DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Deep in Uvalde County, there is a cave. Not just any cave — a cave that stretches about twenty-three miles into the earth, dark and cold and alive with the sound of ten thousand wings.
And during the Civil War, that cave helped keep Confederate guns firing. This is the story of the C.S.A. Saltpetre Mine.
Now, the secret ingredient here wasn't silver, wasn't gold. It was something a lot less glamorous. Bat guano.
The cave was inhabited by bats — still is — and over untold ages, those bats had left behind something the Confederacy desperately needed: the chief ingredient for gunpowder. So in the 1860s, men went to work. They laid down a narrow gauge railway inside that cave.
They hitched mules to the cars and hauled the guano out of the dark. They even built corrals for those mules — right there inside the cave, in one of its chambers. Think about that for a moment.
A working railroad, mule corrals, men with lanterns and shovels, all operating inside a mountain. One room in that great bat den measured five hundred and eighty-five feet by three hundred and twenty-five feet, with a ceiling forty-five feet overhead. That's not a cave, friend — that's a cathedral.
And what came out of it, that putrefied and dried bat guano, was mixed with smaller parts of sulphur and charcoal, and the result was gunpowder. Firepower for Civil War guns, loaded up and sent to the front. The bats just kept living their lives, never knowing what they were supplying.
And somewhere down in that twenty-three miles of darkness, the evidence of all that wartime industry is still waiting in the stone.
What the marker says
Important to Texas in waging the Civil War. Site of natural deposits of bat guano, worked in the 1860s to obtain the chief ingredient for gunpowder. Cave inhabited by bats, source of the guano, extends about 23 miles. One room in the great bat den is 585' x 325', and has a 45' ceiling. A narrow gauge railway with mule drawn cars was used in the digging. Corrals for the mules occupied one chamber of the cave. Putrefied and dried bat guano, mixed with smaller parts of sulphur and charcoal, gave firepower to Civil War guns. 1965