The man from the cave

June 14, 2006

Loyd is 89, looks ten years younger. One ear works and the other doesn't but apart from that and some recent surgery that doesn't slow him down much, he's fine. Which is as well because Loyd spends his time down his cave - a great network of caverns and passageways - shovelling rocks by hand, laying pathways, fitting railings and reaching high behind rock formations to install hidden wiring for lights.

'Not too bad for a man of 89', he says, his voice bubbling with understated modesty and enthusiasm. 'Not when you consider most men of my age couldn't even get down here, let alone do all the work.

'Always been healthy. Been blessed that way. Maybe it comes from being down here so much where the temperature's always the same and there aren't any allergies in the air. My wife Edith's 87 and she's down here even more than I am, so there must be something in it.'

You'd never call the cave commercial. There's a truly commercial one - the never-knowingly understated Fantastic Cave - just a little further on. Loyd is not impressed. 'They charge you four times as much and drive you round in a car. It's like a four-lane highway down there. And moments later, you're back out again. I'm proud of my cave. We have all sorts of scientists and archaeologists down here because there are things here they can't explain.'

His knowledge of formations and crystals is humbling and made all the more appealing by his persistent references to 'stagmites' and 'stagtites'.

A stagmite. Or maybe a stagtite. Something in Loyd's cave, anyway.

The cave, he said, had been bought back in 1877 or so by an Englishman called Alfred Mann, from Brighton, who'd come to run a furniture store in the area but found the caves more fun. He opened it in 1893. Before him, they had been home for around 150 years to the Osage Indian tribe, who had lived - and died - underground presumably because it was more convenient and a great deal cooler than being up on the surface.

Before then there had been another tribe, the Delawares, and before them a tribe known as the Moundbuilders, 'but we don't know a great deal about them and there's a good deal of guess-and-make-up in their history. I've been down the public library to find out more but they don't have a whole lot.' The Osages buried at least their leaders and their wives down in the cave. You need clever eyes to see the markings they scratched in the roof as markers to the tombs. That's difficult even with

electric lighting but with the pale and smoky fires that were all the Osage had, the feat is extraordinary. The Osage obviously hunted with bows because they made arrowheads from the chert that stripes the rock.

'Make them myself, too,' Loyd said in the wooden shack and shop at the entrance. He pointed to a cabinet on the floor, a cabinet that exactly matched the theme of a museum, office and bric-a-brac store. It'd take an Osage eye to spot the display among the old magazines, chinaware and what was proudly called a collection of presidential plates but consisted in fact of just one plate of Richard Nixon. Maybe the collection had never grown any larger; perhaps it had but Richard Nixon was the only president nobody wanted.

'Yep, I sit here and make arrowheads when things are quiet. Usually there's a school group coming round but sometimes there's nobody because we don't advertise. So I work down the cave and I make arrowheads. Big ones are the hardest to do. Some reason, the chert don't make up into big ones.' He has no idea how far his caves reach. He recently discovered a whole extra chamber, even prettier than the others, after sticking his shovel into a hole to see what happened.

'I was the first man ever to see this,' he says proudly. 'Looks attractive now I got the lighting in but you can imagine how difficult that was with all those stagmites and stagtites in the dark when all I had was my little flashlight.'

Loyd charges $9 a person for a personal tour of an hour to an hour and a half. If he's down his hole, you just have to wait until he's finished work or until the previous tour has been completed. Tours take as long as anyone wants and he's not hurried - 'see something different every time I'm down here'.

And the Indians who used to live there? The Delawares were moved elsewhere in Missouri and the white people who'd been living there went on somewhere else. When other settlers arrived to replace them, the Indians were simply driven off the land that the government had given them. Nobody seemed to care.

Elsewhere, the literate and civilised Cherokees and other Indians sided with the British in the revolution because London had repeatedly ordered that Indian territory was to be respected. American government officials and subsequent settlers in search of cotton country had different views and regarded Indians as traitors. In 1828, president Andrew Jackson ordered all the Indians to move west of the Mississippi river. When the Cherokees protested to the Supreme Court, the judges refused to hear them.

In 1835, seven thousand soldiers arrived to expel the Indians to Arkansas, although the bloody roundup was described officially as 'escorting'. What the Indians owned, including their personal goods, was stolen and given to white settlers. Indian homes were set on fire and their animals stolen or slaughtered. Fourteen thousand Indians were made to march to Arkansas in the winter of 1835 and a third of them died on the way of pneumonia and cholera. Those who got through, weak, ill and angry, were then forced to pay for the army that had driven them out of their lands.

The French chronicler Alexis de Tocqueville, who'd come to America in 1831 to investigate this new notion of democracy and explain it to Europeans, was appalled. He wrote of the weak and stumbling Cherokees he'd seen driven across the ice of the Mississippi: 'In the whole scene, there was an air of destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu; one couldn't watch without feeling one's heart wrung.' The Indians, he added, 'have no longer a country, and soon will not be a people.'

As Loyd put it: 'The route those families took, that's become known now as the Trail of Tears. Kinda sums it up, don't it?'

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