Gorin wrote as he reminisced after Bishop's death: I placed a guide in the cave – the celebrated and great Stephen, and he aided in making the discoveries.

[1] Numerous authors wrote about their Mammoth Cave tours with Bishop as their guide in books and magazines.

"[6] Later, in 1854, Nathaniel Parker Willis, in A Health Trip to the Tropics, described Bishop as wearing "a chocolate-colored slouch hat, a green jacket, and striped trousers" as his working uniform.

[7]Willis also described Bishop as "better worth looking at than most celebrities...With more of the physiognomy of a Spaniard, with masses of black hair, curling slightly and gracefully, and his long mustache, giving quite an appearance.

"[8] Bishop led tours through Mammoth that included such well-known 19th century figures as opera-singer Jenny Lind, essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson,[1] Yale professor Benjamin Silliman Jr.,[9] and the violin virtuoso Ole Bull.

[13] In 1839, Dr. John Croghan of Louisville bought the Mammoth Cave Estate from its owner Franklin Gorin for $10,000 (equivalent to $286,125 in 2023).

Croghan briefly ran an ill-fated tuberculosis hospital in the cave, the vapors of which he believed would cure his patients.

While the map does not represent a modern accurate instrumental survey, he took some pains to indicate relative passage dimension and length.

The construction in 1905 of a dam on the Green River had caused the passage to be flooded (and therefore inaccessibly hidden by murky water) most of the time after the dam's completion, and the passage was rediscovered backwards, from its remote end, by the cavers entering the Flint Ridge Cave System.

On the trip, Willis learned that, despite knowing that he would be freed in five years, Bishop intended to buy his and his wife's and son's freedom and move to Liberia.

Three years later, Mellon arranged for a monument carver to prepare a second-hand tombstone, one that a Civil War soldier's family had not paid for (hence the appearance of a sword and flag in the lunette).

Meloy states "The error in the date of death [1859 vs. 1857] detracted nothing from the legend now reinforced by a permanent record in stone.