Floyd Collins
Trapped in Sand Cave
The Collins family owned Crystal Cave, a tourist cave in the same general area as the Mammoth Caves. Although particularly beautiful, Crystal Cave experienced a disappointingly low amount of tourist business because of its relatively isolated location. Collins wanted to find another entrance to the Mammoth Caves or a new cave along the road leading to the Mammoth Caves through which to draw in some of the visitors to those more easily. Collins made an agreement with three farmers who owned land closer to the main highway in the area: if he found a cave with commercial potential on their land, the owners would pay to develop the cave, and Collins would share in the proceeds from operating it as a tourist attraction. Working alone over a period of three weeks, he explored and expanded a hole that would later be dubbed “Sand Cave” by news media.
On January 30, 1925, after a few hours of work, Collins managed to squeeze through various narrow passageways: he claimed that he had discovered a large chamber, though this claim was never verified. Because his lamp was dying, he had to leave quickly, before exploring the chamber. He became trapped in a small passage while on his way out. He accidentally knocked over his lamp, putting the light out, and then he dislodged a rock from the ceiling, pinning his leg. It was later discovered that the rock weighed only 26 pounds (12 kg), but it was wedged in such a manner that neither he nor rescuers could reach it.
He was trapped only 150 feet (50 m) from the entrance. After being found the next day by friends, hot food was taken to Floyd, and an electric light bulb was run down the passage to provide him light and some warmth, and he survived for over a week while efforts to rescue him were made. The cave passage used to reach Collins collapsed in two places on February 4. The rescue leaders, believing the cave to be impassable and too dangerous, began to dig an artificial shaft to reach the chamber under Collins. The 55-foot (18 m) shaft and subsequent lateral tunnel actually intersected the cave just above Collins, but when finally reached on February 17, he was found dead from exposure and starvation. Because they did not reach Collins from the rear, the rescuers still could not remove the rock from his leg. Deciding it was too dangerous to remove the body, the rescuers left it where it lay and hastily filled the shaft with debris. A doctor later estimated he had died three or four days previously, February 13, being the most likely.
Burial
After Collins’s remains were left in the cave, a funeral service was held at the surface. However, Homer Collins was not satisfied with Sand Cave as a final resting place for his brother. Two months later, Homer and friends reopened the shaft, dug a new tunnel to reach the opposite side of the cave passage, and retrieved the body on April 23, 1925. On April 26, Floyd’s body was buried on the Collins homestead near Crystal Cave (renamed Floyd Collins Crystal Cave). In 1927, Floyd’s father, Lee, sold the homestead and cave. On June 13, the new owner moved Floyd’s body into a glass-topped coffin and exhibited it in Crystal Cave for many years. On the night of March 1819, 1929, the body was stolen from Crystal. It was soon recovered, but the left leg was missing. After this, it was kept in a more secluded portion of Crystal in a chained casket. In 1961, Crystal Cave was purchased by Mammoth Cave National Park and closed to the public. Most of the family had long objected to Floyd’s coffin being placed in the cave. At their request, the National Park Service re-interred Floyd Collins in nearby Flint Ridge Cemetery on March 24, 1989. It took a team of 15 men three days to remove the casket and tombstone from Crystal. There was some objection to this from cavers in Europe, where notable explorers are often buried in caves they discovered.
Legacy
The newspaper reporter William Burke “Skeets” Miller from the Louisville, Ky., Courier-Journal participated in and reported on the rescue efforts from the scene. Miller also talked with and interviewed Collins in the cave, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize. His reports were widely distributed by telegraph and printed by newspapers around the country, and in some foreign countries, and the rescue attempts were followed by regular news bulletins on the brand-new medium of broadcast radio (with the first broadcast radio station KDKA having been established in . Shortly after the media arrived, the publicity drew crowds of tourists to the site, at one point numbering in the tens of thousands. Vendors set up to sell food and souvenirs, contributing to a circus-like atmosphere. The Sand Cave rescue quickly grew into the third-biggest media event between World War I and World War II. The biggest media events of that time both involved Charles Lindberghhe trans-Atlantic flight and his son’s kidnappingnd Lindbergh actually had a minor role in the Sand Cave rescue, too, having been hired to fly photographic negatives from the scene for a newspaper.
The whirlwind of attention about the attempted rescue of Collins helped fuel interest in the creation of Mammoth Cave National Park, of which Sand Cave became a part. For decades, fear and superstition kept cavers away from Sand. Eventually, the National Park Service sealed the entrance with a welded steel grate to ensure public safety. Expeditions into Mammoth Cave revealed that portions of Mammoth actually run under Sand Cave, but not even a hint of a connection was discovered. In the 1970s, cave explorer and author Roger Brucker and a small group of explorers entered Sand Cave to conduct research for a book about Floyd Collins. The team surveyed Sand, and, in the process, discovered an opening in the tunnel collapses through which small cavers could crawl, revealing that it likely would have been possible to feed and heat Collins after February 4, 1925. They proceeded as far as the passage in which Collins was trapped, finding it choked with gravel debris and unsafe to excavate. In April 1983, George Crothers led an archaeological investigation that documented the many 1925 artifacts in the cave. The artifacts were then removed for preservation.
The life and death of Floyd Collins inspired a musical by Adam Guettel and Tina Landau, as well as at least one film documentary, several books, a museum, and many tales and short songs by cavers. Ace in the Hole is a 1951 film by Billy Wilder based on the media circus surrounding the attempted rescue of a man stuck in a cave; although this film depicts a fictional (but similar) incident, Collins is explicitly mentioned by name in the film’s dialogue. The life of Floyd Collins is also documented in the books Trapped! The Story of Floyd Collins by Roger Brucker and Robert K. Murray (ISBN 0-8131-0153-0) and The Life and Death of Floyd Collins by Homer Collins as told to Jack Lehrberger and published by Cave Books. He is specifically mentioned in two novels by Kentucky writers Robert Penn Warren and James Still: The Cave and River of Earth, respectively.
A yearly play is put on at the Green River Amphitheatre in Brownsville, Kentucky, entitled The Story of Floyd Collins. The play is not based solely on Floyd himself, but also on the Collins family interacting during the time of the cave-in and media circus that follows.
Kentucky-based rock band Black Stone Cherry has a song entitled “The Ghost of Floyd Collins” on their 2008 album Folklore and Superstition. John Prine & Mac Wiseman released a song entitled “Death of Floyd Collins” written by Andrew Jenkins on their 2007 album Standard Songs For Average People.
References
Brucker, R. and Murray, R. Trapped! the Story of Floyd Collins, University Press of Kentucky, 1983. ISBN 0-8131-0153-0
Black Stone Cherry Ghost of Floyd Collins, from the “Folklore and Superstition”, 2008.
External links
The Floyd Collins Web Page
Find-A-Grave profile for Floyd Collins
Persondata
NAME
Collins, Floyd
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION
DATE OF BIRTH
July 20, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH
February 13, 1925
PLACE OF DEATH
Categories: 1887 births | 1925 deaths | Cavers | American explorersHidden categories: Articles with hCards
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