Steamboat Springs

These hot springs have drawn people for as long as people have passed this way. By the Comstock era the geothermal field south of Reno had become a resort—a fine hotel, a dance hall, and a bar where silver kings, politicians, and gamblers took the waters; President Grant visited in 1879. When the Virginia and Truckee reached here in 1871, the springs briefly served as the terminus where Comstock freight transferred to wagons for the Geiger Grade. Earthquake and fire later undid the resort. The heat endures, now tapped by binary geothermal plants generating power south of the city.

What the plaque says

These natural hot-springs are notable for their curative qualities. They were nationally acclaimed by President Ulysses S. Grant when he visited them in 1879. Early emigrants so named them, because of their puffing and blowing. Located in 1860 (by Felix Monet); a hospital, with adjacent bathhouses, was subsequently added by a Doctor Ellis (1861-1862). The Comstock mining activities and the coming of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad in 1871, caused Steamboat to became a terminal. Here materials for the silver mines were transferred to freight wagons for the steep haul to Virginia City. The completion of the tracks abolished the need for a junction, but its resort popularity was to reach its peak with the Bonanza Days. To its "fine hotel, commodious dance-hall and elegant bar, came the legendary silver kings, politicos, gamblers and news chroniclers, escorting the lovely ladies of stage and opera house." With borasca, attendance waned; fires destroyed the luxurious buildings, but the therapeutic waters remained, not only for health seekers, but for conditioning athletes - even producing mineral muds sought by cosmeticians and race horse owners.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Virginia City — 6.9 mi
  The boomtown that sits on top of the richest silver strike in America—fewer than a thousand people now, on streets built for twenty-five thousand
• Chollar Mine — 7.3 mi
  A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark
• Reno — 11 mi
  The river crossing the Comstock needed, made a city by the railroad—then reinvented as divorce capital, gambling town, and now tech hub: the Biggest Little City in the World
• Carson City — 15 mi
  The capital one man platted before there was a territory—where the Comstock's silver became coin at a U.S. Mint and a small sandstone city that has run Nevada ever since

More markers nearby

• Geiger Station — 1.4 mi
• Old Geiger Grade — 4.0 mi
• Galena — 4.2 mi
• Huffaker’s — 4.5 mi