Colter's Hell
Near Cody, Wyoming
In the winter of eighteen oh seven and eighteen oh eight, mountain man John Colter left the Lewis and Clark Expedition early and pushed alone into the Big Horn Basin. Following the river then called Stinking Water, he stumbled onto a stretch of the Shoshone River bank where sulfurous steam rose from the ground, hot springs poured into the current, and geyser cones stood thirty feet high. When Colter returned east and described what he had seen, many listeners doubted him, and the name Colter's Hell later came to be attached to the place.
Later surveys of the region eventually confirmed that such thermal features were real. The place sits just west of the town of Cody and covers about one square mile at the mouth of the Shoshone's canyon. Colter may never have seen Yellowstone, but his account of this place got mixed up with its geysers.
In eighteen thirty, the trapper Joseph Meek described the area and compared it to the Yellowstone geyser basins. Scouts for Captain Benjamin Bonneville visited in eighteen thirty-three, and Washington Irving's account of Bonneville's journals gave the earliest published description. In eighteen forty, the Crow chief Plenty Coups camped here with his tribe.
Other hot springs near the river forks are now under the reservoir behind Buffalo Bill Dam, and the site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on August fourteenth, nineteen seventy-three. The thermal activity has quieted since his time, but hot springs and steam vents still mark the riverbank, and Colter's name remains, a reminder of how far ahead of credibility a lone explorer can be.
