Bottomless Pit

Beside a bend in the Smoky Hill River, near Sharon Springs, Kan., a white cow observed one of last week's sunrises, ruminatively as was her wont. But she never finished that morning's cud. At 7 o'clock the ground yawned beneath her with a rumbling roar and she was swallowed up, with a section of her pasture, into the bowels of the earth. That at least was what people thought had happened to the cow.

A farmer's daughter heard the noise, saw a bluish cloud of smoke ascend. An investigating party beheld a hole in the earth 50 feet wide descending conically into blackness. As hours passed, this fissure sucked in the adjacent ground for 300 feet around, gaping out into the dry, sandy riverbed. Out of the bottom darkness, pale greenish waters later welled up and there was the white cow's body floating upon them, 100 feet below ground level. Sulphur fumes arose.

State geologists sped to the scene, not knowing beforehand whether to attribute the subsidence to dissolving limestone strata over subterranean caverns, or to some extinct volcano's clearing its throat and swallowing. When Geologist G. S. Lambert arrived, the volcano theory was discarded. He called attention to the nature of a round lake some six miles away, called Old Maid's Pool. From its formation, it had evidently come into existence years ago in just the way the new pool had been formed. He remarked the presence of much gypsum and calcite in the region, two minerals soluble in water. He pointed out that there must be a sheet of subterranean water in the locality since wells have to go down only 10 to 40 feet. Finally, he pounced upon a sink hole they showed him only a few hundred feet from the white cow's sulphurous swimming hole. This hole was only just big enough to admit the body of a cow, but a local ranchman had lately dropped a small herd of dead cattle into it one by one. That accounted for the white cow, and the white cow appeared to prove the subterranean cavern theory of the subsidence. Geologist Lambert warned that the cavernous area might extend widely, lying perhaps under the town of Sharon Springs. When more rock dissolved, the town might some day sink.