In 1806, Captain William Clark and his crew traveled through this valley on horseback while moving quickly on their return trip to St. Louis. Arriving at present day Jackson Hot Springs in the afternoon of July 7th, they stopped to experiment with cooking in the water that Clark later wrote “bubbers with heat.” That night, camped less than a mile east, Clark noted in his journal that “this butifull extensive valley” is “extreemly fertile” and called it “the hot spring Vally.” French trappers referred to it as the “Big Hole,” their term for a large mountain-surrounded valley, and the name stuck. Ranching first began here in the mid-1800s in support of wagon trains on the Oregon Trail. For years afterward, ranchers who lived elsewhere turned their cattle loose to graze these lands, and when the first person intending to live here arrived, he found some 27,000 cattle already feeding in the Big Hole Valley. Ranchers learned that the natural rangelands offered superb nutrition for cattle, and grass-fed animals from this valley fetched the same high prices in midwestern markets as grain-fattened cattle from other parts of the county. The Big Hole earned the nickname “Land of 10,000 Hay Stacks” because of the superiority of its native grasses and because the ‘beaver slide,’ first developed here as a method of stacking hay, made heaps that looked like giant loaves of bread a year-round sight.