Pittsford — A little cave near here is named after an infamous thief and murderer named Sile Doty. The entrance is set into a hill near a stream in Lost Nations State Game Area. You wouldn’t be able to find it unless someone told you where it was.
When it isn’t iced over in the winter, you can crawl in and feel a good sense of what being buried alive is like. You won’t want to stick around long.
The cave has two distinct caverns and three entrances. A dome in the back of the cave hangs just too low for an man to stand upright. Sandstone gravel covers the floor.
The cave was not always this size. It used to be large enough to house horses. The Michigan Natural Features Inventory says that there used to be a larger cave here that “was destroyed to prevent the local brigand Sile Doty from using it to hide stolen horses in the mid-1800s.” Area residents feared Doty so much that they had to destroy his hiding places, knowing that he was one of the great escape artists of his era.
Doty was a self-professed criminal. Born in 1800, he began stealing horseshoes and knives at a young age for thrills. Entering his teen years in Bangor, New York, he began to steal animals from the traps of fur trappers.
He grew up to rob banks, break into homes, and trade on the black market. A thrill seeker, he eventually led slaves to freedom during the abolitionist era, not out of moral concern, but out of hunger for challenge.
In 1846, Doty landed himself in jail by stealing a large number of buffalo robes and several harnesses. He escaped from jail and fled to Mexico, faking enlistment in the army while stealing from both Mexicans and American soldiers in his pathological pursuit. In his life of crime, he lied, counterfeited, stole, and even murdered a man named Lorenzo Noyes in Indiana.
In August 1849, he found himself in jail in Hillsdale for robbing a peddler. Doty had been acquainted with the town since its earliest years. The railroad reached the town only years before, and Hillsdale underwent tremendous expansion. It was a classic pioneer town, and Doty admired it. In his autobiography, Doty always refers to the “congenial” citizens and “kindred spirits” of the town.
Once released in Hillsdale, he quickly wound back up in prison. This time in Jackson, in a much more secure facility. In 1866, after having been confined for 15 years, Doty was a free man.
Shortly after leaving prison, Doty wrote in his autobiography, “Life of Sile Doty, 1800-1876: A forgotten autobiography; the most noted thief and daring burglar of his time,” that as a younger man he went to Coldwater and stole a horse from a local lawyer before dawn. He wrote: “For three days I kept this horse secreted in the southern part of Hillsdale County, no one in that region suspected that I had such a thing as a horse.”
Without mentioning the cave specifically, Doty suggested that he hid a large animal without notice on someone else’s land in a location that coincides with the cave, near the border of Pittsford and Jefferson townships in the southern part of Hillsdale County.
That passage is Doty’s only mention of hiding horses here, but as the legend of Sile Doty developed, the number of horses rose, the cave grew, and the horses became more thoroughly bred. Legends only get bigger.
In a book published by the Hillsdale County Historical Society, titled “150 Years In the Hills and Dales,” the author recorded this legend alongside the history: “It is also said that if you go to his cave at night you will find a dead fox and some black walnuts. If you look real hard you will see the ghost of Sile Doty that is said to haunt the cave, and he is smiling.”
According to the Toledo Blade, the supernatural seems to permeate that patch of woods near Pittsford. An article from February 1989 noted, “Two squirrel hunters, in the woods said they came across extraordinary footprints that have authorities thinking the area is inhabited by either the fabled Bigfoot creature or clever pranksters.” A sergeant on the scene said, “The tracks we found ran right up to the entrance of Sile Doty’s cave. Then they continued on.”
Legends need a point of origin: the echo of a horse’s heavy breathing in a ravine, a cave large enough to stand in, a few sets of footprints. These details expand a story into myth.
But the truth is this: A career thief might have once stashed a horse in a cave, and now people whisper about how Sile Doty’s ghost and Bigfoot munch walnuts together in this little patch of woods in southern Michigan.
Mark Naida is editor of Michigan Enjoyer.
