The Rediscovery of Lamoille Cave

I’ve been told repeatedly over the years that historic LaMoille Cave was destroyed by highway construction. This is a pernicious error, as anyone can discover simply by taking the trouble to visit the cave, like I did. But before I describe how this error gained currency, some of you may want to know a little bit about LaMoille Cave, itself.
LaMoille, Minnesota, for which the cave was named, is located on the Mississippi River south of Winona. In 1888, Theodore H. Lewis, famous for having recorded many Minnesota antiquities, sketched numerous petroglyphs found on the walls of this sandstone cave. In an entry for Appleton’s Annual Cyclopaedia, Lewis wrote, “There are more pictographs in this cave than have been found at any other point in the Mississippi valley.” These included fishes, rattlesnakes, thunderbirds, raccoons, human figures, etc. This material was incorporated into Winchell’s Aborigines of Minnesota (1911) and reported verbatim in an article in the Wisconsin Archeologist (January 1926). Lewis’s directions were sufficiently accurate that I was able to use them to find the cave on August 3, 2001. So far so good!
LaMoille Rockshelter was subsequently discovered ¼ mile to the southeast of the cave during work on U.S. Highway 61. The rockshelter was described in the Minnesota Archaeologist (April 1954 and April 1964). The rockshelter became famous for containing, not petroglyphs, but some of the earliest pottery known in Minnesota, according to Professor Elden Johnson. Ironically, after being discovered by roadwork, the rockshelter was destroyed by the same. Couldn’t you just foresee that two sites with such similar names, so close together, would be confounded?
It was Dean R. Snow, now Department Head and Professor of Anthropology at Penn State, who rather muddied the waters, however. In his “Petroglyphs of Southern Minnesota” in the Minnesota Archaeologist (October 1962)—published in the same year that he graduated with a baccalaureate degree from the University of Minnesota–he attributes the petroglyphs to the rockshelter containing the pottery and states that “LaMoille Cave was destroyed recently by highway construction.” The statement was picked up and propagated in Hogberg & Bayer’s Guide to the Caves of Minnesota (1967), Kehret’s Minnesota Caves of History and Legend (1974), and newspaper articles (see, for example, Winona Daily News, January 2, 1992).
Initially, I found it difficult to believe that such high authorities had gone astray. Accordingly, on January 23, 2002, I paid a visit to Alan Woolworth, former Chief Archeologist of the Minnesota Historical Society and the person who knows more about LaMoille Cave than anyone else. He has accumulated a stack of references that are too numerous to discuss here. Woolworth opined that Snow did indeed confuse the two sites. The “Minnesota Archaeological Site Form” for LaMoille Cave was next consulted. It states that “Snow, in his 1962 article seems to have the two sites confused and reports that the LaMoille Cave was destroyed by highway construction, but then goes on to describe another cave about ¼ mile to the west, which he apparently visited, which fits Lewis’s description of the LaMoille Cave.” The form is dated March 30, 1999, so I was scooped in solving the LaMoille mystery.
You may ask why I went looking for LaMoille Cave in the first place if I was suffering from the delusion that it didn’t exist. I was just passing through the area and wanted to visit the site where the cave had been. I was startled when I actually found it in the flesh. It’s located on Trout Creek one thousand feet upstream from Highway 61, and thus far from any supposed roadwork. The only significant way in which LaMoille Cave differed from Lewis’s description of it is that the cave is now nearly filled with sediment, leaving a few feet of clearance, just enough to crawl around. The filling is presumably due to alluviation in the lower reaches of Trout Creek resulting from construction of the nearby Lock & Dam No. 6 in the 1930s, which raised the river level.
LaMoille Cave appears to be a spring alcove or stream meander niche that has talused shut over most of its length leaving two, low entrances, one at either end. There is a spring at the rear so you get a mudbath in the bargain. I intend to revisit the cave some day and have a look for any remaining petroglyphs. You simply lie on your back on a wet sandbank and stare at the ceiling inches above your face. A relaxing thing to do on a hot summer’s day.