"Big Bone Cave and the Caves of Bone Cave Mountain: Cave Exploration,
Descriptions, Cartography, History, and Geologic Features of the Bone
Cave Region, Van Buren County, Tennessee.' John L. Smyre and Ronald L.
Zawislak. Rocky River Press, Rock Island, Tennessee; 2007. ISBN
978-0-9779471-0-2. 8.5 by 11 inches, softbound, xii+248 pages plus 16
pages of black-and-white photos plus three folded maps in pocket. NSS
members only, one per household, $5 postpaid from John Smyre, 14635
Rocky River Road, Rock Island, Tennessee 38581.
Rocky River Press is the authors, who printed over five hundred copies
of this thing on their personal printers and then had the color cover
and binding professionally done. They are selling it for barely more
than it costs to box and mail it. They’re crazy, of course, but as far
as I know neither of them is actually institutionalized, so I don’t
feel guilty about having taken advantage.
The long-winded subtitle pretty much covers it, but it doesn’t tell
you how extensive the material is. The history part covers the
saltpeter-mining period and the paleontological discoveries that gave
Big Bone it name. Fifty pages are devoted to the modern survey of Big
Bone Cave and Bone Cave East, genetically related but so far
unconnected, with extraordinarily detailed descriptions of ten miles
of passages. The maps of these two caves are in the map pocket. Then
there are descriptions of more than fifty other caves in the project
area, with many maps, including some foldouts. Some fifty pages
contain an extensive geological analysis of the caves by Zawislak. It
features many rose diagrams of an unusual sort and a very detailed
study of passage meanders that might (or might not) repay careful
study. This last section is hard going, but if Ron over-analyses his
data, he at least doesn’t claim too much for the results, and when he
fits a line, he gives the confidence intervals of the parameters,
things that a lot of other cave geologists need to learn.
This book was first finished and prepared for printing in 1979. Then a
short appendix was prepared for another attempt in 1985. Finally, all
the original copy was scanned and laid out anew for this successful
attempt, and the layout is quite nice. There are some irregularities
in type spacing, but that was required to keep the new computer
typesetting in sync with the index page numbers that had been compiled
years before. When the essentially free paper copies are exhausted,
the book will be available in PDF form.
People who read these book reviews will probably know about Larry
Matthews’s book on Big Bone Cave that was published by the NSS in
2006. That book is more historically oriented, but doesn’t really say
much more than Smyre and Zawislak do in that area, and the new book
says much more about the caves themselves. While the NSS book remains
interesting to speleo historians, its main credit now must be that it
shook loose, finally, Big Bone Cave and the Caves of Bone Cave Mountain.
--Bill Mixon
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