World's Largest Mineral Hot Springs

The board's Gift of the Waters is a play as well as a history. Marie Montabé, a Thermopolis Woman's Club member who had spent the summer of 1925 living with the Shoshone, wrote a pageant of the 1896 sale, first staged on October 1, 1925, for the state federation of women's clubs and not again until 1950. It has run each August since at the Big Spring, with Eastern Shoshone dancers and singers and a chorus of local women. Its framing of a gift softens what was a sale, made for about $60,000 in cattle and food supplies.

What the plaque says

See this natural phenomenon while you are in Thermopolis! Monument Hill, pictured here, and visible from this site, overlooks the "Big Spring" See other springs and beautiful terraces created by the mineral deposits of these healing waters. Learn the history of the Indians "Gift of the Waters" to the white man. See the buffalo herd. Avail yourself of many park facilities. No entrance fee.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hot Springs State Park — 2.0 mi
  Wyoming's first state park: a thousand feet of banded travertine along the Bighorn, a 1916 swinging bridge, and a small bison herd on the hill.
• Legend Rock State Petroglyph Site — 21 mi
  Ten thousand years of images pecked into a sandstone cliff, most by the ancestors of the Eastern Shoshone, now behind a gate after vandalism.

More markers nearby

• Broad Streets of Thermopolis — 0.8 mi
• Hot Springs State Park — 1.8 mi
• Wedding of the Waters — 4.0 mi
• Bridger Trail - Bighorn River Crossing — 9.4 mi