Horse Skull History

[Dangerjudy]

Went to Horse Skull for the first time last weekend. I noticed a wall with tally marks. Was Horse Skull mined for saltpeter during the civil war?

I also took some photos of historical signatures and believe I found these soldiers in rosters online. I mentioned them in my photo album at: http://dangerjudy.smugmug.com/Other/Oth ... /i-JjfnL4g

One of the rosters online has several matches: http://archive.org/stream/ourbatteryorj ... 6/mode/2up ... to names on the list in this photo:

[graveleye]

I noticed that Horse Skull was a saltpeter cave too last time I was there. Sift stone, old signatures and all. What is weird to me is that down the river a ways is Long Island Saltpeter Cave, which to me seems such an unlikely cave for saltpeter mining. Sure it would be able to produce and probably did, but it is labeled "Saltpeter Cave" on old maps, while there is not a mention of the much larger and probably more productive saltpeter cave that was Horse Skull. It is sort of a mystery to me and I wonder a lot of the old maps (Civil War era) I have been looking at are mislabeled. Obviously they did know of LISC because it's got the signatures too, but Horse Skull is left off the maps when it had to have been known about. Where is MOS when you need him?