AN UNDERGROUND CIVILIZATION DISCOVERED!

Dubuque: When Julien Dubuque, a French-Canadian trader, secured rights to all mines west of the Mississippi from the Sac and Fox Indian tribes in 1788, how could he know that his efforts would eventually lead to the discovery of an underground civilization?

     Most of the mines in the Dubuque area ceased their production of zinc and lead in 1910, leaving abandoned mine shafts to riddle the countryside. The City of Dubuque itself lies above 700 to 2,000 of these shafts. Unfortunately, these abandoned mines occasionally cause big headaches. In the big heyday of the mines, the standard way to seal off collapsed shafts was to fill them with earth, sand and gravel. This solution was only worked temporarily. Settling and movement of the fills eventually lead to subsidence at the surface, and hollow pockets formed beneath the earth. As recently as 1983, a bit of Hill Street in Dubuque collapsed in just this way.

     But I live in the country and operate a small horse farm. So on April 20, when a twenty-five foot diameter mine shaft opened in front of my house, about forty feet from my front door, I called the Dubuque Area Geological Association. They were thrilled at the chance to come out and have a look.

     Within a half-hour, two pick-up trucks and a van were in my driveway, and a dozen or so scientists dressed in flannel shirts and jeans milled about in my front yard. Dr. Charles Gibson, readlily confirmed my theory that is was a mine shaft. The team spent the next two days running tests and consulting geographical charts to determine the safely of the region around the hole. I only hoped that it didn't get big enough to swallow my house!

     By the morning of April 22, the DAGA group concluded the hole was relatively stable and safe. Dr. Gibson decided to explore. He and two of his associates each donned what looked like streamlined miner's helmet, cinched themselves up in spelunking gear, and descended into the hole

     That day's expedition was for the scientists very exciting, but for me a terrible bore. There's only so long I can listen to conversations about sulfites and galena and zinc. I was kind of hoping that they'd find some old tools or other artifacts from the early days of mining here. They did, however, ascertain that the mine had been sealed off in 1891, long before my house was even built. They were especially excited to try to find a cave network that had apparently been found in 1880 when miners had veered too far off following the trail of zinc. Unfortunately, none of the original miners recorded the location of the cave entrance, which was sealed off shortly after it was found. But Gibson and his crew seemed sure that this was the tunnel system that they were looking for, and thanked me over and over again for this opportunity, as if I had dug the hole myself.

     The afternoon of April 23 changed everything. The first discovery was informative, but not that unusual---a goodly amount of quartz had been found. Then Gibson's team discovered the caves. After a few hours of exploring, they realized that the cave system was enormous, and could possibly stretch on for miles. And it was deep, too. They suspected that the caves would eventually lead right down to the water table. Still, that was not all. Far down in the caves, in one fairly small chamber, one of the geologists found what he took to be evidence that the old miners had explored into these caves, after all.

     A two-foot square of wall had been smoothed over, and then etched deeply with some kind of design or pattern. The team made a charcoal rubbing. When brought to the surface, the rubbing was examined by all. We were baffled. The etching appeared to be a kind of writing, and contained five lines of indecipherable scrawling. One member of the team noted that it looked much like Gaelic script. Gibson admitted that it was possible that a local miner might have been an Irish immigrant and had some knowledge of Gaelic. However, he thought many miners of the time were illiterate. And why write a message on a wall in a script that no-one else would ever be likely to be able to read?

     One of the geologists took a sample from the flattened and smoothed part of the cave wall, and had it sent to the University of Emmetsburg for testing. It stood to reason that the message was the same age as the artificially-smoothed area. The message itself was sent to Georg von Podebrad College, where Prof. Laura van Eck of the Linquistic Studies Department would try to decipher the message.

     Meanwhile, exploration of the caves in my front yard continued. The group wasn't able to proceed into the caves nearly as far as they would have liked. About a half-mile into the west branch tunnel, the only main branch that carried the tunnel any further, they discovered it had been filled top to bottom by a wall of stones. The wall, some forty feet across and twelve feet tall, completely blocked the tunnel using stones each the size of a melon. The team attempted to remove some of this barrier, but it became readily apparent that the blockage continued far into the shaft. They decided to wait until they could be absolutely sure that the passage was safe from collapse. I think such a big pile of rubble made them nervous, and I don't blame them.

     Surprisingly, Prof. van Eck took almost no time to decipher the writing sample we had sent her. Although she couldn't yet make everything out, she agreed that the language used was indeed very similar to Irish Gaelic. But she cautioned that it was also very different. Some of the characters have no Gaelic analog, they are idiosyncratic and inconsistent. The grammar is obscenely different. Yet she persevered and picked out a couple of phrases. One was "Do not come to our people (or world)." Another: "You have sun and moon for...." And yet a third: "...ugly (or evil) ones...."

     Even more startling was U of E's Geology Department's analysis results. Thermal luminesence indicated the writing dated at around 1500 B.C.E. The geologists were stunned. How could such an old document exist beneath the earth, written in a language that no-one on the continent even knew existed at that time? Our group hypothesized wildly about a lost Gaelic civilization and a great many other possiblities, but in the end we had no explanation.

     The inscription warned not to come into the caves. After all, if the readers of the tablet have "the sun and the moon," doesn't that imply that whoever wrote it does not? Perhaps then, there existed at one time an entire underground civilization here in Iowa and Wisconsin. One of the geologists chuckled at all this, and muttered something about "the Shaver mystery," but did not elaborate further.

     DAGA was intrigued. Even if our speculations were way off base, it was definitely in their interest to collaborate with a group of archaeologists, break through the sealed-up passage and find out if there was any truth to our conjectures. This effort is scheduled to begin in either May or June.

     On a side note, something happened to me that will be of particular interest to readers of this magazine. The day we sent the writing samples off to be analyzed, I received a call from a man who refused to identify himself, saying only, "Do not come below."

     I traced the call to Nanson, Iowa. The caller was Dr. Danforth Haversham.