YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK — Colter’s Hell has a strong place in American imagination as the name given to Yellowstone National Park (YNP) after no one believed John Colter’s description of the hydrothermal area. However, the National Park Service (NPS) confirms that, since 1895, this history has deceived everyone.
“No item of Yellowstone history is more widely believed, more universally beloved and more transparently incorrect,” the NPS writes on their website.
The NPS suggests that the earliest published reference to Colter’s Hell is in Washington Irving’s 1937 version of Capt. Benjamin L. E. Bonneville’s journal narrating events from 1832 to 1835. Colter’s Hell is described as full of “gloomy terrors, its hidden fires, smoking pits, noxious streams and the all-pervading ‘smell of brimstone'” located on the Shoshone River, according to Irving.
According to the NPS, in the fur trapping era Colter’s Hell referred to an ancient thermal area bordering the Shoshone just west of present Cody, Wyoming. The term was never applied historically to the thermal zone within YNP.
Although there is no hydrothermal phenomena readily apparent at this current Cody site, the NPS confirms the evidence of thermal activity is “abundantly evident” to anyone who looks for it en route to or from YNP’s East Gate.
The NPS writes it was likely Hiram M. Chittenden, an engineer and historian, who started the legend that Colter’s Hell applied to YNP in his 1895 book, “Yellowstone National Park.” This is because, according to the NPS, no historian prior to Chittenden ever entertained this attachment of Colter’s Hell and YNP.
“But the impression, once created, would not down,” the NPS writes. “Like Aladdin’s wonderful lamp, the jinni was out of the bottle, and the poetic version of ‘Colter’s Hell’ has become a stock item in Western literature.”
The enchantment of YNP is what the NPS credits as the reason the actual Colter’s Hell has been largely ignored since the late 1890s, approximately 50 miles away from the Park’s boundary.
