Utes still lived around Pagosa Springs in the 1870s. Hayes issued an executive proclamation reserving one square mile around the springs as a town site. In response to a problem with fraudulent claims around the springs, in May 1877 President Rutherford B. People began to settle around the springs, which lay along an important route to the San Juan mining camps. Traffic increased after the Brunot Agreement of 1873 opened the San Juan Mountains to mining and white settlement. No public bathhouses existed, so people often bathed in seeps near the main springs, which was too hot for humans. Some nonnatives began to visit the springs for health reasons in the 1870s. Calling it “one of the most remarkable hot springs on the continent,” Macomb added, “It can hardly be doubted that in future years it will become a celebrated place of resort.” Macomb, the first person to write about the hot springs, noted in 1859 that the area was laced with footpaths leading to and from the springs. US Army topographical engineer Captain John N. Groundwater filters down through the fractures, is heated, and returns to the surface in a cycle that probably takes hundreds of years.įor generations before Europeans set foot near the Pagosa hot springs, Native Americans used the warm waters as a gathering place. The name Pagosa comes from the Ute word meaning “healing waters.” The hot water in the springs comes from fractures that allow it to rise from more than 6,000 feet below the earth’s surface, where it is warmed by residual heat left over from volcanic activity in the area that occurred more than 20 million years ago. Now it survives on tourism to the hot springs, nearby Wolf Creek Ski Area, the San Juan National Forest, and the Weminuche Wilderness. The area supported a thriving lumber industry in the early twentieth century. ![]() ![]() ![]() Home to the deepest hot spring aquifer in the world, Pagosa Springs was a popular destination for local Native Americans before it developed into a white settlement in the 1870s.
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