This story was written on Feb. 21, 1925 in the Winfield Courier and Daily Free Press. (combined)
Pinned down and dying in a care! How vividly the public has pictured this withing the past few weeks.
Does anybody know for sure that Hiatt's cave does not contain the moldering bones of some explorer whose disappearance has long been an unsolved mystery?
Apropos of the Sand Cave tragedy, Col. John O'Connor relates this story:
"I was a reporter on the Courier when Margaret Hill McCarter's book 'A Master's Degree' became a best seller in Winfield. Mrs. McCarter had been a visitor in Winfield some time before. The Story was supposed to have 'local color' of this place. 'Bandit's Cave', 'Kickapoo Corral', 'Whirlpool' were names which gave the alleged tinge, to say nothing of thinly veiled names, 'Lagonda Ledge' and 'Sunset College.'
"In the story a couple, in night and storm, climb the hill from Kickapoo Coral, walk across a prairie and right into a carvern. Without any difficulty they proceed through this passage and presently emerge at Bandit's Cave the story name for Hiatt's, the cave-cellar back of the old stone house on Riverside, west of the river.
"The story brought on a revival of the legend that there was a continuous passage from Hiatt's cave to the 'den' in Wildcat Canyon, a distance of over a quarter of a mile. The legend had it that in early days some venturesome boys had made the trip through the cave from one end to the other.
"Intent on getting some facts to be used in a story in the Courier, I went one day to try how far I could go into the cave. I told nobody of my intention. I put on some old clothes and took some candles and matches for equipment.
"Foa a shor distance after leaving the excavated portion of the cave, a man can wald nearly upright. Then crawling becomes necessary. The mud floor was slippery form the outflow of a recent freshet. Jagged pieces of rock stuck up from the bottom and down from the top. It took a good deal of wriggling to make progress.
"After going what seemed several hundred yards but which was probably not over seventy-five feet of the crawl, I came to an abrubt drop in the passage, roof and bottom both going down several feet. There appeared to be a fissure leading onward from thebottom of this hole. To get there I would have had to have dropped in headforemost, then work my way into the fissure on by back.
"I loked dangerous. At the same time I began to imagine that the candle flame was dying away, an indicaton of bad air. I decided to retreat.
"If wriggling along a narrow rough-bottomed passage is hard work, going head formost is twice as hard doing it feet formost. My clothes caught on pieces of rock where I could not reach with my hands. I got loose only by squirming and kicking. I was all but tired out when I got back to the wode part.
"If I had stuck back there, I would be there yet. It is not likely anyone would have come in on the same errand as that which took me. I would have been another case of mysteriouus disappearance.
"But I demonstrated than no one can walk underground from Wildcat to Hiatt.
"If any early-day boy ever tried that passage it would have been the gourp to which belonged George Gentry, Noah Davis, Vince Dillon, Frank Cocrane and Frand Freeland. I asked George Gentry about it. He told he that body had tried it, but that they never got very far."
Who knows whether anybody ever tried the passage and never came back?