Geologic mapping of 340 square miles (884 square kilometers) in the southern Beaverhead Mountains demonstrates that the area is a segment of the Mesozoic to early Tertiary Cordilleran thrust belt, and a northward continuation of the Idaho-Wyoming thrust salient. Five thrust plates are bounded by major west-dipping, low-angle folded thrusts that juxtapose older strata over younger, and are characterized by east-verging concentric folds, frontal ramp anticlines, and transverse tear faults. The five thrust plates, each with a distinctive stratigraphic sequence, are, in descending structural order: Hawley Creek, Fritz Creek, Cabin, Medicine Lodge, and Tendoy. The Cabin thrust plate locally includes Precambrian (Archean(?)) basement crystalline rocks along its leading edge. These crystalline rocks probably were part of an older Precambrian block uplift cut by the eastward directed Cabin thrust. Extension faults with youngest movements ranging in age from early Eocene to Holocene offset the five thrust plates. The Divide Creek extension fault zone, along which middle Paleozoic stratigraphic section is deleted, probably is of early Eocene age. Miocene to Holocene basin-range faults offset older structures, and loci of the younger faults have shifted westward through time. Thrusts and thrust plates identified in the study area also make up a large part of the central and northern Beaverhead Mountains. The Cabin thrust plate is the most extensive of these. IX The redefined Cabin thrust is more than 125 miles (200 kilometers) long, has two major lateral ramps, has Archean(?) crystalline rocks along a 48-mile (75-kilometer) segment of its leading edge in central parts of the mountains, and Middle Proterozoic Yellowjacket Formation and overlying Lemhi Group rocks in northern parts. The Cabin plate includes Archean(?) through Lower Triassic rocks in the central Beaverheads. In the northern Beaverheads, rocks of the Yellowjacket Formation and the Lemhi Group have been thrust over Belt Supergroup rocks creating a structural culmination of Proterozoic rocks in east-central Idaho. The foreland that was overridden by the easterly transported Cabin and Medicine Lodge thrust plates was deformed by northwest to southeast directed reverse faults that probably were formed and partly eroded before the thrust plates arrived in Late Cretaceous (Maestrichtian(?)) time.