[2] His father bought land at Lonetree, just west of the developing town of Eddy (Carlsbad today), and moved the rest of the family there three years later.

[2] Jim occasionally stayed at his family's small horse farm, but mostly lived and worked at the Lucas ranch.

[2] ... any hole in the ground which could house such a gigantic army of bats must be a whale of a big cave.An inscription reading "J White 1898"[3] was discovered deep within Carlsbad Caverns in the 1980s.

[2] Jim described the moment by saying, "I found myself gazing into the biggest and blackest hole I had ever seen, out of which the bats seemed literally to boil".

[5] Standing at the entrance of the tunnel I could see ahead of me a darkness so absolutely black it seemed a solid.A few days later,[note 1] he returned to the cave with some rope, fence wire and a hatchet.

[5] He lowered the ladder into the opening and using a homemade kerosene lantern, descended approximately 50 feet (15 m) to the first serviceable ledge.

It was the first cave I was ever in, and the first stalagmites I had ever seen, but instinctively I knew, for some intuitive reason, that there was no other scene in the world which could be justly compared with my surroundings.

[5]By the time he reached the first formations, he had "... crept cat-like across a dozen dangerous ledges and past many tremendous openings ...".

[5] He encountered chandeliers, stalactites, soda straws, flowstone, pools of water, rimstone dams and other formations.

[6] They explored approximately the same areas of the cave that the modern tourist trails cover[5] including the Big Room, and the King's Palace and Queen's Chamber.

[2] It was a "... two room shack, set practically on top of the small bat cave, which was several hundred yards from the main cavern entrance.

[6] He discovered the Caverns in the good old American way of adventuring.Jim White died on April 26, 1946, in a hospital in Carlsbad, New Mexico, at the age of 63.

[7] He told a reporter for the Carlsbad Current-Argus, two days before his death, that he felt well but was not ready to ride a horse to California, again.

He was chiefly responsible for bringing the attention of the public, scientific groups and the federal government to the importance and significance of the caverns.

[4] In 2011, a large, bronze statue of Jim White descending a wire ladder was unveiled at the National Cave and Karst Research Institute (NCKRI) building in Carlsbad, New Mexico.