yeah, I mean, we'll definitely have to touch on that at some point in the future.

So, you know, in 1940, they finished the road.

But unfortunately, at that point, you know, things, you know, the Second World War has already started in Europe.

Even earlier in Asia, it you get into, you know, US getting, you know, building up the defenses and all the things.

And then, you know, December of 1941, we're in the war to begin.

Right.

Again, this puts a hold on any kind of action.

But before the war, the Park Service was inclined to give over the property to either the state of Wyoming or to the city of Cody.

They were committed to making sure that that transfer happened because they saw it as, you know, not in their mission to take care of it, but they wanted to still see the site preserved in some way and be accessed by the public.

But, you know, and this is re-emphasized in 1946 when the Park Service takes real definite steps to delist the Shoshone Cavern.

Do you think John, because John and I, we do do research, John does more than me, but that's okay.

We read, I just want to shout out our source, a great book called Cody's Cave by Dr.

Phil Roberts from the University of Wyoming.

Do you think, I just lost my point.

Oh my God.

That's fine.

I had a thing I was all going for there.

Well, shoot.

I'll just keep on going.

But I mean, you know, after the war, Park Service is ready to delist.

And it took, you know, Wyoming's congressional folks, you have Senator Lester Hunt, you got Senator Frank Barrett, you got Representative William Henry Harrison.

Not that William Henry Harrison.

This one lasted way longer than 30 days.

Yeah, but this is actually, I think, his great-grandson.

It is not, really?

Yeah, they're related.

That's crazy.

Yeah, I met Bill Harrison when I was a little kid.

Really?

He was a Shriner with my dad.

That's the craziest thing I've ever heard.

He's really related to, like, the William, the shortest, not shortest, shortest-term president.

William Henry Harrison didn't want to wear a coat.

Pretty much.

And his further ancestor signed, I think, the Constitution of the Declaration of Independence.

I think you're right.

That's wild.

Okay.

But let's leave that in.

And I think his grandfather was the one who also signed the statehood bill for Wyoming.

But that's another story.

Oh, Lester Hunt is going to come up again.

Yes.

We won't forget Lester Hunt.

So, you have, you know, in July of 1953, Senator Hunt, Senator Barrett introduced a measure in the Senate to delist the National Monument.

A mirror bill is introduced by Representative Harrison about the same time.

Great.

As things go through with Congress, it takes a few months.

And then by mid-February of 1954, the House passes the bill with little to no debate.

And my take on our readings was that this was generally seen as like if the Park Service doesn't want it and the city and like local control and local authority thinks they could do a better job, why not?

Right?

Yeah.

It was seen really as like a no-brainer.

Right.

And so, you know, in the spring of 54, things are moving along.

It passes through the Senate as well.

The only senator who really kind of speaks on the bill, he's not really for or against it, is Senator Wayne Morris of Oregon, who spoke on a lot of these bills, mostly because he wanted to make sure that the Federal Government was not going to get stiffed.

Oh, interesting.

He wasn't for or against it.

He just wanted to make sure that the government was getting its interests covered.

And then, you know, it passes and on May 17, 1954, President Eisenhower signs the delisting bill.

And it reverts, or provides ownership of the property to the town of Cody.

But, this is important.

This is important.

But, the delisting bill includes a measure for reversion of ownership to the Federal Government if Cody could not develop and maintain the site.

And it handed the decision making on that over to the Bureau of Land Management.

So, I think this is just a good time to take a brief wander down the garden path and talk about sort of where these monuments and parks come from.

Just really briefly.

There's this concept in the last part of the 1800s where there's this natural beauty specifically in the western United States that people have these urges to protect.

Having seen the damage done at Niagara Falls in New York and things like that.

There's this real move to preserve these natural spaces.

We'll talk more about that, I imagine, when we talk about Yellowstone National Park and things like that.

This interest going back to the 1890s of preserving these beautiful landscapes and beautiful places and culturally significant places is sort of a new concept when these monuments and parks are first being built.

Before that, almost all of these things would end up in private ownership and you could get a lot of saltwater taffy, a couple of t-shirts for the kids.

But they weren't preserved in a way that was equitable to people for people to visit and maintain in a way that respected them as they were in their natural state.

That is exactly where we go into when, unfortunately, when the city of Cody takes ownership.

So, you know, talk about under new ownership, you know, the cave.

Can you imagine just like a sign on it like, closed for renovation, cave?

Well, only if you can imagine that being up there for almost like three years.

So, in September 7, 1954, the issue of a concessionaire's license comes up before the city council in Cody.

Now, it's important to realize that even though the city of Cody, the Cody Club, all these different local stakeholders had been interested in getting the cave under local management, no one had a plan for how to really develop it.

Isn't that like funny?

And I speak as someone who worked for a long time in local government.

John, you would not believe the agita that something like a concession license or a liquor license or something can cause in a local community.

I mean, if your job is to go to a city council meeting, you're like, oh, I'm going to get home in time for an early dinner.

And then somebody's liquor license will change hands, and you'll be there for like three hours talking about this stuff.

So it's funny when politics at that local level changes like national things, but it's also just funny how like it all comes down to like concessionaires licensing in 1954.

Yeah, so I mean, there was no local plan.

It was, yeah, we can do a good job, but it's kind of like the dog chasing the car.

Right, what's he going to do when he catches it?

Right, right.

So in this case, they get the cavern.

And they sit on it throughout the summer of 1954.

And then in September, this September 7th meeting, a man named Claude Brown steps up and requests a 20-year lease on the cave.

You know, he really didn't have a project or a proposal.

Or any experience, that's important.

Or any experience, not in running a tourist venture.

He wasn't like, but he was no Buffalo Bill Cody, who could like take something like that and show up at, you know, the Colombian Exposition and be the biggest thing in the world at the time, you know.

So, about two weeks later, at the next city council meeting, his request is approved unanimously by the city council, and he is granted this license.

You know, based on the reading, I don't even think there was a monetary value attached or any kind of cost recovery for the city.

No, probably not.

I assume, I mean, we should make assumptions, but let's, I assume that the city is, the city council's on the idea that this is going to increase traffic in Cody.

This is another example, like, you know, the Buffalo Bill Museum or Stampede, Cody Stampede, where we're able to just increase tourism, grab people going into that entrance in the park in the summer and things like that.

So I would be shocked if it were at least for more than, for 20 years, for more than a dollar.

Yeah.

So, I mean, as we said, Brown was a businessman, you know, but he was a World War I veteran, originally from Syracuse, Kansas.

His family had moved to Wyoming in the early 1920s.

By the late 20s, he'd made his way to Park County, and he had owned and operated a number of different businesses, including a fur farm, a turkey farm, still kind of gross, and operated one of the only retail furrier businesses in the state of Wyoming, just not too far from where the Buffalo Bill Museum was located.

Oh, really?

That's cool.

You know, we think of the new building that they're in now, but they used to be in this wood log building where I think that Cody Chamber of Commerce is located now.

Yeah, you're right.

And this Brown's Furrier store was just down the way from that.

So he started working on improvements around the cave pretty quickly after getting that agreement.

But it wouldn't be until almost, I think, September of 1957 that the cave was actually open to the public.

They worked at modifying the cave's entrance, getting electrical access up there, building ramps and walkways inside the cave.

Smoothing the floors.

Yeah.

You ever walked in a cave, John?

Yeah, I've tripped a lot.

Yeah, they're terrible.

I don't know why anybody wants to go in a cave.

I've been in like four caves.

They're all experiences I could have done without.

There are some that are pretty neat.

But I'm also afraid of things that are tall, fast, loud.

Loud is important or in any way skinny.

Well, I mean, so he was working and you know, I meant we talked about this perilous winding road up to the site.

And so they had to get heavy machinery up there.

And in one case, you know, it was dangerous.

And they did have one of their workers die when one of these pieces of equipment fell over the side of the road and took this unfortunate soul with them.

That's terrible.

So to fund all of this, Brown created the Spirit Mountain Cavern Corporation.

Now they wanted to get away from the name, or at least he did, the name Shoshone Cavern.

He wanted to divorce himself from the renamed Stinking Water River.

And so he built up sort of this legend of a spirit mountain.

And this is very much in keeping with some of the, let's say, marketing around Devil's Tower Bears here, where there is actual lots of indigenous beliefs about that area by a lot of different groups of indigenous peoples.

But I think he just made it up wholesale, right?

This was for the pure entertainment of his visitors, no and whatnot.

So, you know, the Spirit Mountain Cavern Corp, you know, began to raise funds the old fashioned way by creating stocks and selling them to local people.

You know, he was trying to build capital that way.

And he actually went so far as to be able to get the his stock publicly listed at some point.

Oh, really?

Like in a public exchange?

Yeah, but it was a little too little too late.

Oh, wow.

I totally would have fallen for this.

A clever furrier like this could come to me and been like, Jeremy, I need you to spend several thousand dollars on my stock for Spirit Cave.

And I'd have been like, is this going to make me rich?

Well, I think honestly, from from what we read in Robert's book, you know, they had about 300 shareholders.

And most of the people realized they were not going to get their money back.

So but they were doing it because they wanted to see their community succeed and they wanted to see this venture succeed.

So after three years, almost three years to the day that he stepped up in front of the Cody Town Council on September 16, 1957, Spirit Mountain Cave opened to the public.

But some of the same problems that had been there from the beginning, from Frost's initial discovery, still remained.

The biggest one?

Access.

Yeah, and this is when he decides he wants to try to build a tram up to this thing.

Yeah, this whole cable car.

Right, right.

And again, it's, you know, he hasn't had the funding to maintain that road.

By now, that road's 20 years old, has gone through so many winters and rains and erosion that it is not that safe.

So, you know, they tried to build this cable car, but it fails because cable cars are expensive.

Maybe he's looking at, you know, Jackson over in Moose, or Teton Village, where they have successfully parlayed, you know, cable cars and trams into world-class skiing.

I think we just needed more powder up there.

Maybe.

Or we needed Buffalo Bill actually buried up on the mountain.

Have you been to Lookout?

Yeah, it's really depressing.

Poor guy.

That'll teach you to upset your wife in the last months of your life.

That was his sister.

Oh, I think you're right.

Let's redo that.

That'll teach you to upset your sister in the last months of your life.

So, you know, they were able to make a go of it for about nine years.

They closed after the 1966 tourist season, although his lease on that continued until 1972.

That's the end of that 20-year lease.

But, you know, he really wasn't able to make any additional improvements.

And in 1972, that lease reverted back to the city of Cody.

Afterwards, several different individuals and corporations began to get some year-to-year leases.

These parties or groups had great plans, but they weren't able to really do anything.

And so nothing happened.

No maintenance, no noticeable improvements.

It got trashed by local kids.

I mean, it's boring growing up in Wyoming, and it's even more boring growing up in Wyoming in the late 60s.

And I mean, John and I grew up here.

Sometimes you just do stupid stuff.

I never defaced any caves or anything, though.

Well, you said you didn't like to go in caves.

I may know some people that grew up in Cody in the 60s and 70s.

I need to ask them.

Yeah, I just have to be very careful about it, because I might get in trouble if I ask one person.

What's interesting, though, is the lack of improvements, or what energizes the next step of this, is that the Federal Government, the City of Cody, having not fulfilled their plan to make improvements on the site and build it into something viable, so they decided, the BLM officials meet with the city in 1977 and repossess the land, or the site.

Yeah.

The year before, they did a site inspection.

The local BLM officials went up to the cavern to make sure that it was being maintained and cared for under the terms of the handover agreement, and what they found shocked them.

They saw no maintenance.

They saw the site had been severely vandalized, and they reported these findings back to the City of Cody and to their superiors at the local BLM office.

You know, they met again in early 77 and provided notice that something needed to be done.

And based on my reading, the City of Cody was sort of like, yeah, that's fine, just take it.

Well, it was kind of mixed.

You had some members, you know, you had the mayor at the time asking for a second chance.

You had some city council members who were unaware that it was actually, that the city had any responsibility with it whatsoever.

Missed that memo, huh?

And so it was, just like with the park service, it kind of passed out into out of sight, out of mind.

So on July 22, 1977, the BLM actually sent the formal notice that the property was reverting back to federal ownership under the terms of that 54 legislation.

And since then, it has remained in BLM hands.

They, it's still on Google Maps referred to as Spirit Mountain Cave.

And, you know, when you're in Cody, if you look towards Cedar Mountain, you can see the switchbacks.

But, and people can still access the cave.

Yeah, you just have to call the BLM office.

They'll give you a key to get in there.

There are cave groups that go up there.

Yeah, it's, but you got to be careful.

There are some things that, you know, it's not like a dungeon in a, you know, an RPG.

There's nothing, there's not, you know, demons in the deep, but you might find a lot of bats.

Toxic gases, for instance.

Carbon monoxide pits.

Yeah, and see they, you know, those gases, some of it is, you know, that hydrogen sulfide that helped create the cave in the first place.

They kind of ran into that, not in Cedar Mountain, but at Rattlesnake Mountain, when they were doing some improvements and some work over on the Buffalo Bill Dam.

Oh, really?

Yeah, they tapped in some pockets and some people got exposed.

Before I went back to college, I worked moving oil rigs around Park County, and we all had to wear these sour gas monitors.

And when I first got out there, I hadn't got the training, and I looked up at the guy and I said, What's the windsock for?

And then I got in trouble because I hadn't done the training I was supposed to have done.

And his answer was, If that alarm goes off and you see me run, follow me.

That's not under the job training if I've ever done anything.

But, you know, so this winds up that the, you know, after almost another 50 years, well, not even 50 years, 20 years, the cave reverts back to Federal ownership.

And there it sits.

Just a kind of a forgotten landmark.

I mean, it's even, I mean, I was talking to my mom about this earlier today.

Yeah, I still talk to my mom.

Me too.

I don't talk to John's mom.

I talk to her.

I would hope you don't talk to my mom.

She's a nice lady.

You know, I told her, you know, what we're talking about today.

She's like, there's a National Monument.

Outside of Cody.

I'm like, yeah, I'm on.

It was there for like 50 years.

And but because no one knew about it, you know, it was out of sight, out of mind for the Park Service.

It really never captured the public's attention in, you know, when it was under city control and under, you know, Brown's concessionaire's license, you know, it saw some interest and some people can vaguely remember going up there.

But then, you know, after it passed back into federal hands in the 70s, it just poof from people's minds.

That's crazy.

When you start talking about, you know, bits of history that sort of, you know, they're out of out of the public imagination, things just sort of evaporate over time.

So I hate to say it, but that's just the way it goes.

But, you know, the big thing that I saw when reading Robert's book was his discussion of what we call the Sagebrush Rebellion.

Yeah, that's actually what I thought was most interesting about this story.

You want me to do a little bit of that?

Well, so the Sagebrush Rebellion is a movement in the western United States that begins in the 1970s.

And what happens is there's about 13 western states where the Federal Government has claim over a large percentage of the state land, up from like 20 to 80 percent.

I think the largest one is New Mexico, where almost 85 percent of the state lands are held actually by the Federal Government.

Wyoming, and I always get this wrong, it's either 48 or 52 percent.

I think it's 52 percent of the state is essentially owned by the Federal Government.

This is enshrined in all of these state constitutions.

But it's this political movement at like the local and state level to get those lands back from the Federal Government.

A lot of that is because, you know, the states want severance taxes on minerals pulled out of there.

They want royalties on logging and stuff like that.

But then there's also just a movement that exists still today that you can see with like Clive and Bundy and BLM Leasing.

And things like that, where this becomes like a really big issue in these Western states.

And there are all the states in the Intermountain West, like Montana down to Mexico, where there's this this like internal conflict about in the residents themselves and between the states and the Federal Government, where the states want rights and maybe interests like ranchers want the states to have the rights.

They're not paying BLM Leasing for grazing rights and stuff like that.

But then there's huge percentages of the population that don't want the federal lands to go back to the state because they're worried about getting locked out of hunting or hiking or fishing or just.

I mean, one of the reasons a lot of people live in the state, and I definitely would count myself with this, is like, it's cool.

It's big.

It's open.

You can go get really lost really fast, right?

There are a lot of places to hide a body in Wyoming.

And it's just this beautiful big place.

And there's a tension even now.

The Sagebush Rebellion is essentially over.

But even now, there's this tension remains about how these western states, Wyoming is definitely one of the central ones, how they deal with that dichotomy of like federal versus state land.

And it's really, it's a complicated issue.

You could ask 10 people in Wyoming and five people will tell you they want it to go back to those lands to be given to the state for state control.

And the other five will say, no, we want to keep the federal lands and forests, federal forests and national parks and national monuments.

It's just a really interesting and you can see sort of, there is just like nothing new in Wyoming politics and Wyoming history.

This question, the Cody boosters want local control over this.

The federal government is happy to give it to them, but then the local boosters can't make it work.

So then it goes back to the federal government.

So that dialogue about that is just like continuing to go on.

And you can see it like reflected in national politics.

I mean, that's the Sagebrush Rebellion is where, you know, that's why there's lots of libertarian groups that come into these states and a big part of like Cliven Bundy stuff in Arizona.

Yeah, I mean, we think of the Sagebrush Rebellion in the 1970s, but some of these same themes were being echoed, you know, 20 years earlier when the expansion of Grand Teton National Monument and National Park was going on because you have all of this land that was bought up by the Rockefellers that were, you know, it was either make it a monument or we're going to sell it for development.

And then once it's, you know, turned over into, you know, federal hands, it really destroys a lot of the local industry that was, you know, the agricultural industry of Teton County at the time.

Which if you're a rancher in Teton County, bad.

But if you're, you want a ski shop in Teton County, good.

Yeah, there weren't that many ski shops at that point in time in Teton County.

Fair point, fair.

I will make as many straw men as I want to knock down.

No, that's true.

I mean, there was a Woodward Carpentry shop in Jackson at the time, but I don't think Granddad was, I don't...

He wasn't, he wasn't making skis for like to get down on that gnar, pal?

No, he was not.

I don't know if you could have, I don't know if anyone ever asked him to make skis.

He would have just, he would have kicked him right out of the shop.

Told him to get a haircut?

I don't know what Granddad would have said.

But it's an interesting, an interesting way of seeing how this particular issue is part of a larger, you know, the larger themes.

Even though we're in Wyoming, the events that happen here are tied to all these different themes and all these different movements across not only US history but world history.

I mean, yes, we're isolated, but we're part of everything else.

Oh, absolutely.

And I mean, that's what's like fun, I know, for me, and I would, I'll speak for John for a second.

Like, I think that's one of the things we, that both drew us to Wyoming history is that like, it's very immediate and you like, you can go see petroglyphs, you can go see forts, you can go see teepee rings, you can go to national parks, and it's all like 90 minutes away.

And it's 90 minutes to get through the front gate, 90 minutes to get 10 miles down the road.

But we'll talk about Yellowstone another time.

Anyway, folks, thanks for joining us on our first episode of Buffalo Tales and listening to our chat about the history of Shoshone Cavern National Monument.

Just a few announcements and some housekeeping as we wrap things up.

New episodes will be dropping every couple of weeks, so stay tuned for new content.

Don't forget to subscribe to Buffalo Tales on your preferred podcasting app so you don't miss an episode.

Speaking of which, when you find us and if you like our show, please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you're listening to us.

Your reviews are going to help make us improve and to help other folks find us in the future so we can grow sort of the Buffalo Tales community.

For people who'd like to ask questions or for feedback, you can contact us via email at buffalotalespodcast.gmail.com or once we get our Facebook page up and running, you can send us a message there too.

And also included in the show notes, you'll find some of the resources that we use for today's podcast.

So thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you next time.

Thanks!