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Chico Hot Springs

Chico Hot Springs Resort and Day Spa

A view from 1939:

Chico Hot Springs (adm. 35¢; hotels, cabins; shower, tub, and vapor baths, mineral water, warm and hot plunges; horses available for saddle and pack trips into the Absarokas, and for fishing and hunting), (5,160 alt.). The resort is in sheltered EMIGRANT GULCH, where placer gold was discovered by Thomas Curry in 1862; the earliest trappers and prospectors bathed in crude vats built around the hot springs.

Jim Bridger is believed to have spent the winter of 1844-45 here, though legend and story set an even earlier date for his first visit. When a train of immigrants arrived near the narrow entrance to the gulch in 1864, their attention was drawn to a lone pine with 18 to 20 elk horns around its base, so strongly imbedded that they could not be removed. In December of that year Jim Bridger and one of the settlers met at a primitive hotel near Bozeman. When, during the swapping of stories, the ring of elk horns was mentioned, Bridger asserted that he had placed them there 25 years before.

Source: Montana: A State Guide Book; Compiled and Written by the Federal Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration for the State of Montana; September, 1939.