For thousands of years, Big Southern Butte served as a prominent waypoint on a harsh plain that discouraged most long-term settlement. People have lived on these lands for more than 10,000 years, and Native American hunting and gathering groups used the plain’s resources, leaving stone tools, ancient campsites, pictographs, and obsidian from the Butte that has been found at sites across Idaho, Montana, Utah, and as far away as California’s Joshua Tree National Monument. During most of the Pleistocene epoch, about 1.8 million to 10,000 years before present, ancient Lake Terreton and its streams and wetlands supported nomadic people as well as mammoths, camels, and other Ice Age fauna, until climate change caused the lake and those animals to disappear about 10,000 years ago, leaving Mud Lake as the modern remnant. In the 1800s, emigrants bound for Fort Boise often left Fort Hall on the Snake River and followed the Goodale Cutoff, an Oregon Trail shortcut, steering toward the Butte’s sharp silhouette and passing north of it, while relying on springs at its base for fresh water. An 1878 stage line from Blackfoot to the copper mines near Mackay and Challis followed a similar path, and later the Oregon Short Line Railroad did as well. Today, the Butte and surrounding landscape remain spiritually important to the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, and the Idaho National Laboratory Site lies within the aboriginal lands of the Shoshone and Bannock people, whose tribal members work with the U.S. Department of Energy to protect significant resources there.