National Mythmaking in the Valley of Vapors: Imperial Memory at Hot Springs, Arkansas, 1890-1926

Though it is situated in the geographic South, the town of Hot Springs, Arkansas embraced the narratives of the western frontier of the United States during its development as a tourist destination in the early twentieth century. White business proprietors in Hot Springs claimed that Indigenous tribes in the area had worshipped the thermal waters and led the Spanish conquistador Hernando De Soto to the springs during his sixteenth-century exploration of the region. Though these narratives were historically unfounded, the story of De Soto’s early colonial endeavors in Arkansas became embedded in the landscape of Hot Springs in a re-imagining of history that commodified Indigenous culture and celebrated colonial attitudes. This thesis explores how and why Hot Springs developed in this way during this period and argues that these myths were intentionally created by business owners in Hot Springs to attract tourism by assuaging national anxieties about the closure of the United States Western frontier. These marketing techniques framed Hot Springs and its natural resources as a frontier space, and the association of the town with the early Spanish American empire connected Hot Springs to a broader legacy of European imperialism and conquest.