Alvin McDonald

The South Dakota Mining Company hired Jesse McDonald in 1890 to look after its mineral claim at Wind Cave, and his son Alvin, sixteen years old, went down into it and did not really stop. He worked by candlelight with string paying out behind him, sometimes nine hours at a stretch, and over about three years explored and named eight to ten miles of passage by the Park Service's reckoning: Moss's Palace, Monte Cristo's Palace, Mound Builder's Rest. He described himself in his diary as permanent guide of Wind Cave. The most quoted line in it was written on 23 January 1891, when he was seventeen: have given up the idea of finding the end of Wind Cave. He carried cave specimens to the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in the summer of 1893, probably contracted typhoid there, and died that December at twenty. He is buried on the hillside near the natural entrance, and a signature of his was found on a ceiling in 2009. The family lost the cave anyway, and lost it in a way that made it a park. The mining claim and a homestead entry were both contested, and in 1899 the General Land Office ruled that the land was not mineral and ought to be kept by the government as a public resort. The following year Interior held that neither party was entitled to it. Theodore Roosevelt signed the act creating the national park in January 1903.