Among the pioneers who settled in the vicinity of the Indian Healing Spring before the town of Eureka Springs was founded was the Gaskin family who located on Leatherwood Creek in 1856. “Uncle Johnny” as he was affectionately called by his friends, was one of the famous bear hunters of the Ozarks and he left a record of his hunting adventures in a booklet entitled, “Life and Adventures of John Gaskins in the Early History of Northwest Arkansas.” This little book, published at Eureka Springs in 1893, tells the Gaskin story from the time the family moved from Washington County, Indiana to Carroll County, Arkansas in 1839, up to and beyond the founding of Eureka Springs half a century later. Most of it consists of his hunting escapades (he killed 200 bears in thirty years), but there are some references to his neighbors and the economic set-up of that day. In the introduction he tells about the discovery of the springs and the community’s early development. “As I was one of the first settlers in the country, living along the creek three miles below Eureka Springs for thirty-eight years, I will tell something about the discovery of that place. “I had hunted all over these mountains—killed bears and panthers and many other wild animals in nearly every gulch and cave in that vicinity. I have killed nine bears in the hollow near the Dairy Spring and many deer, for that was a good place for them. My regular stopping place was the Rock House, or cave, above the Basin Spring in which Alvah Jackson camped on his hunting trips. We often camped there, using the Basin water for our coffee and never imagining it was more than pure water, until Uncle Alvah camped there with them. They simply dipped the water up from the little basin. “Then Uncle Alvah began to use the water for other diseases, finding that it was beneficial. He induced Judge Saunders and Mr. Whitson to go there in the summer of ’79. Then others began to come and were cured and benefitted; the whole sides of the mountains were covered with tents. “I was there every day, watching and wondering. The people crowded around the Basin Spring (that was the only spring at first, though in a short time others were discovered) dipping up the water that poured down over the rock into the little basin, one waiting on the other. “I would watch for hours, wondering how it could be that I had used the water so long and now to see the crowds gathering there for the cure of all kinds of diseases. Many who were not able to walk would use the water and be able in two or three weeks to climb the mountains, at that time steep and rugged and without roads. Wagons would turn over in trying to drive too near the springs. Once on the bench of the mountains they would take off the wheels, and let the axles rest on the ground. Then tents and afterwards houses were erected.