Native Americans used the hot springs area as a homestead well before Europeans arrived in this part of Big Bend. The steep rocky cliffs provided shelter, as well as a canvas. Rock art, including pictographs and petroglyphs, adorn the limestone walls just beyond the motel. Aprons of rock jutting into the Rio Grande reveal bedrock mortar holes once used for grinding mesquite beans and other seeds. J. O. Langford found that Native Americans had bathed in the hot springs where the hot water "....poured off a lip of rock and into the casket-like bathtub that the Indians built sometime in the past by chipping out and enlarging a fissure in the flat layer of sedimentary rock." The later construction of the bathhouse covered that historic tub.