A cattle rancher named Absalom Lehman is generally credited with finding this cave in 1885. Ask which version of the story is true, and you'll find historians have documented more than 40 different answers.
Nobody Actually Knows How He Found It
Absalom S. Lehman had been ranching in the South Snake Range since the late 1860s when, by most accounts, he became the first person of European descent to find the cave that now carries his name. The trouble is that nobody agrees on how it happened. One popular version has his horse breaking through a thin crust covering the entrance. Another credits his brother Ben, who supposedly felt cold air rising from a hole in the ground. Historians have since documented more than 40 differing accounts of the discovery, no eyewitness account survives that settles the question outright, and the most plausible version, that Lehman or one of his hired ranch hands simply stumbled onto the natural opening, is also the least dramatic one on record.
What can be pinned down is when the discovery became public. The White Pine Reflex, a newspaper out of Ely, Nevada, reported it on April 15, 1885, giving the find an actual paper trail even if the moment itself stayed foggy. Word spread fast enough that within weeks, Lehman was leading paying visitors through the passages by candlelight, an odd second career for a rancher who'd spent nearly two decades just trying to raise cattle in one of the driest corners of Nevada.
- Credited discoverer ABSALOM S. LEHMAN
- Competing accounts 40+ DOCUMENTED VERSIONS
- First public report WHITE PINE REFLEX, APR 15, 1885
- Lehman ranching locally since LATE 1860S
Book a Cave Tour
Rangers still lead the same passages Lehman once walked by candlelight, now with real lighting and a paved path.
Open the Trip PlannerThe Cave's Real First Visitors Predate Lehman by Centuries
Long before Lehman's name attached itself to the cave, Native Americans in the region likely knew the entrance existed, evidence points to human use dating back to around 1000 A.D., including human remains found beneath the entrance that suggest deliberate, purposeful placement rather than accident. Lehman's "discovery" in 1885 was, in other words, a rediscovery by European settlers of a place people had already known about for the better part of a thousand years.
The first documented group to actually walk the cave after word got out included Ab and Ben Lehman alongside a roster of prominent Snake Valley residents, William Burbank, Dan Simonsen, E.W. Clay, Ed Lake, William Atkinson, Isaac Gandy, George Robison, D.A. Gonder, and P.M. and Nettie Baker. Nettie Baker's name matters here for a specific reason: she is recorded as likely the first white woman to see inside the cave, a detail easy to lose in a story that otherwise centers entirely on the men who get credited with "finding" it.
- Native American use AS EARLY AS ~1000 A.D.
- First documented tour group 11 NAMED INDIVIDUALS, 1885
- Notable member NETTIE BAKER, LIKELY FIRST WHITE WOMAN IN THE CAVE
Discovery accounts, the count of differing versions, the White Pine Reflex report date, the first documented tour group's roster, and evidence of Native American use dating to roughly 1000 A.D. all checked against the National Park Service's official page on the Lehman Caves discovery.
Walk into the Grand Palace Room today and a ranger will still tell some version of the horse-and-crusted-ground story, because it's the best one on file even if nobody can prove it happened that way. The cave doesn't care which account is true. It was here, known to somebody, roughly a thousand years before Absalom Lehman rode over it, and it will keep being here long after all forty competing versions of his discovery blur into one convenient legend.