The cave is a broad shelter worn into the sandstone of the river bluff, and on its walls are carvings of animals, deer and bison among them, cut by people long before any written record here. Some are thought to be several thousand years old; who made them is not known. Later visitors carved their own names over and among them, and some of the old images are gone. Visitors now see the wall from an accessible boardwalk.
The park lies inside land the 1830 Treaty of Prairie du Chien set aside between the Great and Little Nemaha rivers, about 138,000 acres for the mixed-descent children of Otoe, Missouria, Ioway, Umóⁿhoⁿ, Yankton and Santee families, many of them sons and daughters of fur traders. Joseph Deroin, born near Bellevue in 1819 to a French trapper and an Otoe woman, took 640 acres here in 1842 and kept a trading post; he was killed in 1858 over a debt of six dollars for a pig, and his killer was acquitted. Allotments were patented in 1860, and by 1870 few of the holders still had their land.
The river town named for Deroin peaked in the 1870s at about 300 people, then lost out to the Burlington railroad in 1903 and a flood in 1911. Its school, used until 1944, and a general store have been restored. Twenty-two miles of hiking and biking trail run along the bluffs, and the Ioway still hold reservation land elsewhere in Richardson County.
The closest stops worth working into your route