Along the banks of the Neosho River west of Humboldt hides a breathtaking surprise, and an even more exhilarating story.
Lining the bluffs not far from the “Camp Hunter” park, a series of solutional caves reveals both places where water has patiently drilled through rock over millennia as well as where escaped slaves once hid themselves prior to the Civil War.
The caves were reportedly part of the Underground Railroad, a network of secret routes and safe houses established to help Blacks escape into “northern” free states, Canada and other places where slavery had been abolished (like Mexico).
According to John Rankin, “it was called [a railroad] because they who took passage on it disappeared from public view as really as if they had gone into the ground. After the fugitive slaves entered a depot on that road no trace of them could be found.”
Though it wasn’t a literal railroad, by 1850 the system of hiding places and travel routes had ferried around 100,000 people to freedom.
Near the site of Humboldt’s river bridge even, Col. Orlin Thurston and his friend/physician Capt. George Miller aided escaped slaves with the help of tunnels, caves and a couple unassuming sandstone buildings.
So not only are they an extraordinary natural feature, the Humboldt river caves are part of our country’s ongoing struggle to deliver on the promise of “liberty and justice for all.”
According to area papers dating back to 1861, during the first raid on Humboldt, as many as a dozen fugitive slaves were captured and returned to Missouri.
Standing between the river and the sequence of cave faces, one is quickly launched back in time to when water and landmarks set the rhythm and geographic tone of our days.
Only those things as solid as a limestone cliff, or as pliable as black-brown waves will survive.
The winter air was cold and unbending when last I was there, and I found myself watching the crows who’d come to peck about and explore the earth below them.
Their calls were soft and crooning, as though they were trying to comfort the dead child whose gravestone someone had thrown from the bluff into the “dump” below.
“Walter Lee King/ December 25, 1935/ Our Darling”
An almost identical stone for the same person resides in Mount Hope Cemetery.
Surveying the stone at length, I stood there wondering what meaning echoes forth from a life that lasts only days, weeks, a single day.
