Saltville Valley preserves evidence of a rich environment that attracted animals and people for thousands of years. Fossils of large mammals that lived in North America about 13,000 years ago, during Pleistocene times, were found here, and layers of soil record the valley’s changing past. Beneath the valley floor are the remains of the Saltville River, an old riverbed estimated to be from 27,000 to 14,006 years old, lined with shale, silts, sands, and fingernail clams, while bones and tooth fossils bear scrapes from being washed down the river. Abundant salt in the river and deep in the ground drew animals, giving Saltville the earlier names Buffalo Lick and Salt Lick. Over time the river backed up to form a shallow lake called Lake Totten, while spruce forests, ponds, and prairies covered the landscape before today’s hardwood forests appeared. Later, mud deposits turned the upper valley into a marsh and reduced open water, and these stream and lake deposits helped preserve plant and animal remains. In 1782, Arthur Campbell wrote Thomas Jefferson about “bones of an uncommon size” from the valley and enclosed a mastodon jaw tooth. Since then, discoveries have included the third most nearly complete skeleton of an extinct musk ox known in North America, tracks of a ground sloth, and fossils of woolly mammoth, stag-moose, caribou, fish, plants, turtles, and snakes, all revealing a diverse and changing environment. Early people were also drawn to the valley, and nearby excavations have uncovered PaleoIndian fluted projectile points and other evidence suggesting humans were present from 10,500 to 9000 years ago, likely taking advantage of abundant food from animals at the lake and marshes. The English first surveyed the area in 1753, the remaining lake was drained in the 1840s, and after settlement the salt industry flourished, followed later by the Civil War and industrialization.