Recently on eBay I picked up an interesting item. It's a flyer for the old Steamboat Springs Spa. The mention of access via passenger service on the Virginia & Truckee RR puts the date of this flyer before 1950, as that's the year the railroad ceased operations.
But what interested me was the mention of "Chicken Soup Springs". Don White mentions it in one of his USGS Professional Papers on Steamboat Springs [#458-C, 1964, pg. 74], as being #33, a spring located near Steamboat Creek south of the present-day spa buildings. I never visited it myself, as we always avoided the spa grounds.
White says that during the 1950s the discharge from this spring was fairly high as long as the discharge from nearby wells was low. The water in that spring must have been pretty bad to taste that way, and I doubt it had much nutritional value.
On the other hand this history of the Compstock Silver Lode & Mines claims that there was a "Chicken Soup Spring" located at Shaw's hot springs "a mile west of Carson City". (Waring, in [USGS PP-492, Nev.#59], lists it as 2 miles north of Carson City.) It also mentions another spring known by that name near Elko. So it may be that "chicken soup spring" was almost a generic term applied to any foul tasting or smelling spring in Nevada.
So now the question becomes, did Spring #33 acquire the name because every location with brackish springs in Nevada require it, or was it an original name that spread to other areas? And why doesn't Yellowstone have a spring with such a name?