Taking the Waters: A Hydrological History of Health and Leisure in Hot Springs National Park, 1832-1932

Abstract

“Taking the Waters: A Hydrological History of Health and Leisure in Hot Springs National Park, 1832-1932,” analyzes the many-textured relationships between humans and the thermal waters of Hot Springs, Arkansas. It defines Hot Springs as a cultural laboratory where Americans used the waters to gain a better understanding of popular ideas surrounding health, leisure, representation, and race, both locally and nationally in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hot Springs’ hydrological advantages brought together a diverse group of private and public interests, all pursuing the waters’ medicinal and recreational properties. Men and women, the rich and the poor, medical professionals and perceived charlatans, along with millions of patients and patrons representing different racial and ethnic identities, all descended upon this curious valley. These groups clashed over control of, and access to, this precious natural, national resource. Hot Springs Reservation (later Hot Springs National Park), situated in a liminal space between the local and the national, where all corners of the nation were represented, became a place where Americans negotiated nature’s changing role in their lives. This dissertation offers a new history of this national landscape. It presents an idea of the national parks as places of health and healing and interrogates how officials embedded that concept in the nation’s most protected landscapes. At Hot Springs, these ideas manifested themselves on mountainsides, in bathhouse pools, doctors’ offices, and hospital wards. Hot Springs served as a pivotal site where a growing administrative state wrestled with their power of, and control over, natural resource use, public health, the government’s role in leisure pursuits, and understandings of who constituted “the public.” “Taking the Waters” expands outside the historiographical niche of national parks to address larger discourses in American history around the role of the state, natural cures within the history of medicine, and racialized landscapes.