Chapter I: Mount "big Snow" and Indian Tradition

Long hours we toiled up through the solemn wood,
Beneath moss-banners stretched from tree to tree;
At last upon a barren hill we stood,
And, lo, above loomed Majesty.

--_Herbert Bashford: "Mount Rainier."_

The great Mountain fascinates us by its diversity. It is an inspiration and yet a riddle to all who are drawn to the mysterious or who love the sublime. Every view which the breaking clouds vouchsafe to us is a surprise. It never becomes commonplace, save to the commonplace.

Old Virgil's gibe at mankind's better half--"varium et mutabile semper femina"--might have been written of this fickle shape of rock and ice and vapor. One tries vainly, year after year, to define it in his own mind. The daily, hourly change of distance, size and aspect, tricks which the Indian's mountain {p.018} god plays with the puny creatures swarming more and more about his foot; his days of frank neighborliness, his swift transformations from smiles to anger, his fits of sullenness and withdrawal, all baffle study. Even though we live at its base, it is impossible to say we know the Mountain, so various are the spells the sun casts over this huge dome which it is slowly chiseling away with its tools of ice, and which, in coming centuries, it will level with the plain.

We are lovers of the water as well as the hills, out here in this northwestern corner of the Republic. We spend many days--and should spend more--in cruising among the hidden bays and park-like islands which make Puget Sound the most interesting body of water in America. We grow a bit boastful about the lakes that cluster around our cities. Nowhere better than from sea level, or from the lakes raised but little above it, does one realize the bulk, the dominance, and yet the grace, of this noble peak. Its impressiveness, indeed, arises in part from the fact that it is one of the few great volcanic mountains whose entire height may be seen from tide level. Many of us can recall views of it from Lake Washington at Seattle, or from American or Spanaway Lake at Tacoma, or from the Sound, which will always haunt the memory.

Early one evening, last summer, I went with a friend to Point Defiance, Tacoma's fine park at the {p.021} end of the promontory on which the city is built. We drank in refreshment from the picture there unrolled of broad channels and evergreen shores. As sunset approached, we watched the western clouds building range upon range of golden mountains above the black, Alp-like crags of the Olympics. Then, entering a small boat, we rowed far out northward into the Sound. Overhead, and about us, the scenes of the great panorama were swiftly shifted. The western sky became a conflagration. Twilight settled upon the bay. The lights of the distant town came out, one by one, and those of the big smelter, near by, grew brilliant. No Turner ever dreamed so glorious a composition of sunlight and shade. But we were held by one vision.

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... "Where the mountain wall
Is piled to heaven, and through the narrow rift
Of the vast rocks, against whose rugged feet
Beats the mad torrent with perpetual roar:
Where noonday is as twilight, and the wind
Comes burdened with the everlasting moan
Of forests and far-off waterfalls."--Whittier.]

Yonder, in the southeast, towering above the lower shadows of harbor and hills, rose a vast pyramid of soft flame. The setting sun had thrown a mantle of rose pink over the ice of the glaciers and the great cleavers of rock which buttress the mighty dome. The rounded summit was warm with beautiful orange light. Soon the colors upon its slope changed to deeper reds, and then to amethyst, and {p.023} violet, and pearl gray. The sun-forsaken ranges below fell away to dark neutral tints. But the fires upon the crest burned on, deepening from gold to burnished copper, a colossal beacon flaming high against the sunset purple of the eastern skies. Finally, even this great light paled to a ghostly white, as the supporting foundation of mountain ridges dropped into the darkness of the long northern twilight, until the snowy summit seemed no longer a part of earth, but a veil of uncanny mist, caught up by the winds from the Pacific and floating far above the black sky-line of the solid Cascades, that

* * * heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared
Between the East and West.

And when even that apparition had faded, and the Mountain appeared only as an uncertain bulk shadowed upon the night, then came the miracle. Gradually, the east, beyond the great hills, showed a faint silver glow. Silhouetted against this dim background, the profile of the peak grew definite. With no other warning, suddenly from its summit the full moon shot forth, huge, majestic and gracious, flooding the lower world with brightness. Clouds and mountain ranges alike shone with its glory. But the great peak loomed blacker and more sullen. Only, on its head, the wide crown of snow gleamed white under the cold rays of the moon.

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No wonder that this mountain of changing moods, overtopping every other eminence in the Northwest, answered the idea of God to the simple, imaginative mind of the Indians who hunted in the forest on its slopes or fished in the waters of Whulge that ebbed and flowed at its base. Primitive peoples in every land have deified superlative manifestations of nature--the sun, the wind, great rivers, and waterfalls, the high mountains. By all the tribes within sight of its summit, this pre-eminent peak, variously called by them Tacoma (Tach-ho´ma), Tahoma or Tacob, as who should say "The Great Snow," was deemed a power to be feared and conciliated. Even when the missionaries taught them a better faith, they continued to hold the Mountain in superstitious reverence--an awe that still has power to silence their "civilized" and very unromantic descendants.

The Puget Sound tribes, with the Yakimas, Klickitats and others living just beyond the Cascades, had substantially the same language and beliefs, though differing much in physical and mental type. {p.026} East of the range, they lived by the chase. They were great horsemen and famous runners, a breed of lithe, upstanding, competent men, as keen of wit as they were stately in appearance. These were "the noble Red Men" of tradition. Fennimore Cooper might have found many a hero worthy of his pen among the savages inhabiting the fertile valley of the Columbia, which we now call the Inland Empire. But here on the Coast were the "Digger" tribes, who subsisted chiefly by spearing salmon and digging clams. Their stooped figures, flat faces, downcast eyes and low mentality reflected the life they led. Contrasting their heavy bodies with their feeble legs, which grew shorter with disuse, a Tacoma humorist last summer gravely proved to a party of English visitors that in a few generations more, had not the white man seized their fishing grounds, the squatting Siwashes would have had no legs at all!

Stolid and uninspired as he seemed to the whites, the Indian of the Sound was not without his touch of poetry. He had that imaginative curiosity which marked the native {p.028} American everywhere. He was ever peering into the causes of things, and seeing the supernatural in the world around him.[1]

[Footnote 1: Among those who have studied the Puget
Sound Indians most sympathetically is the Rev. Mr.
Hylebos of Tacoma. He came to the Northwest in 1870,
when the census gave Tacoma a white population of
seventy-three. In those days, says Father Hylebos, the
Tacoma tideflats, now filled in for mills and railway
terminals, were covered each autumn with the canoes of
Indians spearing salmon. It was no uncommon thing to see
at one time on Commencement Bay 1,800 fishermen. This
veteran worker among the "Siwashes" (French
"_sauvages_") first told me the myths that hallowed the
Mountain for every native, and the true meaning of the
beautiful Indian word "Tacoma." He knew well all the
leaders of the generation before the railways: Sluiskin,
the Klickitat chief who guided Stevens and Van Trump up
to the snow-line in 1870; Stanup, chief of the
Puyallups; Kiskax, head of the Cowlitz tribe; Angeline,
the famous daughter of Chief Seattle, godfather of the
city of that name, and many others.]

To the great Snow Mountain the Indians made frequent pilgrimages, for they thought this king of the primeval wild a divinity to be reckoned with. They dreaded its anger, seen in the storms about its head, the thunder of its avalanches, and the volcanic flashes of which their traditions told. They courted its favor, symbolized in the wild flowers that bloomed on its slope, and the tall grass that fed the mowich, or deer.

As they ascended the vast ridges, the grandeur about them spoke of the mountain god. There were groves of trees he must have planted, so orderly were they set out. The lakes of the lofty valleys seemed calmer than those on the prairies below, the foliage brighter, the ferns taller and more graceful. The song of the waterfalls here was sweeter than the music of the tamahnawas men, their Indian sorcerers. The many small meadows close to the snow-line, carpeted in deepest green and spread with flowers, were the gardens of the divinity, tended by his superhuman agents. Strange as it may seem, the nature-worship of the silent Red Man had many points in common with that of the imaginative, volatile Greek, who {p.030} peopled his mountains with immortals; and no wood in ancient Greece was ever thronged with hamadryads more real than the little gods whom the Indian saw in the forests watered by streams from Tacoma's glaciers.

Countless snows had fallen since the mountain god created and beautified this home of his, when one day he grew angry, and in his wrath showed terrible tongues of fire. Thus he ignited an immense fir forest on the south side of the peak. When his anger subsided, the flames passed, and the land they left bare became covered with blue grass and wild flowers--a great sunny country where, before, the dark forest had been. Borrowing a word from the French _coureurs des bois_ who came with the Hudson's Bay Company, the later Indians sometimes called this region "the Big Brulé"; and to this day some Americans call it the same. But for the Big Brulé the Indians had, from ancient times, another name, connected with their ideas of religion. It was their Saghalie Illahe, the "Land of Peace," Heaven. Our name, "Paradise Valley," {p.031} given to the beautiful open vale on the south slope of the Mountain, is an English equivalent.

Here was the same bar to violence which religion has erected in many lands. The Hebrews had their "Cities of Refuge." The pagan ancients made every altar an asylum. Mediæval Christianity constituted all its churches sanctuaries. Thus, in lawless ages, the hand of vengeance was stayed, and the weak were protected.

So, too, the Indian tradition ordained this home of rest and refuge. Indian custom was an eye for an eye, but on gaining this mountain haven the pursued was safe from his pursuer, the slayer might not be touched by his victim's kindred. When he crossed its border, the warrior laid down his arms. Criminals and cowards, too, were often sent here by the chiefs to do penance.

The mountain divinity, with his under-gods, figures in much of the Siwash {p.032} folklore, and the "Land of Peace" is often heard of. It is through such typical Indian legends as that of Miser, the greedy hiaqua hunter, that we learn how large a place the great Mountain filled in the thought of the aborigines.

This myth also explains why no Red Man could ever be persuaded to an ascent beyond the snow line. As to the Greek, so to the Indian the great peaks were sacred. The flames of an eruption, the fall of an avalanche, told of the wrath of the mountain god. The clouds that wrapped the summit of Tacoma spelled mystery and peril. Even so shrewd and intelligent a Siwash as Sluiskin, with all his keenness for "Boston chikamin," the white man's money, refused to accompany Stevens and Van Trump in the first ascent, in 1870; indeed, he gave them up as doomed, and bewailed their certain fate when they defied the Mountain's wrath and started for the summit in spite of his warnings.

The hero of the Hiaqua Myth is the Indian {p.035} Rip Van Winkle.[2] He dwelt at the foot of Tacoma, and, like Irving's worthy, he was a mighty hunter and fisherman. He knew the secret pools where fish could always be found, and the dark places in the forest, where the elk hid when snows were deepest. But for these things Miser cared not. His lust was all for hiaqua, the Indian shell money.

[Footnote 2: This legend is well told in "Myths and
Legends of the Pacific Northwest," a delightful book by
Katharine B. Judson of the Seattle Public Library
(Chicago, A. C. McClurg & Co.). See also Prof. W. D.
Lyman's papers in "Mazama" Vol. 2, and "The
Mountaineer," Vol. 2; and Winthrop's "Canoe and
Saddle."]

Now, Miser's totem was Moosmoos, the elk divinity. So Miser tried, even while hunting the elk, to talk with them, in order to learn where hiaqua might be found. One night Moosmoos persuaded him that on top of the Mountain he would find great store of it. Making him two elk-horn picks, and filling his ikta with dried salmon and kinnikinnick, he climbed in two nights and a day to the summit. Here he found three big rocks, one like a camas root, one like a salmon's head, the third like his friendly Moosmoos. Miser saw that Moosmoos had told him truly.

After long digging, Miser overturned the rock that was like the elk's head. Beneath lay a vast quantity of hiaqua. This he strung on elk's sinews--enough of it to make him the richest of men. Then he hurried to depart. But he left no thank-offering to the tanahnawas powers. Thereupon the whole earth shook with a mighty convulsion, and the mountain shot forth terrible fires, which melted the snows and poured floods down the slopes, where they were turned to ice again by the breath of the storm-god. And above the roar of torrents and the crash of thunder, {p.038} Miser heard the voices of all the tamahnawas, hissing: "Hiaqua! Hiaqua! Ha, ha, Hiaqua!"

Panic-stricken at the results of his greed, Miser threw down his load of treasure to propitiate the angry tamahnawas. But the storm-god hurled him down the mountain side. Miser fell into a deep sleep. Many, many snows after, he awoke to find himself far from the summit, in a pleasant country of beautiful meadows carpeted with flowers, abounding in camas roots, and musical with the song of birds. He had grown very old, with white hair falling to his shoulders. His ikta was empty, save for a few dried leaves. Recognizing the scene about him as Saghalie Illahe, he sought his old tent. It was where he had left it. There, too, was his klootchman, or wife, grown old, like himself. Thirty snows, she said, she had awaited his return. Back they went to their {p.039} home on the bank of the Cowlitz, where he became a famous tamahnawas man, and spent the rest of his days in honor, for his tribesmen recognized that the aged Indian's heart had been marvelously softened and his mind enriched by his experience upon the peak. He had lost his love for hiaqua.

Among the familiar myths of the Mountain was one of a great flood, not unlike that of Noah. I quote Miss Judson's version:

WHY THERE ARE NO SNAKES ON TAKHOMA.

A long, long time ago, Tyhce Sahale became angry with his people.
Sahale ordered a medicine man to take his bow and arrow and shoot
into the cloud which hung low over Takhoma. The medicine man shot
the arrow, and it stuck fast in the cloud. Then he shot another
into the lower end of the first. Then he shot another into the
lower end of the second. He shot arrows until he had made a chain
which reached from the cloud to the earth. The medicine man told
his klootchman and his children to climb up the arrow trail. Then
he told the good animals to climb up the arrow trail. Then the
medicine man climbed up himself. Just as he was climbing into the
cloud, he looked back. A long line of bad animals and snakes were
also climbing up the arrow trail. Therefore the medicine man
broke the chain of arrows. Thus the snakes and bad animals fell
down on the mountain side. Then at once it began to rain. It
rained until all the land was flooded. Water reached even to the
snow line of Takhoma. When all the bad animals and snakes were
drowned, it stopped raining. After a while the waters sank again.
Then the medicine man and his klootchman and the children climbed
out of the cloud and came down the mountain side. The good
animals also climbed out of the cloud. Thus there are now no
snakes or bad animals on Takhoma.

Childish and fantastic as they seem to our wise age, such legends show the Northwestern Indian struggling to interpret the world about him. Like savages everywhere, he peopled the unknown with spirits good and bad, and mingled his conception of a beneficent deity with his ideas of the evil one. Symbolism pervaded his crude but very positive mind. Ever by his side the old Siwash felt the Power that dwelt on Tacoma, protecting and aiding him, or leading him to destruction. Knowing {p.040} nothing of true worship, his primitive intelligence could imagine God only in things either the most beautiful or the most terrifying; and the more we know the Mountain, the more easily we shall understand why he deemed the majestic peak a factor of his destiny--an infinite force that could, at will, bless or destroy. For to us, too, though we have no illusions as to its supernatural powers, the majestic peak may bring a message. Before me is a letter from an inspiring New England writer, who has well earned the right to appraise life's values. "I saw the great Mountain three years ago," she says; "would that it might ever be my lot to see it again! I love to dream of its glory, and its vast whiteness is a moral force in my life."

Perpetual
And snowy tabernacle of the land,
While purples at thy base this peaceful sea,
And all thy hither slopes in evening bathe,
I hear soft twilight voices calling down
From all thy summits unto prayer and love.

--_Francis Brooks: "Mt. Rainier."_

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