By OBBM Network Editorial Staff

Derived from an episode of The Buried Archive.

Deep within the earth, hidden from the prying eyes of modern society, lies a cave system so mysterious that it has captured the imagination of explorers and scientists for centuries. The story of Walter Griggs and Samuel Pratt, two cartographers who disappeared in 1892 while mapping the deepest lava tube in Northern California, is a testament to the enduring power of the unknown. The Modoc people, indigenous to the region, had warned the cartographers not to enter the cave, but their warnings were dismissed as mere superstition.

The Warning Signs

The Modoc people had known about the deep tube systems for generations, and their oral traditions described the caves in terms that Western ethnographers consistently misread as mythology. However, some of what the Modoc described was not mythology at all. They spoke of a world that existed before the world they knew, a world that was built, not grown, with roads beneath the earth and chambers with walls that did not look like stone.

A field note from May 14th, 1892, reads, ‘Spoke with local native man near the south opening. He indicated that the passage designated S7 in our system runs considerably deeper than the surface survey suggests and warned against descending past the second chamber. His reasons were unclear but appeared to be of a spiritual nature.’ This phrase, ‘of a spiritual nature,’ appears three times in the surviving field notes, each time used to dismiss something that someone told the survey team about the deep passages.

The Disappearance

On June 3rd, 1892, Griggs and Pratt descended into the passage, despite the warnings from the Modoc people. A letter written by Samuel Pratt himself, dated June 1st, 1892, two days before he disappeared, describes the passage as ‘wider than any we have yet surveyed’ and the air coming from it as ‘unlike anything I have encountered in cave work.’ The letter ends with a sense of foreboding, as Pratt writes, ‘I wish now that I had not said these things.’

The sequence of events in the days before the disappearance can be partially reconstructed from the surviving field notes, but the exact circumstances of Griggs and Pratt’s disappearance remain a mystery. The USGS survey register for the 1892 Siskiyou County Survey lists passages S1 through S10 with full documentation, but passage S11, the one that Griggs and Pratt entered, does not appear in any subsequent USGS publication about the lava beds region.

The Cover-Up

The USGS survey register lists passage S11 as ‘surveyed and complete,’ but there is no documentation of any kind. The passage does not appear in the maps produced from the 1892 survey, and it is not included in the current inventory of caves and lava tubes within the Lava Beds National Monument. The silence surrounding passage S11 is not just a lack of information; it is a deliberate suppression of records. When something is lost, the record becomes fragmentary, randomly, important and unimportant alike. When something is suppressed, the silence has a shape.

The full episode of The Buried Archive is available on OBBM Network TV.

Watch The Buried Archive on OBBM Network TV: https://media.obbmnetwork.tv/embed/tv.html#series/the-buried-archive