Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“Colter's Hell” and John Colter
The area along the Shoshone River here was called Colter's Hell by nineteenth-century
trappers. Native American Indians and trappers used the Shoshone River Canyon and
Sylvan Pass as an east-west passage through the high Absaroka Range. Probably the first
white person to use this pass and the first to see Yellowstone's marvels was mountain man
John Colter. Colter reported information about his 1806-8 traverse of the area to Capt.
William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, who recorded it on a map. John Col-
ter may have seen at least some of the hot spring basins and must have told people about
them, but they did not believe him.
A large tar spring that gave of sulfurous odors near the junction of the North and
South Forks of the Shoshone River came to be called Colter's Hell, and the river was
called the Stinkingwater River throughout the nineteenth century. In 1835, “Colter's Hell”
showed up in Washington Irving's version of an early explorer's journal,
The Adventures of
Captain Bonneville.
Somehow the name had become transposed to the whole of the Yel-
lowstone thermal area as a derisive term, with the implication that Colter had not seen the
wonders he had described.
The dual confusion over Colter's veracity and exactly where Colter's Hell was located
persisted until about 50 years ago, when historian Merrill J. Mattes determined that the
name referred to hot springs in the Shoshone River Canyon and not to Yellowstone Park.
The Wyoming Legislature changed the name Stinkingwater River to Shoshone River
in 1901, when Cody was first being settled and the road into Yellowstone was being im-
proved.
You enter the Shoshone Canyon and cross the river almost simultaneously, with
Rattlesnake Mountain on the north and Spirit Mountain (also called Cedar Mountain) on the
south. This whole area was important to the people of the Crow tribe. Young Crow vision
questers, seeking to become tribal leaders and medicine men, visited the land that is now un-
der Buffalo Bill Reservoir.
Automobile use of the Shoshone Canyon road began in 1915. Here's what it looked like to
the author's grandfather, Montana mountaineer Fred Inabnit, as he drove up the old road in
1918:
The Shoshone canyon is so narrow and winding that you can hardly see from the bench [rim of
the canyon] where the valley cut through. You follow the river closely here as there is no other
way possible, at times several hundred feet above it and then dipping down almost into the wa-
ter. The roads are rocky, some places on and through solid rock and up and down steep hills….
