Steamboat Springs is a small volcanic field of rhyolitic lava domes and flows in western Nevada, located south of Reno.

The state of Nevada has a Steamboat Springs Historical Marker (#198) situated along the eastern shoulder of the busy Carson–Reno Highway (US 395 Alt.

As settlers came west during the Gold Rush in 1849, and noticed steam coming from cracks in the rock, the hot springs became a welcoming watering place for traveling wagons.

In those early days, William Wright reported that as many as sixty or seventy columns of steam could be seen when the air was cool and calm.

[6] In the early days, when the air was cool and calm, William Wright reported that as many as sixty or seventy columns of steam could be seen.

[7] In the early 1860s, cottages, a bathhouse and a hospital set up by British hydrotherapist Dr. James Ellis were built near the springs, but many buildings were destroyed by a fire in 1867.

Along with a new drugstore, cottages and 15 medicinal bathing facilities, the town became a popular spa with silver miners, tourists and people seeking health treatments.

Once tracks were extended south the following summer to meet the existing Carson-Virginia City rail line, such transfer business fell off rapidly.

In order to attempt to raise money for further financing for a larger resort, she wrote a prospectus stating that the thermogenic waters had extensive healing properties.

Famous Thoroughbred Man o' War was brought to the springs in the 1940s with major injuries where his handler used the mud and mineral water for therapeutic purposes.

The hot water is constantly depositing silica, gold, silver, mercury, antimony, and other minerals and metals, which it holds in solution.

One of the most beautiful mineral specimens in the well-known Mackay School of Mines Museum at Reno is a mass of intermixed dazzling white silica, crimson cinnabar, and meta-stibnite from Steamboat Springs.”[5] Mark Twain wrote in August 1863 "... From one spring the boiling water is ejected a foot or more by the infernal force at work below, and in the vicinity of all of them one can hear a constant rumbling and surging, somewhat resembling the noises peculiar to a steamboat in motion - hence the name" [7] He is also quoted as saying, “Behold!