The first white homesteaders in Jackson Hole arrived in the mid 1880's, and in 1889 six wagons full of the Mormon Wilson clan traveled from Idaho over Teton Pass to settle at its foot, founding the little community of Wilson.  One of these settlers was Uncle Nick Wilson, who as a boy spent two years with the Shoshone as the adoptive brother of Chief Washakie.  As an eighteen year old Wilson was a pony express rider; as a young man he was a stage coach driver and an army scout.  He always wore a hat, even when he was inside, to hide what must have been a very spectacular scar left by an arrow wound he received during his Pony Express days.

The town of Jackson was founded in 1901 as a business enterprise of Grace Miller, a local banker's wife who purchased the land and platted it for settlement.  Although Jackson spent many years as a dusty little cow town before the tourists discovered it, the region has a long tradition of offering high quality dude ranch experiences.  Jackson Hole’s scenery is spectacular but the ranching only marginal.  As one old rancher supposedly explained, "Dudes winter better than cattle."  The Hole has traditionally provided habitats for a variety of artists and writers.  Writer Donald Hough said if you shot an arrow into the air in Jackson in the 1940's, it would most likely have come to rest in the back of someone hunched over a typewriter.

North of Jackson lies Grand Teton National Park, a small park created in the first half of the 20th century to protect the Hole's beautiful landscapes from commercial development.  It began with some sneaky maneuvering -- J. D. Rockefeller used the cover of the Snake River Land Company to buy out struggling ranches in the valley, which infuriated many locals and resulted in decades of controversy.  The end result has undoubtedly been good for the local economy, and the scenery is truly sublime.

Jackson Hole and Jackson Lake were both named for trapper David E. Jackson, while the Tetons received their name from French Canadian trappers.  During the fur trade days this was a busy place.  Once the trappers were gone, however, the Hole was isolated and lonely up into the twentieth century.  Indians used it as a summer camping ground, and in the 1860's a lone Englishman named Richard Leigh settled in the Jackson Hole area with his Shoshone wife Jenny.  He scraped out a living trapping on the western side of the Tetons, and supplemented his income by working as a guide.  He led the Hayden scientific expeditions of 1871 and 1872 through the Teton and Yellowstone regions, bringing Jenny and the children along.  The Hayden expedition named Leigh Lake and Jenny Lake after them.  Those happy summers became nothing but memories the Christmas of 1876, when Leigh watched helplessly while Jenny and their five children all died of small pox.  He wrote heartbreakingly to a friend about his loss, describing how the first child died on Christmas Eve at about the time they usually celebrated with a candy pulling, the second died Christmas night, and the third on the twenty sixth.  By the early morning hours of the twenty eighth, his entire family was gone, leaving Leigh a broken man.  He found the will to continue, however, and remarried three years later, this time to a sixteen-year-old Bannock girl named Susan Tadpole.  Leigh had assisted at Susan's own birth, and together they had three children.  He took this second family along on guiding jobs, too -- Theodore Roosevelt once gave a rifle to his daughter Emma.  Leigh died in 1899 and is buried in the Tetons.