Trapped! The story of Floyd Collins by Robert K. Murray and Roger W. Brucker

Jim and I spent a week in New York last month. We saw a bunch of shows including Floyd Collins (music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, book by Tina Landau, who also directed the production). I knew the musical had been around awhile but it was older than I thought, first produced off Broadway in 1996. Jim had seen a couple of productions. I had not seen it before. This was its first time at a Broadway theater, the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center.

Frankly, I was skeptical. A musical about a man stuck in a cave? And he dies at the end? I did trust Jim, of course. Plus, we had seen Guettel’s latest musical, Days of Wine and Roses, (with a book by Craig Lucas) the last time we were in New York and thought it was great. I’d also seen his Light in the Piazza (also with Craig Lucas). And I knew about Guettel from having read Mary Rodger’s memoir, Shy. She thinks he’s a genius, but she’s also his mother. Anyway, I was curious and prepared to like it.

I loved it. The music is lovely, but smart, consistently interesting. It helps immensely to know going in that Collins won’t be rescued because it relieves the tension. His predicament is awful, but as the days pass he grows delirious, easing the horror and offering the musical a couple of opportunities for fantasy sequences. Meanwhile, half the story or more takes place above ground. There are the characters involved in the rescue attempt: his brother Homer, a reporter nicknamed Skeets, and a bossy outsider named Carmichael who comes with a paid crew from a concrete company called Kyroc; and then there is the carnival atmosphere that develops as local and out-of-town gawkers arrive and reporters spin-up ever more dramatic and fanciful stories for a eager public following the story nationwide and better hooked by sensation than truth.

They had this book for sale at the theater, so I bought it at intermission and read it once we got back to Los Angeles.

The book is copyright 1979, but I read an edition updated this year. It includes not only the original text but an additional epilogue written for the 1999 edition (that includes mention of the then recent first production of the musical) a further epilogue for the 2025 edition, and a forward by Tina Landau. Robert K. Murray, one of the co-authors, was a history professor at Pennsylvania State University. He died in 2019. The other co-author, Roger W. Bruckner is a life-long cave explorer who is also the author of several books about caving. The two authors met, as explained in a Prologue, when both were researching the Floyd Collins story and decided one’s experience with historical research and the other’s experience with caves made them perfect collaborators.

The book is remarkable thorough, though not burdensomely so. The author’s challenge apparently wasn’t a dearth of material but too much of it, and discerning the truth amid the legends, boasts, false reports, and outright lies. Some of the players were still alive in the 1970s and available for interviews. Others had recorded their stories for television or print, but not always honestly, or accurately. That the book is so detailed (the text is over 300 pages not including notes) and so convincingly reliable is impressive.

Floyd Collins was born in 1887 around the Mammoth Cave area of Kentucky south of Louisville and north of Nashville. His family had a farm, but Floyd dreamed of making a success with a cave discovery of his own. Mammoth Cave was the main attraction, still a private company at the time – it’s now a National Park. But the hills in the area were riddled with caves. The secret to success would be to discover a worthy cave located nearer to the train depot at Cave City, thus siphoning off visitors before they got to Mammoth Cave. Collins had already found a spectacular cave near his family farm, in 1917, that they called Crystal Cave, but it was located beyond Mammoth Cave, and smaller, so failed to attract the crowds. Collins identified a likely spot to search in a better location and teamed up with the property owners to share the profits if he found anything.

That brought Collins, on January 30, 1925 to Sand Cave, and to his doom. He crawled down well-enough, fearlessly, and maybe foolishly, too, though he was an experienced caver. But turning back up through a tight spot, his body dislodged a rock that fell on his left ankle, pinning him. The rock was too heavy to be shaken off, and the spot too narrow for him to bend fully down. Further movement only dislodged more rock and soon both legs and his arms were also trapped. He waited more than a day before the property owners realized he was gone and then discovered his predicament.

It was interesting to compare the true story to the choices Landau made for the musical. In the musical, Floyd has a single brother, Homer. In reality, he had two others, Andy Lee and Marshall. His father, Lee, is a character in both the real and musical versions, getting drunk, enjoying the attention, finding ways to make a little money from the crowds, and drawing out religious significance based on his Baptist theology. The musical greatly inflates the presence of Lee’s second wife (Floyd’s step-mother), and his sister, Nellie, I suspect in order to include female characters in the show. Nellie, in particular, becomes a kind of benevolent angel figure giving Floyd psychic support even though she’s unable to go down to him physically. But in the real story both women barely appear.

Skeets Miller, the reporter, is the closest the story has to a hero, if a story that ends in tragedy can have a hero. He writes for one of the Louisville papers. He is one of the only half-dozen or so to actual go in to the cave and all the way down to Floyd, which requires both bravery and small size. Skeets probably comes the nearest to actually rescuing Floyd by clearing by hand the rocks covering Floyd’s upper body and then stretching his body down over Floyd’s and attempting to use a jack to lift the rock off his leg. Unfortunately he couldn’t get the jack in a stable enough position to be effective. Skeets won the Pulitzer prize the following year for his reporting.

Henry Carmichael the foreman of the Kyroc crew, who takes leadership of the organized rescue attempt comes off as a bit of a villain in the musical but is a more benign figure in the book. There’s a tension in the entire episode between the locals, exemplified by Homer, who are proud of their local knowledge and experience in caves, and outsiders, like Carmichael who consider the locals backward and want to apply modern technology to the problem. Carmichael’s first solution is to pull Floyd out by force, even if it means ripping off his leg. Homer attaches the harness to his brother, but is also the one to call it off when he sees the distress the pulling causes. Eventually a cave-in above Floyd blocks access to him and prevents any further attempts to rescue Floyd through the cave itself.

The effort then turns to digging a vertical shaft beside the cave down to the depth where Floyd is trapped and then a horizontal tunnel over to him. The shaft is dug but the work is slow. The ground is full of boulders. They can’t blast out the rock for fear of shaking more material on top of Floyd and smothering him. The weather is cold and miserable. Water flows into the shaft and the walls must be shored up to prevent collapsing. The crew does finally reach Floyd this way, on Monday, February 16, but he’s found dead. It seems likely he had died on Friday the 13th, two weeks and a day after entering the cave. The last contact had come more than a week earlier, Wednesday, February 4, at the time of the cave-in. Cause of death was starvation and prolonged exposure to the cold and damp.

Nearly a third of the book continues after Floyd’s death. They find the body, but he’s still trapped, even more tightly than before. Rather then risk the dangerous conditions of the tunnel and shaft collapsing as they dig him out they decide to leave him there. The workers come out and they fill in the shaft. In April, when the weather is better they re-dig the shaft and retrieve the body. The body has its own adventures after that. First Floyd’s corpse is buried in a grave near the family farm. Then, when Floyd’s original discovery, “Crystal Cave” is sold, in 1927, the new owner has Floyd’s corpse moved into the cave and put on display in a glass casket. He stayed on display until his body was stolen in 1929, probably as a publicity stunt. It was recovered the next day and returned to Crystal Cave but now under a metal cover which could still be raised to allow a peak with the proper tip to a guide. Crystal Cave was bought by the Federal Government and joined to the Mammoth Cave National Park, in 1961. In 1972 cavers discovered a connection between Mammoth Cave and Crystal Cave becoming the world’s longest cave system. Floyd’s body stayed in the cave, inaccessible to park visitors, until 1989 when it was moved and buried yet again, this time in the graveyard of the Mammoth Cave Baptist Church.

A song called, “The Death of Floyd Collins” written shortly after his death was sold to Columbia records who gave it to a country singer named Vernon Dalhart to record. The previous year, Dalhart’s recording of “The Prisoner’s Song” had become the first American phonograph record to sell more than a million copies. His recording of “The Death of Floyd Collins” sold even better: over three million copies over the next two years. Nineteen other artists made their own recordings. In 1951, Billy Wilder released the film, “Ace in the Hole” which uses some of the Floyd Collins scenario to tell a fictional story. In 1959 Robert Penn Warren tells the story (re-located to Tennessee) in a novel called, The Cave.

I’m glad to know the story now, myself. I won’t read Robert Penn Warren’s novel, but I might watch the Billy Wilder movie, and hope I’ll have another chance to see the musical some day. God bless you Floyd Collins. RIP.