Twin Springs is an oasis amid rolling hills of sagebrush, or what early pioneers called "an endless sea of Artemisia." Wildlife, birds, and people are drawn to its still water and rich grasses. Thousands of years ago, Indigenous people traveled this valley with the buffalo, and the springs served as a reliable watering place for nomadic bands moving between the Inland Sea, Great Salt Lake, and the Camass prairie to the north. In 1849, Benoni Hudspeth and John Meyers sought a shorter route to the Sierra Nevada goldfields and pioneered a western cutoff between Soda Springs and City of Rocks for immigrants heading south to California. This Hudspeth Cutoff proved more difficult and saved only twenty-five miles compared with the previous northwest Fort Hall route, yet thousands of miners and other immigrants used it between 1849 and 1859 during the rush to the gold fields. The trail was later abandoned with the coming of the railways and the establishment of a wagon road between Salt Lake and the Montana gold mines through Marsh Valley and Eagle Rock, along the same route as today's I-15 corridor. Twin Springs still serves as a green stopover for wildlife, birds, and people, and the Curlew National Grassland, a patchwork of lands in the Arbon and Curlew Valleys bought back by the federal government between 1934 and 1942 from former homestead lands, is managed for sustainable range, recreation, and wildlife habitat.