Among the many relics of the American West that have passed through
estate sales, museum archives, and private collections, few objects have
generated as much sustained curiosity—or as much scholarly
frustration—as a single nineteenth-century photograph purportedly taken
at Hunter’s Hot Springs, Montana. The image, a black-and-white group
portrait of fifteen men arranged on the porch steps of a modest hotel
building, appears unremarkable at first glance. What elevates it into
the realm of genuine historical intrigue—and what has fueled decades of
debate—is the handwritten list of names attached to its surface. That
list claims to identify, among the assembled men: Wyatt Earp, Theodore
Roosevelt, Doc Holliday, Morgan Earp, Bat Masterson, Judge Roy Bean,
Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and the formidable mountain man known
as “Liver Eating” Johnson. If accurate, the photograph would constitute
the single greatest gathering of frontier celebrities ever captured by a
camera. Historians, however, have arrived at a far less romantic
conclusion.
The photograph has circulated in Montana since at least the 1960s, long
before the internet provided a mechanism for rapid, widespread
dissemination. As researcher Jason Leaf noted in his multi-year
investigation begun in 2000, the image had quietly populated the walls
of homes, restaurants, and bars across North America, most reproductions
bearing some variation of the famous names list (huntershotsprings.net).
The consistency of that cultural footprint—combined with the
irresistible appeal of the photograph’s claimed contents—ensured that
the image would endure long past any serious expert’s initial dismissal.
This article examines the photograph from multiple angles: the history
of the location where it was taken, the origins of the spurious name
annotations, the investigative work undertaken to determine its actual
content, and what the photograph ultimately reveals about the human
appetite for myth-making in relation to the American frontier.
Long before the arrival of European-American settlers, the geothermal
springs located approximately twenty miles east of present-day
Livingston, Montana, were already well-known to the Crow people of the
region. According to the Montana History Portal, at certain periods of
the year as many as one thousand tipis surrounded the hot springs, and
the Crow continued to use them at least until the mid-1870s, when the
western portion of their reservation—which included the springs—was
ceded to the federal government (www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/128750).
The site carried with it an indigenous significance that predated any
white settlement by generations.
The man whose name would be permanently attached to the springs was Dr.
Andrew Jackson Hunter, a Virginia-born Confederate battlefield surgeon.
According to a detailed history published in Bozeman Magazine, Hunter
was born in 1816 and had served as a physician for the Illinois Central
Railway before the Civil War disrupted his life entirely. When his
family’s farm, store, and home in Missouri were burned by those who
viewed them as Southern sympathizers, the Hunters began their westward
journey in April 1864 (Shearer). On July 18 of that year, while hunting
antelope north of the Yellowstone River, Dr. Hunter came upon the hot
springs and hundreds of encamped Crow Indians. His daughter Mary later
recorded in a memoir that her father had previously spent considerable
time at Arkansas Hot Springs and immediately recognized the therapeutic
and commercial potential of what he observed (Shearer,
bozemanmagazine.com).
Dr. Hunter established squatters’ rights on the parcel in 1870 and by
1873 had constructed a hotel and bathhouses at the site. The early years
were marked by considerable hardship—the family diary, newspaper
accounts, and memoirs describe stolen horses, destroyed gardens, and the
constant threat from traveling bands of Sioux and Blackfeet. The first
post office opened at Hunter’s Hot Springs in 1878, with Dr. Hunter
serving as its inaugural postmaster (bozemanmagazine.com). A significant
turning point came in 1882, when the Northern Pacific Railroad pushed
westward through the region, bringing its tracks within a mile and a
half of the resort’s front door. Frank Rich, Dr. Hunter’s son-in-law,
operated a complimentary carriage service from the Springdale station to
the hotel, and a second hotel—the Rich Hotel, sometimes called the Lower
House—was erected nearby to accommodate overflow guests.
By 1885, the Hunter’s Hot Springs town site included two hotels, a post
office, separate bathhouses for men and women, a one-room schoolhouse, a
dry goods store, a laundry, and several family dwellings. That same
year, Dr. Hunter sold the property to the Montana Hot Springs Company,
headed by Cyrus B. Mendenhall. Subsequent decades saw the resort pass
through additional ownership changes, ultimately becoming the Hotel
Dakota in 1909—a structure over 450 feet long with a capacity of 300
guests, boasting steam heat, electric lights, and room telephones. That
grand structure burned in 1932 and was never rebuilt. The plunge
reopened in 1948 under new owners, who operated it until 1974, when the
facility closed permanently (ktvq.com; mtmemory.org). Today the site is
private property, and the ruins of what was once a celebrated Western
spa lie scattered north of the Yellowstone near Springdale.
One of the few points of genuine consensus among both believers and
skeptics is that the photograph itself has not been manipulated. The
image shows fifteen men, most standing or seated on the porch steps of a
hotel building, dressed in the clothing typical of the late
nineteenth-century American West. Researcher Jason Leaf, a Vancouver,
British Columbia resident who devoted years of his life to the question,
confirmed that the photograph appears to be an authentic, unaltered
period image: the dispute concerns not the photographic medium but the
identity annotations attached to it (mywebvault.wordpress.com; Brekke,
Montana Best Times, February 2003).
Establishing the photograph’s location required relatively little
effort. A sketch of the Hunters Hot Springs Hotel appears in Michael
Leeson’s 1885 reference work History of Montana. Comparing that sketch
with the building visible in the group portrait established the location
beyond reasonable doubt. Additional confirmation came from photographs
of the hotel taken in 1909 and provided to Leaf by Doris Whithorn of the
Park County Museum in Livingston, Montana. Whithorn’s 1909 photographs,
however, revealed something significant: the porch steps visible in the
group portrait were no longer present. Analysis indicated that Cyrus
Mendenhall had raised the ground level around the hotel when laying the
stone foundation for an annex, effectively eliminating the need for the
steps. This alteration appears to have taken place around 1888
(huntershotsprings.net).
The presence of steps in the group portrait therefore establishes a
terminus ante quem of approximately 1888. The lower end of the date
range was refined by the 1885 Leeson sketch, which shows no
steps—indicating that the steps were added after 1885. Mendenhall took
ownership in 1885 and undertook substantial renovation, making 1886 the
most probable year for the steps’ construction. Combined with historical
records placing Theodore Roosevelt, Robert Leroy Parker (later known as
Butch Cassidy), and Harry Longabaugh (the Sundance Kid) in southeastern
Montana during the summer of 1886, this dating initially appeared to
give the famous names list a thread of plausibility. However, as
subsequent investigation demonstrated, plausibility of proximity is not
evidence of presence—and the famous names list fell apart under
sustained scrutiny (huntershotsprings.net; mywebvault.wordpress.com).
The most persuasive arguments against the photograph’s famous names
annotations are chronological in nature. Wild Bunch historian and author
Daniel Buck, recognized as one of the foremost authorities on the lives
of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, stated plainly that the
photograph was “as authentic as the jackalope and as verifiable as the
legend of the vanishing hitchhiker” and confirmed that he knew of no
serious Western historian who lent any credibility to the identification
roster (truewestmagazine.com, 2007; truewestmagazine.com, 2013).
Several of the named individuals present logical impossibilities. Morgan
Earp, identified as one of the men in the image, was shot and killed in
Tombstone, Arizona, on March 18, 1882—more than a year before the
photograph’s original claimed date of 1883, and four years before the
revised date of 1886. The original annotation listing the photograph as
taken in 1883 creates additional problems: in that year, Robert Leroy
Parker—who would not adopt the alias “Butch Cassidy” for some years—was
approximately seventeen years old, far younger than any of the adults
depicted. Lyndel Meikle, writing in the Helena Independent Record,
observed that multiple versions of the photograph existed with differing
names and dates, indicating that annotations were revised over time as
researchers eliminated historically impossible inclusions. In one
version, Alan Pinkerton, founder of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, was
named; he was eventually replaced by Ben Greenough—who, the record
shows, would have been thirteen years old in 1883 and did not arrive in
Montana until 1886 (helenair.com).
Similarly, the identification of the figure labeled “Teddy Roosevelt” is
undermined by the notation itself. Roosevelt was not called “Teddy”
until the 1890s, meaning any caption using that nickname would
necessarily have been written well after the alleged date of the event
(helenair.com). Meikle also contacted the Theodore Roosevelt historical
site in New York, which confirmed that while Roosevelt could not be
definitively excluded from the geographic vicinity of Montana in 1883,
he visited North Dakota that September for three weeks—traveling
directly from New York and returning directly there—which makes an
appearance at Hunter’s Hot Springs in that year highly improbable.
Roosevelt did not relocate to the West until 1884.
Perhaps the most consequential thread of Jason Leaf’s investigation
concerned a name that was neither famous nor recognizable: Harry
Britton, listed as figure number twelve in the photograph. Following
advice from Daniel Buck—who urged researchers to examine the names that
were not celebrated, as they might lead to authentic provenance—Leaf
spent years pursuing this obscure figure. In the winter of 2004, after
many months of correspondence, two of Harry Britton’s granddaughters,
Margaret Rootes and Hazel Walen, came forward with key information
(huntershotsprings.net).
A significant additional contribution came from Sharon Pohlman, a
great-granddaughter of Frank and Lizzie Rich—the couple who operated the
Rich Hotel at Hunter’s Hot Springs. Pohlman, serving as family
archivist, provided period photographs and a detailed genealogical
history that enabled Leaf and other researchers to identify several of
the men in the photograph as local ranchers, hoteliers, and resort
employees connected with the Hunter and Rich families. Most strikingly,
the man previously identified as “Butch Cassidy” in the photograph
appears, upon comparative analysis, to be Franklin Rich himself
(mywebvault.wordpress.com). Additionally, a later revision to Leaf’s
findings—prompted by California-based researcher and “Liver Eating”
Johnston biographer Dorman Nelson—revealed that the figure previously
believed to be the mountain man Johnston was in fact Dr. Andrew Jackson
Hunter, the resort’s founder, himself (huntershotsprings.net).
The trajectory of the annotations’ evolution was also traced through the
photograph’s physical history. Livingston photographer Fred Shellenberg
made several copies of the image in 1970 for the Harold Johnson family,
who then owned the Hunter’s Hot Springs property. It appears that it was
around this time that the names of Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and
Judge Roy Bean began to appear on the photograph—names absent from
earlier versions. Previous copies, apparently circulating among the
Britton family since at least the mid-twentieth century, bore a shorter
and somewhat different list. Each generation of reproduction added to,
altered, or substituted names, reflecting both popular culture
influences of the time and the specific enthusiasms of whoever made the
copies (huntershotsprings.net). Helena-area writer Lyndel Meikle
reported being told by one source that a man named Jack Teaghman, who
had acquired resort properties in Montana around 1925 and obtained the
photograph from one of those properties, had paid someone $100 to supply
colorful names to go with the image—a claim that, while unverified, fits
the pattern of the photograph’s embellished circulation history
(helenair.com).
The photograph’s tenacity in popular consciousness raises questions that
extend beyond the specifics of the image itself. Arizona’s official
historian, Marshall Trimble, offered a pointed assessment in True West
Magazine: no one, he suggested, has any real idea who posed for the
Hunter’s Hot Springs photo; the men were probably acquaintances at a
social gathering, after which someone made the decision to “identify”
them as celebrities (truewestmagazine.com, 2013). The mechanism Trimble
describes is not unique to this photograph; it belongs to a broader
tradition in which ordinary relics are retrofitted with extraordinary
significance. Analogous practices have been documented in connection
with photographs from the Civil War era, the gold rush, and the
settlement of the Great Plains—periods during which photographic
documentation was rare enough that surviving images carried an outsized
cultural weight, inviting ambitious attribution.
The particular cast of characters assigned to the Hunter’s Hot Springs
photograph is also revealing. The names chosen—Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday,
Theodore Roosevelt, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, Judge Roy
Bean—represent not so much the actual population of the frontier West as
a curated selection of its most cinematically familiar icons. Several of
these figures had already, by the early twentieth century, been the
subjects of popular novels, stage shows, and newspaper serializations.
By the time Fred Shellenberg’s 1970 copies began circulating with
expanded name lists, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had been
immortalized in the 1969 film of the same name. The cultural moment in
which each additional name was grafted onto the photograph appears to
correspond to periods of renewed popular interest in specific frontier
figures.
A parallel dynamic involves the photograph’s commercial circulation.
Copies of the image have sold for hundreds of dollars at antique fairs
and in private transactions (huntershotsprings.net). The economic
incentive to maintain the mystery—or to reaffirm the famous names’
validity—should not be discounted as a factor in the photograph’s
persistence. So long as there is appetite for the idea that Wyatt Earp
and Theodore Roosevelt once shared a porch step in Montana, there will
be a market for the object that promises to prove it. The photograph has
found a home not only on residential walls but in bars and restaurants
across Montana and beyond, where its romantic premise functions as
décor—an artifact that invites conversation and sustains a particular
vision of the frontier as a place where legends rubbed shoulders with
ease.
In recent years, Hunter’s Hot Springs has re-entered public
consciousness through discussions about the potential revival of the
site as a resort. As of late 2023, signs posted on the property’s fence
by its current owner—the Lone Star Land and Cattle Company, owned by
Texan Russell Gordy—hinted at development plans. Longtime area residents
such as Jean Chapel recalled the resort as a community landmark, noting
that the pool operated under the Johnson family into the 1970s and
remained a significant gathering place for South Central Montana
communities (ktvq.com). A representative for the Gordy family indicated
to journalists that plans existed to rebuild the hotel using its
original design, though no definitive timeline had been established as
of the date of reporting.
Whether or not the resort is eventually rebuilt, the Hunter’s Hot
Springs photograph will almost certainly continue to circulate. The site
at huntershotsprings.net—maintained by Jason Leaf as a compendium of his
research—remains one of the more thorough amateur historical
investigations available on the subject and has helped inform subsequent
journalistic accounts. Academic institutions such as the University of
Montana’s Mansfield Library have digitized period photographs of the
resort, providing scholars with access to archival imagery that can be
used to corroborate or refute claims about the property’s physical
history (mtmemory.org/nodes/view/13227). Researchers such as Carroll Van
West have documented the site’s historical footprint through the Montana
Historic Landscape project, situating Hunter’s Hot Springs within the
broader development of automobile tourism and early resort culture in
the Yellowstone Valley (montanahistoriclandscape.com).
The Hunter’s Hot Springs photograph is, at its heart, a genuine artifact
of nineteenth-century Montana—a real image of real men, taken at a real
place with a documented history stretching from Crow encampments to
grand hotels. What it is not, the weight of historical evidence makes
clear, is a record of the greatest gathering of Old West celebrities
ever assembled. The men on those porch steps were almost certainly local
ranchers, resort employees, hoteliers, and travelers connected to the
tight-knit community that surrounded Dr. Andrew Jackson Hunter’s sulphur
springs on the Yellowstone—ordinary people of an extraordinary era whose
true identities were obscured, layer by layer, by a mixture of
commercial opportunism, regional pride, popular romanticism, and the
peculiar human desire to believe that heroes and legends once occupied
the same ordinary spaces that ordinary people do.
As Montana’s Historic Landscape project has noted, little remains of
Hunter’s Hot Springs today—scattered stones and fence lines where a
celebrated spa once stood (montanahistoriclandscape.com). The
photograph’s subjects are equally elusive. What the historical record
ultimately recovers is not a gathering of icons but a community: the
Hunters, the Riches, the Brittons, and the other settlers who built
something significant in an isolated corner of the West, then watched it
vanish into the ground. The famous names superimposed upon their image
are, in a sense, an inadvertent tribute to the appeal of that era—the
suggestion that wherever such a place existed, the legends of the age
must surely have found their way there. That the legends did not,
however, makes the true story no less worthy of careful remembrance.
Brekke, Jerry. “Livingston Montana History – Hunter’s Hot Springs
Mystery Photo.” Montana Best Times, February 2003. Reproduced at
mywebvault.wordpress.com, 26 December 2010.
https://mywebvault.wordpress.com/2010/12/26/livingston-montana-history-hunters-hot-spring/. Accessed 27 February 2026.
Leaf, Jason. “WHO ARE THOSE GUYS? Hunters Hot Springs Photograph.”
Hunters Hot Springs, n.d. http://huntershotsprings.net/page-4.html.
Accessed 27 February 2026.
Meikle, Lyndel. “Debunking the Famous Hunter’s Hot Springs Photo.”
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Accessed 27 February 2026.
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2026.
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Accessed 27 February 2026.
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https://www.ktvq.com/news/local-news/signs-spark-interest-in-revival-of-historic-hunters-hot-springs. Accessed 27 February 2026.
Trimble, Marshall. “Who Are the Men in the ‘Mystery Photo’ That Claims
to Feature Some of the Old West’s Most Famous Gunfighters at Hunter’s
Hot Springs in Montana?” True West Magazine, 6 December 2013.
https://www.truewestmagazine.com/article/who-are-the-men-in-the-mystery-photo-that-claims-to-feature-some-of-the-old-wests-most-famous-gunfighters-at-hunters-hot-springs-in-montana/. Accessed 27 February 2026.
True West Magazine. “I Own an 1883 Photo Taken in Hunter’s Hot Springs,
Montana, That Supposedly Shows Wyatt and Morgan Earp, Teddy Roosevelt,
Butch Cassidy, Judge Roy Bean and Other Notables. Is It Legit?” True
West Magazine, May 2007.
https://www.truewestmagazine.com/article/i-own-an-1883-photo-taken-in-hunters-hot-springs-montana-that-supposedly-shows-wyatt-and-morgan-earp-teddy-roosevelt-butch-cassidy-judge-roy-bean-and-other-notables-is-it-legit/. Accessed 27 February 2026.
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