Stephen Bishop

Stephen Bishop ( – 1857) was an American cave explorer and self-taught geologist known for being one of the first people to explore and map Mammoth Cave in the U.S. state of Kentucky. Mammoth Cave is regarded as the longest cave system in the world and Bishop's map of the cave, hand-drawn from memory off-site in 1842, was included in a book published in 1844. It was regarded as the authoritative map of the cave system for over four decades. Bishop was enslaved and worked as a guide at Mammoth for approximately 19 years. He was freed by manumission the year before his death. Background Bishop was brought to Mammoth Cave in 1838 when he was 17 years old, by lawyer and enslaver Franklin Gorin, who had acquired ownership of Bishop as repayment for a debt stemming from the divorce of Bishop's possible father, white farmer Lowry Bishop. Gorin had purchased Mammoth Cave from its previous owners in the spring of 1838 for $5000 (~$ in ). Gorin wrote as he reminisced after Bishop's death: I placed a guide in the cave – the celebrated and great Stephen, and he aided in making the discoveries. Stephen was a self-educated man; a fine genius, a great fund of wit & humor, some little knowledge of Latin and Greek, and much knowledge of geology, but his great talent was a perfect knowledge of man. Mammoth Cave career Bishop explored and named large areas of the Mammoth Cave system. He discovered and named many features of the Cave – including River Styx, Great Relief Hall, Fat Man's Misery, Tall Man's Misery, and Lake Lethe. Numerous authors wrote about their Mammoth Cave tours with Bishop as their guide in books and magazines. Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, writing in The Knickerbocker, as "Barnwell" refers to Bishop as "Stephen, the best guide to the cave". Roosevelt states that Bishop told the group that he, Bishop, had learned to read and write by seeing previous tourists "...the gentlemen paint their names with the smoke of the torches on the walls, and then asking how they spelled them." Later, in 1854, Nathaniel Parker Willis, in A Health Trip to the Tropics, described Bishop as wearing "a chocolate-colored slouch hat, a green jacket, and striped trousers" as his working uniform.