The name Tyaughton is an adaptation of the Chilcotin word for "jumping fish", and has also appeared on the map in the form Tyoax or Tyax, the latter being the simplified form used by the Tyax Mountain Lake Resort, a five-star resort on Tyaughton Lake, which is a tributary to the creek.
The name appears to have been conferred by Chief Hunter Jack, chief of the Lakes Lillooet (a subdivision of the St'at'imc, today's Nequatque and Seton Lake First Nations) during the later 19th Century and a legendary hunting guide who held claim to the title of Hyas Tyee (king) of the Bridge River Country.
Hunter Jack was one of the few Lillooet natives who spoke Chilcotin, and is said to have learned it in order to end a bloody war which had raged over the rich hunting and food-gathering grounds of the area of the upper Bridge River, including the basin of Tyauughton Creek.
The end of the war is said to have come about at a place now called Graveyard Valley, which lies over a narrow defile from the head of Relay Creek, Tyaughton's northernmost tributary, which is in the upper basin of Big Creek, a tributary of the Chilcotin River.
In the 1930s, times when the Bridge River Country was as much known for big-game hunting as for gold mining, Charlie Cunningham, a guide and multi-faceted entrepreneur in the goldfield hub of Gold Bridge first promoted the idea of protecting the region north of Gun Creek and west of Tyaughton and south of Relay, as a wildlife preserve and scenic wilderness treasure, and in the process became a pioneering wildlife cinematographer.