Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico
Jim White

Jim White

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico       The Story of its Early Explorations, as told by Jim White

HOW JIM FOUND THE CAVERNS

Bats!… millions of black little mammals drifting along the horizon and seeming to fuse into the hazy clouds of a New Mexico sunset! That was the spectacle which led Jim White, back at the turn of the century, to become interested in the colossal phenomenon designated by Act of Congress as Carlsbad Caverns National Park.

If you could ask him about it today, Jim’s eyes would probably turn inward as he’d muse and remember. “I thought it was a volcano—but then I’d never seen one. For that matter, I’d never seen bats fly. I had seen plenty of prairie whirlwinds during my life on the range, but this thing didn’t move. It seemed to stay in one spot near the ground—but the top kept spinning upward. I watched maybe a half-an-hour, and being about as curious as the next fellow, I started toward the place”.

Jim White, native of Mason County, Texas, grew up ranching … surrounded by the cattle-business, without even a grammar school education. Jim would have preferred bustin’ broncos to books and blackboards even if there had been a little log schoolhouse on his native soil. So it was an experienced ten-year-old range-rider who teamed up with John and Dan Lucas of the X-X-X Ranch in New Mexico, three miles or so from the entrance to the cave. Jim White spent eight or ten years on the range surrounding Lucas’ Ranchhouse, and like the other rangemen, had known of “the bat cave”, but he had felt no impelling urge to see what was hiding in its darkness.

Then came the day of the bat-flight. Crawling through the rocks and brush, Jim White approached the spot from which the bats seemed literally to boil. The incredulous young range-rider made a feeble guess about the number of bats—could think no further than millions—but realized that any hole with capacity for that many bats must be a whale of a big affair. Creeping still closer, Jim finally lay on the brink of the chasm and looked down … into awesome, impenetrable blackness.

Torn between awe and curiosity, Jim did the natural thing for a man familiar with desert ranges.

“I piled up some dead cactus and built a bonfire. When it was burning good, I took a flaming stalk and pushed it off into the hole. Down, down, down it went until the flame went out—and I still watched until the embers sprinkled on the rocks below. Seemed the thing wouldn’t ever stop, but later it measured about thirty or forty feet from where I dropped the fire down to that faraway bottom. I kicked the remainder of the fire into the hole and watched it fall. The bats seemed to be scared, and for several minutes none flew out. Soon as the embers died, though, they boiled up again. I watched another hour or so, then went back to camp.”

The fence-building crew, camped in the vicinity at the time, heard not a word from their companion about his observation.

JIM EXPLORES FARTHER

Jim White kept his counsel, waited a couple of days for the opportunity, then gathered together several coils of rope, a kerosene lantern, some wire and a hand-axe.

“I got back to the cave about mid-afternoon. You know the opening faces West, and the sun was in the right place to shine down into it. There was enough light so I could see the bottom of the shaft. Off to the right I could see the opening of a huge tunnel, and my imagination started running ahead of me. Where would that tunnel lead? I made up my mind to find out.”

Busy with the hand-axe, Jim cut sticks of wood from the shrubs nearby, accumulating a sizeable pile. Next, he picked up the rope and the wire … and with his newly-cut sticks for steps, Jim White’s rope-ladder-to-adventure was soon lowered into the entrance of the cave. Cautious rung-by-rung descent led the probing cowboy down into blackness until his feet touched something solid. Lighting his lantern, he discovered himself on a narrow ledge—almost at the end of his rope, literally and figuratively!

From that precarious spot, Jim could see into the tunnel—only a little farther and he could be on its smooth-looking floor level. Appetite whetted for exploration, the range-toughened man dared a “human-fly” approach, holding onto the rough wall for that final twenty feet or so to wide, level footing!

Standing at the entrance to the tunnel, Jim peered ahead by light from his lantern … a sickly glow against a blackness that seemed solid. Determined to see what was there, dark or no dark, the cowboy summoned his courage and started walking slowly forward.

“The tunnel grew larger with every step. It seemed to me that I was wandering into the very core of the Guadalupe Mountains.

“Finally, I reached a chamber—a whale of a big oval-shaped room. Looked like several hundred yards before there was a sharp curve to the right and another sharp descent. On the left was another big tunnel leading in the opposite direction … and the floor on the left looked a little more smooth and level, so I tackled it first. It didn’t take long to discover that this one was the Bats’ Cave, so I went back to the big entrance and started down the other tunnel.

“I kept going until I found myself in the mightiest wilderness of strange formations a cowboy ever laid eyes on! It was the first cave I was ever in, and I didn’t know then that those formations had names like ‘stalagmites’. But I did know, with the kind of instinct the Creator puts into a man, that there just wasn’t another scene like this one in the whole world.”

To arrive at this point, Jim White had crept cat-like across a dozen dangerous ledges and past many a tremendous opening that seemed to reach downward into the very center of the earth. He dropped rocks to sound depths; into one opening he pushed a great boulder. It hit something—not bottom—and kept rolling and rolling until the sound faded into a haunting memory of sound.

“I walked through more of those ‘stalagmites’, and each one seemed larger and more beautifully formed than the ones I’d already seen. I blinked at the sight of giant-size wonders that turned out to be gleaming ‘onyx’. The ceilings blinked back at me with clusters of ‘stalactites’ … like great chandeliers. The walls sparkled and glittered.”

Those walls were frozen cascades of flowstone, with jutting rocks holding long, slender formations that rang under Jim White’s experimental touch like keys on a xylophone. Floors were carpeted with formations with new shapes and new sizes at every turn. Through the gloom, Jim saw the tall, graceful, ghost-like shapes resembling totem-poles, stretching upward into darkness. Through crystal-clear water, Jim White saw that the sides of several pools at his feet were lined with what appeared to be marble. Lost in the beauty, the weirdness, the grandeur into which his inquisitive mind had led him, Jim forgot time, place and distance.

Suddenly, the oil in his lantern was exhausted. The flame curled and died. Reality descended swiftly, as if millions of tons of black wool drifted down to smother and choke. With the black loneliness paralyzing his bloodstream, Jim White tried to refill his lantern from the small emergency canteen of oil, brought for just such a moment.

“My fingers shook so much that I fumbled the filler-cap and spilled more oil in my lap than I did in my lamp. Then I dropped the filler-cap when I tried to screw it back on.

“The inky blackness and the almost ‘deafening’ total silence, save for an occasional drop, drop, drop of water, didn’ help me stop shaking, either. It’s hard to describe how completely dark, how perfectly still it is down in that cave. Seemed like a month went by before I got that lantern going again and looked around in the dim light to get my bearings.”

Foresight and range experience had prompted the westerner to leave landmarks for himself so the retracing of steps would be possible, even if natural sense of direction failed. Resourcefully using what was at hand, Jim’s guide-marks were broken stalactites taken from the floors and placed on top of the rocks, ends pointing to the outbound pathway. Even so, Jim started feeling a mounting fear that he might not be able to find the markers he had left behind. It was worse when he realized that no one at camp knew where he had gone—that his chances of being found were extremely remote even if his companions had known of his destination. In the cool depths of the cavern, now known to be 56 degrees day and night, summer and winter, the once-bold adventurer felt the wild alarm in his veins turn into perspiration and panic-chills.

“Suddenly I was seized with a mad desire to run—to charge like a crazy bull when he’s cornered. I scrambled along the edge of a black gash in the rock, and rammed my head against those sharp-pointed critters above me that all at once seemed unfriendly. Those needle-points pierced my hat and cut a few holes in my scalp … and that sort of cooled me off. I leaned back against the wall and talked to myself the way a lonesome cowboy does. ‘Here, Jim’, I said, ‘don’t get in an uproar. It won’t get you anywhere. Take it easy’.”

Maybe those formations up there were not so unfriendly after all, because Jim seemed to hear his own words of advice returning from every direction. “Take it easy … take it easy … take it easy!”

Grasping the thin thread of courage which remained, the man who now feared that he would never see daylight again held the inadequate lantern securely in his hand. This was his last chance to reach the surface—the oil flickering away moment by moment in the little flame. Desperation was his strength, determination his guide as he held the lantern forward in search of those arrow-points to safety. Repeating the cat-crawl in reverse, narrowly clearing the margins of safety because nerves were jumpy and jangled, Jim White worked his agonizing way toward the tunnel’s mouth. The distance seemed multiplied by thousands of footsteps since he had traversed the distance … when was it? Hours? Or days ago?

Never was there so gratifying a sight as the shaft of sunlight filtering down through the entrance. Fumbling, eager hands fastened onto the rope ladder and Jim White hungrily climbed over the rocky ledge to the warmth and cheer of the New Mexico sunshine.

“I waited a minute till my bones thawed out. Then I turned and stared back into the cave. It had beaten me—driven me out. I stared at it the way I’d stare at a stubborn bronco, telling myself that someday I would conquer it!”

Riding back to camp, busy with thoughts of the adventure and pondering about the possible extent of the cave, Jim White felt an increasing desire to see it all. He must see it, he felt, but wondered if it wouldn’t be better to get someone to go back with him. Somehow the mammoth, buried fairyland wouldn’t seem so overwhelming if someone else were along to relieve the silent, dark loneliness. The boys at camp, however, refused to take seriously Jim’s account of the bats and the glittering under-ground palace. The more he talked of it, the more they howled their disbelief.

“When they found out I was serious, they decided I had just naturally gone ‘plumb loco’, or else I’d set out to be the world’s champion cow-punchin’ liar! Try as I would, I couldn’t find a single cowboy who would agree to go with me. They just weren’t the least bit interested!”

JIM AND THE KID SPEND THREE DAYS IN THE CAVERNS

At the Lucas X-X-X Ranch there was a Mexican boy about fifteen years old who worked steadily and said little. He couldn’t speak much English, and the cowboys were not gifted with much Spanish. Jim White never did know the boy’s real name or what became of him finally, but during those days called the young Mexican, as did the others, the “Kid”.

One day, the Kid called the exploring White aside and overcame language difficulties enough to offer his company on that risky trip into the cave! Jim accepted the offer readily enough! To return to the scene of his lonely adventure had by now become a consuming desire. Among Jim White’s acquaintances, if only “the Kid” would make the exploration with him, it was still a lot better than going alone.

Five days from his first trip into the cave, Jim White and the Kid set out with a couple of crude torches, a canteen of water, a sack of grub and a can of kerosene. Right up to the moment of departure, White expected his volunteer-companion to get cold feet and back out of the project, but at last they were headed together toward the Big Hole.

The kerosene torches were a great improvement over the lantern used in the first visit. The torches gave sufficient light to enable fairly good progress. Now familiar to the man, the startling, dazzling formations frightened the Kid, but as White expressed it: “He was a game little cuss, and never whimpered once. I doubt if any man could have stood up under the strain any better than the Kid”.

For three days, the strangely-matched pair roved and explored the recesses of the cave, covering about the same territory now open to visitors who take the guided tours. For Jim White and the Kid, however, there was not the comfortable element of bright lights—certainty—and sure-footed guides along well-established paths. Their three-day exploration was an unbroken chain of hazards and thrills, findings and fears, adventures which sound exaggerated even when evidence lends them support!

If you could ask Jim White about his biggest thrill during that unbelievable three-day experience, he would say: “During the last day, I was over in one corner of what we later called ‘The Big Room’, crawling along a ledge of rock. I sat down to rest and just looked around as I sat there. Over on the other side of the ledge, what do you suppose I saw? Staring right back at me was the skull of a man! Fast as I could I brought my torch about, and there was the whole skeleton intact. If I thought some giant could have been living in this cave along with the giant formations, right there seemed to be my proof! Those thigh-bones looked to me like the biggest kind of beef-shanks! I tried to pick up one of the leg-bones and it crumbled in my fingers. Just about that time a drop of water fell on my hand. Only the Good Lord knows how long that skeleton had been lying under that drip, but it must have been long enough for the mineral water to soften the bones. It took just a touch to crumble the thigh, but the skull was not under the drip, so it was perfect. When I picked it up, the Kid backed away. I suggested that we’d take it back to camp with us, or the boys would never believe we found a skeleton in the cave.”

Jim White’s proposal brought a hesitant question from the Kid.

“How we take it?”

“Oh, we’ll put it in the bag with the grub”, Jim replied.

The groceries had been the Kid’s responsibility, till then. Firmly, immediately he told Jim White: “Then you carry it!” Jim did. Sometime later a doctor in Carlsbad borrowed the skull to examine it. Someone borrowed it from him, and that one in turn loaned it to someone else, until eventually all trace of it was lost … a most unfortunate eventuality, since the skull would have been among the most treasured of the cave-souvenirs in Jim White’s collection.

Jim finally deduced that the skeleton was all that remained of some Indian who wandered into the cave out of curiosity, even as Jim himself had done. Failing to find the way out, the Indian must have starved there on the ledge. Cowboy White was often heard to muse that this Indian must have been an unusually brave Red Man, for it is known that Indians feared darkness and the unknown above all else. That might be the logical explanation for the fact that there was never found any trace of Indian habitation within the cavern, even though small groups lived in the vicinity. An Indian cooking-pit can still be seen near the cavern entrance, beside the present flagpole.

Other skeletons were found by Jim White, though none had the spectacular thrill for him engendered by that first sight of a frame-work of a man.

With all their excitement to feed their interest, Jim and his youthful companion might have stayed longer than three days, but for an untoward event which Jim would describe:

“I had the oil for our torches. It was in a gallon can … the can in a gunny-sack slung over my shoulder. The can started leaking and my clothes were soaking up kerosene.... Before long my back was sore and burning, so I was planning to stop as soon as we got off the ledge we were crawling on at the time. Wanted to fix my back, the best I could in there. But the Kid, crawling along behind me, brought his torch too near my back. The next instant, I was hanging on a narrow shelf of rock, my clothes blazing, and a gallon can of oil on my back!”

If he hung there on the ledge, he would burn to death. If he let go, he’d be dashed to pieces on the rocks below. If he threw the can away, they’d be left without oil for the torches on the trip from the cavern—if he lived long enough to start that journey!