Preston Moore sits near the ledge that “Phelps’ body was placed after he died during one of the longhunts into the Green River region during the decade preceding the Revolutionary War. Preston is a tenth generation descendant of William Phelps who came to the South Central Kentucky area with Boone’s companion, William Pitman. Phelps’ son, John Phelps, took up the original survey where Mammoth Cave’s Echo River spring emerges near the present Green River Ferry.
According to tradition passed down through several generations, Phelps, the longhunter had killed a buffalo on the narrow ridge dividing Green River from First Creek. Later in the afternoon, his handful of comrades gathered with their rifles and knives near the big, dead brute to skin it and dress it. Phelps, in an attempt to lift one end of the dead buffalo, in order to turn it over and skin that side, suddenly staggered a bit, and crumpled over onto the belly of the beast. He was bleeding profusely at the nose and mouth. He died, and his hunting companions having nothing to bury him with, carried him into the darksome recesses of a sandstone cavern on the Green River slope, a few hundred yards away, and laid him to rest on a waist-high ledge. They returned to Virginia, leaving him to the solitude of the wilderness and to God.
Jesse I. Houchin, while a school-boy at the old Temple Hill schoolhouse in the 1840’s told of a girl, Nancy Guess, who went into the cave at recess and brought out the old hunter’s skull. The teacher required the girl to replace the skull on the ledge within the cave. A beech, long gone, that stood at the mouth of the cave had the name of the hunter engraved on it.
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