The history of hot springs in America is as old as the land itself. Long before spa resorts and wellness retreats, before paved roads and national parks, people were drawn to the same places you seek out today — those steaming, mineral-rich pools rising from the earth with an almost mystical persistence. To understand why soaking feels so fundamentally right, it helps to understand who came before you, and what they knew.
This is the story of how America fell in love with its hot springs — from sacred Indigenous ground to Gilded Age grandeur to the backcountry pools drawing hikers off the beaten path right now.
The First Soakers: Indigenous Peoples and Sacred Waters
The history of hot springs in North America doesn’t begin with European explorers. It begins thousands of years earlier, with the peoples who built their lives around these geothermal wonders.
For many Native nations, hot springs were sacred. The Shoshone, Bannock, and Nez Perce peoples of what is now Idaho traveled to hot spring sites for healing and ceremony. The Arapaho and Ute of the Southern Rockies treated thermal waters as places where the earth breathed — powerful, alive, not to be taken lightly. The Cherokee held the hot springs of present-day Arkansas in such reverence that warring tribes reportedly agreed to lay down weapons to share them peaceably, a story that may be partly legend but speaks to the cultural weight these places carried.
In the Southwest, Pueblo and Apache communities understood the medicinal value of mineral springs long before any European vocabulary existed to describe the chemistry. In Alaska, Indigenous peoples of the interior relied on thermal springs during brutal winters, a relationship that persists in communities near places like Chena and Manley to this day. For more on Alaska’s remarkable hot spring heritage, the Alaska hot springs guide is a good companion read.
These weren’t just bathing holes. They were gathering places, healing centers, and spiritual sites — often marked with offerings and protected through custom. The soaking culture we practice today inherits something from every one of these traditions, whether we realize it or not.
Spanish Explorers and the First Written Records
European contact brought written documentation to springs that Indigenous peoples had known for millennia. Spanish missionaries and explorers moving north from Mexico in the 16th and 17th centuries encountered thermal waters throughout the Southwest and documented them with genuine wonder. The hot springs of New Mexico — places like Ojo Caliente, which translates to “hot eye” — appear in early Spanish colonial records, already well-established as sites of healing.
The Spanish concept of aguas termales — thermal waters — fit neatly into European medical philosophy of the era. The humoral theory of health, which dominated European medicine from ancient Greece through the 18th century, held that mineral waters could correct imbalances in the body. Spanish priests and physicians didn’t need much convincing that the same springs the local population had used for generations were medically valuable.
By the time American settlers began moving into the Southwest and Great Basin in earnest, they inherited a landscape already mapped — at least partially — by Spanish knowledge of where the hot waters ran.
Hot Springs, Arkansas: America’s First Thermal City
If any single place defines the history of hot springs in the United States, it’s Hot Springs, Arkansas. The thermal springs flowing from the western slope of Hot Springs Mountain were known to Indigenous peoples for thousands of years. European explorers documented them in the early 1800s, and when the federal government moved to protect them in 1832 — creating what would eventually become Hot Springs National Park — it set in motion a chain of events that shaped American wellness culture for a century.
The 1832 designation made Hot Springs one of the earliest federally protected natural areas in American history, predating Yellowstone by four decades. What followed was a slow, deliberate build toward the grandeur you can still see on Bathhouse Row today.
Through the mid-1800s, the town of Hot Springs grew around the springs as a destination for the sick, the wealthy, and eventually the fashionable. The therapeutic claims were significant — the waters were said to help with everything from rheumatism to syphilis to simple exhaustion — and at a time when medicine had few reliable treatments, the thermal baths offered real relief to many and at least the comfort of hope to many more.
By the late 19th century, Bathhouse Row had taken shape: a string of magnificent bathhouse buildings along Central Avenue that were, by any standard, monuments to the American belief that nature could be civilized and commodified simultaneously. The Fordyce, the Buckstaff, the Quapaw — these were not rustic soaking holes. They were palaces of marble and tile, with attendants and treatments and all the ceremony the Gilded Age could muster. Baseball teams used them for spring training. Politicians, gamblers, and industrialists mingled in the waters. Theodore Roosevelt soaked here. Al Capone soaked here.
The Buckstaff Bathhouse has operated continuously since 1912 and still offers traditional bathing services today, making it one of the longest continuously operating bathhouses in the country. For anyone interested in experiencing the Gilded Age of American hot springs culture firsthand, Hot Springs, Arkansas remains one of the most historically layered hot spring destinations in the country.
Westward Expansion and the Discovery of Western Springs
As American settlers pushed west through the 19th century, they encountered geothermal landscapes that dwarfed anything in the East. The Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin, the Pacific Northwest — these regions sit atop volcanic and tectonic systems that produce extraordinary concentrations of thermal activity.
The Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-1806) passed through regions rich with hot springs, including along the upper Missouri River where the landscape of present-day Montana still bubbles with thermal activity. Fur trappers and mountain men who followed were often the first to document specific springs, though their reports were informal and sometimes deliberately obscure — a good hot spring could be a private asset in a wilderness where comfort was scarce.
The survey expeditions of the 1860s and 1870s brought more systematic documentation. When Ferdinand Hayden led his geological survey into the Yellowstone region in 1871, he returned with reports so extraordinary — of hot springs, geysers, and boiling mud pots unlike anything seen in the known world — that Congress moved within a year to establish Yellowstone as the first national park in 1872. The thermal features were central to that argument: here was something too strange, too magnificent, too American to allow private ownership.
Idaho’s thermal landscape drew particular attention as settlers and prospectors moved through the territory in the 1860s and 1870s. The springs concentrated along river drainages in the mountains became rest stops, then homesteads, then small resorts as the territory developed. The extraordinary density of hot springs in Idaho — the state has more than any other in the country today — made them a practical resource as much as a recreational one. Today, Idaho’s 340+ hot springs represent the richest soaking landscape in America, a legacy of that geothermal abundance.
In Colorado, the Ute people had long used the springs at what would become Glenwood Springs, and the arrival of the railroad in the 1880s transformed these remote thermal waters into one of the most accessible resort destinations in the West. The massive pool built at Glenwood became a showpiece for the entire concept of western hot springs development.
The Sanitarium Era: Medicine, Myth, and Marketing
From roughly 1870 to 1930, America was in the grip of what historians sometimes call the sanitarium era. Thermal resorts across the West adopted the language of medicine to attract visitors, and the marketing ranged from the plausible to the fantastical.
The mineral content of hot spring water — calcium, magnesium, silica, sulfur, lithium, and dozens of other compounds depending on the local geology — gave legitimate scientific credibility to some of the health claims. Bathing in mineral water genuinely does affect the skin, circulation, and muscular tension. The psychological benefits of immersion in warm water were real even when the specific medical claims were not.
But the era also produced extravagant quackery. Proprietors advertised their springs as cures for cancer, tuberculosis, nervous disorders, and “female complaints” — a catch-all Victorian term that covered almost any condition a woman might have. The more sulfurous the water smelled, the more powerfully medicinal it was assumed to be, an association that survives in the popular imagination today even though it has no particular medical basis.
What the sanitarium era accomplished, regardless of its excesses, was to establish hot springs as aspirational destinations — places worth traveling to, worth investing in, worth telling your friends about. It built the infrastructure: hotels, access roads, bathhouses, and the cultural expectation that soaking was something respectable Americans did.
The era ended gradually as modern medicine advanced and the federal government began regulating health claims more aggressively. But the destinations remained, stripped of their medicinal pretensions and kept alive by something more durable: people just liked soaking in hot springs.
Conservation, the National Parks, and a New Relationship with Thermal Waters
As the 20th century developed, the federal government’s role in managing hot springs shifted from the early preserve-and-privatize model toward conservation and public access. The National Park Service, established in 1916, found itself steward of extraordinary thermal landscapes — Yellowstone most famously, but also numerous hot springs within other parks and national forests.
The tension between preservation and access that defines so much of American public lands history played out at hot springs with particular intensity. Some thermal features were so fragile — so easily damaged by human contact, contamination, or altered hydrology — that restricting access was essential. Others were robust enough to accommodate careful recreational use.
This era also saw the establishment of the primitive hot springs culture that many enthusiasts treasure most today. As road systems expanded into the backcountry, springs that had been known only to locals and occasional wilderness travelers became accessible to a wider audience. The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management developed a general policy that primitive hot springs on public land were available for free public use — a democratic tradition that distinguishes American hot springs culture from much of the rest of the world, where thermal baths are almost always commercial facilities.
The health benefits that drew people to hot springs for centuries haven’t disappeared — they’ve simply been reframed in modern terms. If you’re curious about the contemporary science behind soaking, the Health Benefits of Hot Springs post breaks down what the research actually supports.
The Counterculture Movement and the Hot Springs Renaissance
The 1960s and 1970s brought a cultural shift that transformed how many Americans thought about hot springs — particularly the primitive, clothing-optional springs that had been quietly attracting a bohemian clientele since the 1930s.
The counterculture’s embrace of naturism, communal bathing, and back-to-the-land living created a new constituency for wild hot springs. Places like Terwilliger Hot Springs in Oregon, Deep Creek Hot Springs in California, and the high-altitude springs of Colorado became pilgrimage sites for a generation that valued liberation from both clothing and convention.
This era cemented the association between primitive hot springs and clothing-optional bathing that persists — with significant variation — to this day. The cultural norms around clothing at hot springs are genuinely complex and sometimes contested, which is why Clothing Optional Hot Springs: A First-Timer’s Complete Guide remains one of the most useful resources for anyone navigating this terrain for the first time.
The environmental movement that ran parallel to the counterculture also began shaping how people engaged with hot springs. Leave No Trace principles, though not formally codified until later, entered the culture during this period. The idea that these places needed stewardship — that human use could damage or destroy what made them special — began to take hold among the soaking community.
The Modern Era: From Wellness Trend to Year-Round Pursuit
By the 1990s and 2000s, hot springs had been fully absorbed into the broader wellness industry that was reshaping American consumer culture. High-end spa resorts at places like Ojo Caliente in New Mexico and Strawberry Park in Colorado attracted visitors willing to pay premium prices for immersion in mineral waters and the array of services that had grown up around them.
At the same time, the internet was making it easier to find and share information about primitive springs — creating both new access and new pressures. Springs that had been known only to locals could go from hidden gems to crowded destinations in the course of a viral blog post, raising real questions about carrying capacity and impact.
This tension between discovery and preservation is one of the defining issues in hot springs culture today. The answer isn’t to stop exploring — it’s to explore responsibly, understand the specific rules and conditions at each location, and practice the kind of etiquette that keeps these places open and beautiful for the next person. The Hot Springs Etiquette guide covers the principles that matter most.
The history of hot springs bathing in America is ultimately a story about what humans want from wild places: restoration, community, wonder, and a connection to something older and more powerful than themselves. Every time you lower yourself into a thermal pool — whether it’s a marble bathhouse in Arkansas, a developed resort in Colorado, or a primitive pool you reached after a backcountry hike — you’re participating in a tradition that stretches back to the first people who stood where you’re standing and felt the same thing you feel.
The Springs Are Still Out There
Two thousand years of human history with American hot springs, and there are still pools hidden in the mountains that only a handful of people know about. Springs that reward the hikers willing to earn them. Resorts that have been welcoming tired travelers for more than a century. Developed facilities where the bathing culture of the Gilded Age lingers in tile and marble and quiet ceremony.
Whether you’re drawn to the historical grandeur of Arkansas’s Bathhouse Row or the wild solitude of a primitive pool in Wyoming or Idaho, the tradition you’re stepping into runs deep.
Over 2,000 hot springs across America — with GPS directions, community check-ins, offline maps, and real-time conditions — are waiting for you in the Soakr app. Download Soakr free for iOS