Hot Springs: The Spa Town That Found Mammoths

Hot Springs was developed in the eighteen eighties by investors who recognized the commercial potential of more than seventy warm mineral springs bubbling from the hillsides here. The town, originally called Minnekahta from the Lakota words for warm water, rebranded itself Hot Springs in the early eighteen eighties, deliberately echoing the Arkansas resort city of the same name. By eighteen ninety-one, entrepreneur Fred Evans had tapped the largest thermal spring and built Evans Plunge, an indoor swimming pool that still operates today.

Then in June of nineteen seventy-four, a construction crew grading land for a new housing development unearthed something else entirely: mammoth bones. Excavation eventually revealed the world's largest known site of Columbian mammoth remains, more than sixty mammoths, most of them Columbian, who fell into a steep-sided sinkhole and could not climb out and could not climb out. The Mammoth Site museum now preserves the bones exactly where they were found.