Not surprisingly, archeologists have concluded that Indians did not make their homes on this immense lava field. Astronauts would one day trek about Craters of the Moon in hopes that experiencing its harshly alien environment would make walking on the moon less disorienting for them. No wonder people have not chosen to live on these hot, black, sometimes sharp lava flows on which you must line the flight of doves to locate drinking water.

Indians did traverse this area on annual summer migrations, however, as shown by the developed trails and many sites where artifacts of Northern Shoshone culture have been found. Most of these archeological sites are not easily discerned by the untrained eye, but the stone windbreaks at Indian Tunnel are easily examined. Rings of rocks that may have been used for temporary shelter, hunting blinds, or religious purposes, numerous stone tools, and the hammerstones and chippings of arrowhead making are found scattered throughout the lava flows. Some of the harder, dense volcanic materials found here were made into crude cutting and scraping tools and projectile points. Such evidence suggests only short forays into the lavas for hunting or collecting by small groups.

The Northern Shoshone were a hunting and gathering culture directly dependent on what the land offered. They turned what they could of this volcanic environment to their benefit. Before settlement by Europeans, the vicinity of the park boasted several game species that are rare or absent from Craters of the Moon today. These included elk, wolf, bison, grizzly and black bear, and the cougar. Bighorn sheep, whose males sport characteristic headgear of large, curled horns, have been absent from the park since about 1920.

Military explorer U.S. Army Capt. B.L.E. Bonneville left impressions of the Craters of the Moon lava field in his travel diaries in the early 1800s. In The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, which were based on the diaries, 19th-century author Washington Irving pictures a place “where nothing meets the eye but a desolate and awful waste, where no grass grows nor water runs, and where nothing is to be seen but lava.” Irving is perhaps most famous for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but his Adventures is considered a significant period work about the West and provided this early, if brief, glimpse of a then unnamed Craters of the Moon.

Pioneers working westward in the 19th century sought either gold or affordable farm or ranch lands so they, like the Northern Shoshone, bypassed these lava wastes. Later, nearby settlers would venture into this area in search of additional grazing lands. Finding none, they left Craters of the Moon substantially alone.

Early pioneers who left traces in the vicinity of the park did so by following what eventually came to be known as Goodale’s Cutoff. The route was based on Indian trails that skirted the lava fields in the northern section of the park. It came into use in the early 1850s as an alternate to the regular route of the Oregon Trail. Shoshone Indian hostilities along the Snake River part of the trail—one such incident is memorialized in Idaho’s Massacre Rocks State Park—led the emigrants to search for a safer route. They were headed for Oregon, particularly the Walla Walla area around Whitman Mission, family groups in search of agricultural lands for settlement. Emigrants traveling it in 1854 noticed names carved in rocks and trees along its route. It was named in 1862 by travelers apparently grateful to their guide, Tim Goodale, whose presence, they felt, had prevented Indian attacks. Illinois-born Goodale was cut in the mold of the typical early trapper and trader of the Far West. He was known to the famous fur trade brothers Solomon and William Sublette. His name turned up at such fur trade locales as Pueblo, Taos, Fort Bridger, and Fort Laramie over a period of at least 20 years.

After the discovery of gold in Idaho’s Salmon River country, a party of emigrants persuaded Goodale to guide them over the route they would name for him. Goodale was an experienced guide: in 1861, he had served in that capacity for a military survey west of Denver. The large band of emigrants set out in July and was joined by more wagons at Craters of the Moon. Eventually their numbers included 795 men and 300 women and children. Indian attacks occurred frequently along the Oregon Trail at that time, but the size of this group evidently discouraged such incursions. The trip was not without incident, but Goodale’s reputation remained sufficiently intact for his clients to affix his name to the route. Subsequent modifications and the addition of a ferry crossing on the Snake River made Goodale’s Cutoff into a popular route for western emigration. Traces of it are still visible in the vicinity of the park today.

Curiosity about this uninhabitable area eventually led to more detailed knowledge of Craters of the Moon and knowledge led to its preservation. Geologists Israel C. Russell and Harold T. Stearns of the U.S. Geological Survey explored here in 1901 and 1923, respectively. Taxidermist-turned-lecturer Robert Limbert explored the area in the early 1920s. Limbert made three trips. On the first two, he more or less retraced the steps of these geologists. On his third and most ambitious trek, Limbert and W. L. Cole traversed what is now the park and the Craters of the Moon Wilderness Area south to north, starting from the nearby community of Minidoka. Their route took them by Two Point Butte, Echo Crater, Big Craters, North Crater Flow and out to the Old Arco-Carey Road, then known as the Yellowstone Park and Lincoln Highway. These explorations and their attendant publicity in National Geographic Magazine were instrumental in the proclamation of Craters of the Moon as a national monument by President Calvin Coolidge in 1924.

Since Limbert’s day, astronauts have walked both here and on the moon. Despite our now detailed knowledge of the differences between these two places, the name—and much of the park’s awe-inspiring appeal—remains the same. It is as though by learning more about both these niches in our universe we somehow have learned more about ourselves as well.

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