In 1806, Captain William Clark and his crew traveled through here on horseback 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 of where you stand now, Clark noted in his journal that "this butifull extensive valley" is "extreemly fertile" - and he 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 in this area in the mid-1800s, in support of wagon trains on the Oregon Trail. For years thereafter, 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 here offered superb nutrition for cattle - grass-fed animals from this valley fetched the same high prices in midwestern markets as did 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 is native grasses - and because here, where the 'beaver slide' was first developed as a method of stacking hay, heaps of it looked like giant loaves of bread became a year-round sight.

Erected by Montana State University (Bozeman), Bureau of Land Management, Montana Stockgrowers Association.