Frank and Albert Michaud were prospecting in Hell Canyon in 1900 when they felt cold air coming hard out of a hole in the rock too small to crawl into. They widened it with hand tools and dynamite and went in with a family friend, Charles Bush, into crawlways lined with calcite crystals, which is where the name came from. They filed a mining claim on it, called the Jewel Tunnel, which gave them control of the entrance rather than any ore worth having, and they tried to run it as a tourist attraction. Neither the mining nor the tourism came to much, though they did sell calcite crystals to a priest in Iowa for a grotto. Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed Jewel Cave a national monument on 7 February 1908, under the Antiquities Act passed two years earlier, making it the first national monument set aside to protect a cave. The proclamation names no acreage at all: it simply reserves the tracts shown on a diagram attached to it. The monument sat inside the national forest and stayed under the Forest Service until 1933. In 1928 five businessmen from South Dakota and Wyoming formed a corporation and paid the Michauds seven hundred and fifty dollars to relinquish the claim to the government, then ran tours until the company dissolved in 1939. The surveyed length now stands beyond 220 miles, the fifth longest cave known.
Getting there
43.7336, -103.8434
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
