Beatrice Rhodes

The Rhodes cabin was included in the 1975 National Register of Historic Places for “its association with the early tourist industry at Lehman Caves.”

Library of Congress

Article written by Louisa Brandt

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So, tourists, when you pass Baker thru
Don’t fail this wonderful cave to view
But come up here and camp a week-
The fishing’s good in Lehman creek.

Beatrice Rhodes, “The Beautiful Lehman Cave"¹

Beatrice Rhodes spent ten years (1920-30) as the steward of Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada along with her first husband. Her time there coincided with the era’s burgeoning automobile tourist industry, fueling a desire among many to explore the US West and escape the pressures of urban modernity. Rhodes’ role as an advertiser, tour guide, and even entertainer at the Lehman Caves embodied this trend to seek excitement and individuality in the rural West.

Beatrice Robinson was born on November 30, 1885 in Arlington, Vermont. On January 4, 1917, she married Clarence T. Rhodes.² By 1920, they lived in Beaver, Utah (200 miles south of Salt Lake City) where he managed a café and she was a cook.³ In the same year, the couple acquired fifty acres near Lehman Caves in the far eastern part of Nevada. Two years later, President Warren G. Harding designated the caves a National Monument, and the Rhodes became the site’s stewards.⁴

The Rhodes immediately started to improve the accommodations to attract tourists to the cave. Their first candlelight-guided tours in 1921 served only forty-eight visitors. The next year, they increased their efforts in advertising. Bea Rhodes published a poem titled “The Beautiful Lehman Caves” in the local White Pines News, which expressed her intent to make the caves an attractive recreational and event destination. The poem, quoted above, encouraged tourism, highlighting the caves’ “mystic” quality. Indeed, the Rhodes hosted weddings, musical events, and dances within the cave.⁵ They also had their photos taken for promotional material. A 1923 photo of the couple shows them in the “Gothic Palace” cave dressed in stylized primitive clothing during one of these entertainments.⁶

The allure of this rustic retreat increased as the affordability of automobile travel and a new fascination with domestic exploration after the Great War also grew.⁷ Some scholars have interpreted the charades that took place at the caves and other tourist destinations as a type of performative escapism among white Americans who were reacting to demographic changes in Northern and Western cities as Black Americans migrated from the South to new locations and neighborhoods.⁸

The Rhodes’ experiences while stewards also showed the perils of remote living and travel. Despite the addition of amenities, including a tea room in a log cabin on the property, the caves remained quite isolated.⁹ In 1922, the Rhodes were in a nearly disastrous car accident when the “steering apparatus… went wrong” and the vehicle overturned.¹⁰ A year later, in October 1923, Clarence was stabbed in the neck by a “crazed knife-man.” The couple had to travel sixty miles to the larger town of Ely for his surgery.¹¹

By the late 1920s, the Rhodes had greatly increased the desirability of visiting the caves, hosting thousands of visitors a year. They introduced carbide lanterns, replaced the ladder into the caves with stairs, and built facilities to hold up to fifty overnight guests and horses for trips to Mt. Wheeler in the Snake Range. But the demands of more visitors put a strain on Bea Rhodes’ mental health and in 1925, she suffered a nervous breakdown. Within five years, Francis Elroy and Agnes Cue were the new caretakers of Lehman Caves and Cabins, and the government had purchased Rhodes’ ranch.¹² Bea Rhodes died under her new married name of Beatrice Winn on January 12, 1981 in Plymouth, California, and is buried in Fiddletown, California.¹³

While the Rhodes’ tenure was brief, the Lehman Caves continued to become more accessible to visitors with safer entrances and exits, and its otherworldly qualities were captured on film in science fiction movies. In 1975, the Rhodes Cabin was listed on the National Register of Historic Places for “its association with the early tourist industry at Lehman Caves.”¹⁴ Beatrice Rhodes’ contributions to this monument reflect the ways that women shaped the experience of automobile-facilitated tourism in the twentieth century.

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Acknowledgements

This project was made possible in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation.
This project was conducted in Partnership with the University of California Davis History Department through the Californian Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, CA# P20AC00946

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¹ Beatrice L. Rhodes, “The Beautiful Lehman Cave” White Pine News. (East Ely, Nev.), August 7, 1921.

² “Beatrice I. Winn,” Findagrave, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/54203990/beatrice-i-winn; “Clarence T. Rhodes,” Ancestry.com; “Index to Marriages,” Los Angeles County, 1917.

³ Beaver County, Utah, 1920 Census.

4 “Lehman Caves,” National Park Service, December 13, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/grba/learn/historyculture/lehman-caves-national-monument.htm

⁵ “M’Gill Brevities,” White Pine News. (East Ely, Nev.), May 21, 1922; “Memorable Wedding Held in Lehman Caves,” White Pine News, October 21, 1923.

6 Beatrice Rhodes to Stephen Mather, c. 1928, “Lehman Caves National Monument”; “Clarence and Bea Rhodes in Gothic Palace, Lehman Cave,” Great Basin Association Photographs, J. Willard Marriot Digital Library: The University of Utah, 23 December 2003, https://collections.lib.utah.edu/details?id=204524

⁷ Hal K. Rothman, Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 145-6.

⁸ Marguerite S. Shaffer, “Seeing America First: The Search for Identity in the Tourism Landscape,” Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West. Eds. David M. Wrobel and Patrick T. Long. (Lawrence: University of Colorado at Boulder by the University Press of Kansas, 2001), 181-8.

⁹ “Lehman Caves”; “Rhodes Cabin,” National Park Service, February 18, 2017 https://www.nps.gov/grba/learn/historyculture/rhodes-cabin.htm The mix of rough-hewn buildings and fine amenities reflects the luxurious, rustic-style hotels in popular in national parks since the turn of the twentieth century. See Anne Farrar Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820-1920. (New York: New York University, 1990), 258-9.

¹⁰ “Automobile Party Has Narrow Escape,” White Pine News, November 12, 1922.

¹¹ “C.T. Rhodes Attacked by Crazed Knife-Man,” White Pine News, October 21, 1923; “Rhodes Back to Ranch After Sojourn in Ely,” White Pine News, November 4, 1923; The perpetrator was arrested and later acquitted. “Knife Man Acquitted of Murder Attempt,” White Pine News, December 16, 1923.

¹² Beatrice Rhodes to Stephen Mather, c. 1928. “Lehman Caves National Monument.”; Francis Elroy Cue, Family Search, https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/LH1B-RJR/francis-elroy-cue-1906-1991

¹³ Beatrice Winn, Ancestry.com Beatrice married Benjamin Winn in 1935 and Ralph Winn in 1949; their is no evidence these men were related. “Beatrice I. Winn,” Findagrave, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/54203990/beatrice-i-winn; “Obituaries: Beatrice I. Winn,” Amador Record and Ledger, January 16, 1981.

¹⁴ “Lehman Caves National Monument”; “Rhodes Cabin.”

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