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Jones Creek

Captain William A. Jones

Creek in Shoshone NF, North Absaroka Wilderness, Rocky Mountains in WY

Wyoming Fishing Regulations

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Length

11mi

Jones Creek, outside Yellowstone National Park’s East Entrance is a headwater tributary to the North Fork of the Shoshone River. The creek is named after Captain W. A. Jones, who led a military expedition through the newly established Yellowstone National Park. Under the guidance of Native American scouts, Jones is credited as the first European explorer to ascend and map, the rugged volcanic landscape of the Absaroka Range’s North Fork of the Shoshone River as he discovered what is known today as Jones Pass into the Yellowstone Park.

Jones described the ascent up today’s Jones Creek and crossing over Jones Pass as (Jones 1875, 20):

Saturday, August 2. Broke camp at 8:30 a.m. and marched 14.4 miles, across the divide and into the Yellowstone basin, about one mile from the pass. The trail was excellent, except the short spurt of ascen[t] into the pass, which was severe. This slope is on a friable volcanic sandstone, carrying but little soil, and smooth and bare in many places. The horse in the odometer-cart broke down completely at this spot, and the cart had to be left behind.

— Jones

During this 1873 expedition, Jones is also is credited with two other historic achievements:

While inside the park, he verified the existence of Jim Bridger’s fabled Two Ocean Plateau, a place where water simultaneously spilled to both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

While leaving Yellowstone, Jones discovered Togwotee Pass as he crossed over the Continental Divide dividing the Pacific bound Snake River and the Atlantic bound Wind River watersheds. (Jones Expedition in Baldwin; Chittenden 1895, 319; Whittlesey 2006, 141)

Sources

Baldwin, Kenneth H. “Enchanted Enclosure: The Army Engineers and Yellowstone National Park.” History. Accessed November 12, 2023. https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/baldwin/index.htm.

Chittenden, Hiram Martin. Yellowstone National Park. Cincinnati: The Robert Clarke Company, 1895. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42112/42112-h/42112-h.htm.

United States. Army. Corps of Engineers, William Albert Jones, Stanhope E. (Stanhope English) Blunt, Theo B. (Theodore Bryant) Comstock, Charles Lawrence Heizmann, Charles Christopher Parry, and Joseph Duncan Putnam. Report upon the Reconnaissance of Northwestern Wyoming, Including Yellowstone National Park, Made in the Summer of 1873. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1875. http://archive.org/details/reportuponrecon00putngoog.

Whittlesey, L.H. Yellowstone Place Names. Second. Wonderland Publishing Company, 2006.

Taxonomy

Classified As

Creek