After the War of 1812, saltpeter prices collapsed and the operation ended.

The cave’s new commercial identity emerged: tourism.

By the 1820s and 1830s, Mammoth Cave was attracting visitors from across the country and from abroad, guided by enslaved and later freed Black guides who knew the cave in a way that no one else did — Stephen Bishop, the Bransford family, other individuals whose names deserve to be better known than they are.

The tourist era created a new human relationship with the cave: not as a resource to be extracted, not as a working environment, but as a spectacle to be appreciated.