Chapter III: The Story of the Mountain

I asked myself, How was this colossal work performed? Who
chiseled these mighty and picturesque masses out of a mere
protuberance of earth? And the answer was at hand. Ever young,
ever mighty, with the vigor of a thousand worlds still within
him, the real sculptor was even then climbing up the eastern sky.
It was he who planted the glaciers on the mountain slopes, thus
giving gravity a plough to open out the valleys; and it is he
who, acting through the ages, will finally lay low these mighty
monuments, * * * so that the people of an older earth may see
mould spread and corn wave over the hidden rocks which at this
moment bear the weight of the Jungfrau.--_John Tyndall: "Hours of
Exercise in the Alps."_

The life of a glacier is one eternal grind.--_John Muir._

Our stately Mountain, in its youth, was as comely and symmetrical a cone as ever graced the galaxy of volcanic peaks. To-day, while still young as compared with the obelisk crags of the Alps, it has already taken on the venerable and deeply-scarred physiognomy of a veteran. It is no longer merely an overgrown boy among the hills, but, cut and torn by the ice of centuries, it is fast assuming the dignity and interest of a patriarch of the mountains.

To some, no doubt, the smooth, youthful contours of an active volcano seem more beautiful than the rugged grandeur of the Weisshorn. The perfect cone of Mt. St. Helens, until recently in eruption, pleases them more than the broad dome of Mt. Adams, rounded by an explosion in the unknown past. But for those who love nature and the story written upon its {p.079} face, mountains have character as truly as men, and they show it in their features as clearly.

Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the monarch of the Cascades. No longer the huge conical pimple which a volcano erected on the earth's crust, it bears upon it the history of its own explosion, which scattered its top far over the landscape, and of its losing battle with the sun, which, employing the heaviest of all {p.080} tools, is steadily destroying it. It has already lost a tenth of its height and a third of its bulk. The ice is cutting deeper and deeper into its sides. Upon three of them, it has excavated great amphitheaters, which it is ceaselessly driving back toward the heart of the peak. As if to compensate for losses in size and shapeliness, the Mountain presents the most important phenomena of glacial action to be seen in the United States.

In its dimensions, however, it is still one of the world's great peaks. The Rainier National Park, eighteen miles square--as large as many counties in the East--has an elevation along its western and lowest boundary averaging four thousand feet above sea level. Assuming a diameter for the peak of only twenty miles, the {p.081} area occupied by this creature of a volcano exceeds three hundred square miles. Of its vast surface upwards of 32,500 acres, or about fifty-one square miles, are covered by glaciers or the fields of perpetual snow which feed them. A straight line drawn through from the end of North Tahoma glacier, on the west side, to the end of White glacier, on the east, would be thirteen miles long. The circumference of the crest on the 10,000-foot contour is nearly seven miles. Its glacial system is, and doubtless has long been, the most extensive on the continent, south of Alaska; it is said by scientists to outrank that of any mountain in Europe. The twelve primary glaciers vary in length from three to eight miles, and from half a mile to three miles in width. There are nearly as many "interglaciers," or smaller ice streams which gather their snow supply, not from the névé fields of the summit, but within the wedges of rock which the greater glaciers have left pointing upward on the higher slopes.

The geological story may be told in a few untechnical words. As those folds in the earth's crust which parallel the coast were slowly formed by the lateral pressure of sea upon land, fractures often occurred in the general incline thus {p.082} created. Through the fissures that resulted the subterranean fires thrust molten rock. In many cases, the expulsion was of sufficient amount and duration to form clearly defined volcanic craters. The most active craters built up, by continued eruptions of lava and ashes, a great series of cones now seen on both sides of the Cordillera, that huge mountain system which borders the Pacific from Behring sea to the Straits of Magellan. Tacoma-Rainier is one of the more important units in this army of volcanic giants.

Unlike some of its companions, however, it owes its bulk less to lava flows than to the explosive eruptions which threw forth bombs and scoriae. It is a mass of agglomerates, with only occasional strata of solid volcanic rock. This becomes evident to one who inspects the exposed sides of any of the canyons, or of the great cliffs, Gibraltar Rock, Little Tahoma or Russell Peak. It is made clear in such pictures as are on this page and the next.

This looseness of structure accounts for the rapidity with which the glaciers are cutting into the peak, and carrying it away. Most of them carry an extraordinary amount of debris, to be deposited in lateral or terminal moraines, or dropped in streams which they feed. They are rivers of rock as well as of ice.

{p.083} That the glaciers of this and every other mountain in the northern hemisphere are receding, and that they are now mere pygmies compared with their former selves, is well known. What their destructive power must have been when their volume was many times greater than now may be judged from the moraines along their former channels. Some of these ridges are hundreds of feet in height. As you go to the Mountain from Tacoma, either by the Tacoma Eastern railway or the Nisqually canyon road, you find them everywhere above the prairies. They are largest on the north side of the Mountain, because there the largest glaciers have been busy. Many of them, on all sides, are covered with forests that must be centuries old.

Even now, diminished as they are, the glaciers are fast transporting the Mountain toward the sea. Wherever a glacier skirts a cliff, it is cutting into its side, as it cuts into its own bed below. From the overhanging rocks, too, debris falls as a result of "weathering." The daily ebb and flow of frost and heat help greatly to tear down the cliffs. Thus marginal moraines built of the debris begin to form, on the ice, far up the side of the peak. As the glacier advances, driven by its weight and the resistless mass of snow above, it is often joined by another glacier, bringing its own marginal moraines. Where the two meet, a medial moraine results. (See illustrations, pp. 68 and 77.) Some medial moraines are many feet high. Trees are found growing on them. In Switzerland houses are built upon them. Often the debris which they transport, as the ice carries them forward, includes rocks as big as a ship.

A glacier's flow varies from a hundred to a thousand feet or more a year, depending upon {p.085} its volume, its width, and the slope of its bed. As the decades pass, its level is greatly lowered by the melting of the ice. More and more, earth and rocks accumulate upon the surface, as it travels onward, and are scattered over it by the rains and melting snow. At last, in its old age, when far down its canyon, the glacier is completely hidden, save where crevasses reveal the ice. Only at its snout, where it breaks off, as a rule, in a high wall of ice, do we realize how huge a volume and weight it must have, far above toward its sources, or why so many of the crevasses on the upper ice fields seem almost bottomless.

These hints of the almost inconceivable mass of a glacier, with its millions of millions of tons, suggest how much of the Mountain has already been whittled and planed away. But here we may do better than speculate. The original surface of the peak is clearly indicated by the tops of the great rocks which have survived the glacial sculpturing. These rise from one to two thousand feet above the glaciers, which are themselves several thousand feet in depth. The best known of them is the point formed by Gibraltar and the ridges that stretch downward from it, Cowlitz Cleaver and Cathedral Rocks, making a great inverted V. Eastward of this, another V with its apex toward the summit, is called Little Tahoma; and beyond, still another, Steamboat Prow, forming the tip of "The Wedge."

Spines of rock like these are found on all sides of the peak. They help us to estimate its greater circumference and bulk, before the glaciers had chiseled so deep.

{p.086} But they do even more. Wherever lava flows occurred in the building of the Mountain, strata formed; and such stratification is clearly seen at intervals on the sides of the great rocks just mentioned. Its incline, of course, is that of the former surface. The strata point upward--not toward the summit which we see, but far above it. For this reason the geologists who have examined the arêtes most closely are agreed that the peak has lost nearly two thousand feet of its height. It blew its own head off!

Such explosive eruptions are among the worst vices of volcanoes. Every visitor to Naples remembers how plainly the landscape north of Vesuvius tells of a prehistoric decapitation, which left only a low, broad platform, on the south rim of which the little Vesuvius that many of us have climbed was formed by later eruptions, while a part of the north rim is well defined in "Monte Somma." Similarly, here at home, Mt. Adams and Mt. Baker are truncated cones, while, on the other hand, St. Helens and Hood are still symmetrical.

Like Vesuvius, too, Rainier-Tacoma has built upon the plateau left when it lost its head. Peak Success, overlooking Indian Henry's, and Liberty Cap, the northern elevation, seen from Seattle and Tacoma, are nearly three miles apart on the west side of the broad summit. These are parts of the rim of the old crater. East of the line uniting them, and about two miles from each, the volcano built up an elevation now known as Crater Peak, comprising two small adjacent craters. These burnt-out craters are now filled with snow, and where the rims touch, a big snow-hill rises--the strange creature of eddying winds that sweep up through the great flume cut by volcanic explosion and glacial action in the west side of the peak. (See pp. 14, 27, and 52.)

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This mound of snow is the present actual top. Believing it the highest point in the United States south of Alaska, a party of climbers, in 1894, named it "Columbia's Crest." This was long thought to be the Mountain's rightful distinction, for different computations by experts gave various elevations ranging as high as 14,529 feet, with none prior to 1902 giving less than 14,444 feet. Even upon a government map published as late as 1907 the height is stated as 14,526 feet. In view of this variety of expert opinion, the flattering name, not unnaturally, has stuck, in spite of the fact that the government geographers have now adopted, for the Dictionary of Altitudes, the height found by the United States Geological Survey in 1902, 14,363 feet. That decision leaves the honor of being the loftiest peak between Alaska and Mexico to Mt. Whitney in the California Sierra (14,502 feet).

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The definitive map of the National Park which was begun last summer by the Geological Survey, with Mr. Francois E. Matthes in charge, will establish the elevations of all important landmarks in the Park. Among these will be the Mountain itself. Whether this will add much, if anything, to the current figure of the Dictionary is uncertain. In any case, the result will not lessen the pride of the Northwest in its great peak. A few feet of height signify nothing. No California mountain masked behind the Sierra can vie in majesty with this lonely pile that rises in stately grandeur from the shores of Puget Sound.

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The wide area which the Mountain thrusts far up into the sky is a highly efficient condenser of moisture. Near to the Pacific as it is, its broad summit and upper slopes collect several hundred feet of snow each year from the warm Chinooks blowing in from the west. On all sides this vast mass presses down, hardened into solid granular névé, to feed the twelve primary glaciers. Starting eastward from Paradise Valley, these principal ice-streams are: Cowlitz and Ingraham glaciers; White or White River glacier, largest of all; Winthrop glacier, named in honor of Theodore Winthrop, in whose romance of travel, "The Canoe and the Saddle," the ancient Indian name "Tacoma" was first printed; Carbon, North and South Mowich, Puyallup, North and South Tahoma, Kautz and Nisqually glaciers. The most important secondary glaciers, or "interglaciers," rising within the great rock wedges which I have described, are called Interglacier, Frying-Pan, {p.094} Stevens, Paradise and Van Trump. All of these are of the true Alpine type; that is, they are moving rivers of ice, as distinguished from "continental glaciers," the ice caps which cover vast regions in the Arctic and Antarctic.

In thus naming the glaciers, I have followed the time-honored local usage, giving the names applied by the earliest explorers and since used with little variation in the Northwest. There has been some confusion, however, chiefly owing to a recent government map. For instance, in that publication, White glacier, properly so called because it is the main feeder of the White river, was named Emmons glacier, after S. F. Emmons, a geologist who was one of the first to visit it. It is interesting to note that in his reports Mr. Emmons himself called this the White River glacier. On the other hand, the map mentioned, after displacing the name White from the larger glacier to which it logically belongs, gave it to the ice-stream feeding another branch of the White river, namely, the glacier always locally called the Winthrop, and so called by Prof. Russell in his report to the Geological Survey in 1897.

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Similarly, North and South Mowich, names of the streams to which they give birth, were miscalled Willis and Edmunds glaciers, after Bailey Willis, geologist, and George F. Edmunds, late United States senator, who visited the Mountain many years ago. The Mowich rivers were so named by the Indians from the fact that, in the great rocks on the northwest side of the peak, just below the summit, they saw the figure of the mowich, or deer. The deer of rock is there still--he may be seen in several pictures in this volume,--and so long as he keeps to his icy pasture it will be difficult to displace his name from the glaciers and rivers below. The southern branch of the great Tahoma glacier, locally called South Tahoma glacier, this map renamed Wilson glacier, for A. D. Wilson, Emmons's companion in exploration. Finally, the name of General Hazard Stevens, who, {p.097} with Mr. Van Trump, made the first ascent of the peak in 1870, was misplaced, being given to the west branch of the Nisqually, whereas the general usage has fixed the name of that pioneer upon the well-defined interglacier east of the Paradise, and above Stevens canyon, which in its prime it carved on the side of the Mountain. General Stevens himself writes me from Boston that this is the correct usage.

Such errors in an official document are the more inexcusable because their author ignored local names recognized in the earlier publications of the government and its agents. In such matters, too, the safe principle is to follow local custom where that is logical and established. The new map prepared by Mr. Ricksecker, and printed herewith, returns to the older and better usage. Unless good reason can be shown for departing from it, his careful compilation should be followed. Willis Wall, above Carbon Glacier, appropriately recalls the work of Bailey Willis. The explorations of Emmons and Wilson may well be commemorated by landmarks as yet unnamed, not by displacing fit names long current.

In connection with his survey of the Park, Mr. Matthes has been authorized to collect local testimony as to established names within that area, and to invite suggestions as to appropriate names for landmarks not yet definitely named. His report will doubtless go to the National Geographic Board for final decision on the names recommended. Thus, in time, we may hope to see this awkward and confusing tangle in mountain nomenclature straightened out.

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The written history of the Mountain begins with its discovery by Captain George Vancouver. Its first appearance upon a map occurs in Vancouver's well-known report, published in 1798, after his death: "Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and around the World, 1790-1795."

It was in the summer of 1792, shortly after Vancouver had entered the Sound, he tells us, that he first saw "a very remarkable high round mountain, covered with snow, apparently at the southern extremity of the distant snowy range." A few days later he again mentions "the round snowy mountain," "which, after my friend Rear-Admiral Rainier, I distinguished by the name of Mount Rainier." Nearly all of Captain Vancouver's friends were thus distinguished, at the cost of the Indian names, to which doubtless he gave no thought. Sonorous "Kulshan" and unique "Whulge" were lost, in order that we might celebrate "Mr. Baker" and "Mr. Puget," junior officers of Vancouver's expedition.

{p.100}

Happily, the fine Indian name "Tacoma" was not offered up a sacrifice to such obscurity. Forgotten as he is now, Peter Rainier was, in his time, something of a figure. After some ransacking of libraries, I have found a page that gives us a glimpse of a certain hard-fought though unequal combat, in the year 1778, between an American privateer and two British ships. It is of interest in connection with "Mount Rainier," the name recognized by the Geographic Board at Washington in 1889 as official.

On the 8th of July, the 14-gun ship Ostrich, Commander Peter
Rainier, on the Jamaica station, in company with the 10-gun armed
brig Lowestoffe's Prize, chased a large brig. After a long run,
the Ostrich brought the brig, which was the American privateer
Polly, to action, and, after an engagement of three hours'
duration (by which time the Lowestoffe's Prize had arrived up and
{p.101} taken part in the contest), compelled her to surrender.
* * * * Captain Rainier was wounded by a musket ball through the
left breast; he could not, however, be prevailed upon to go
below, but remained on deck till the close of the action. He was
posted, and appointed to command the 64-gun ship Burford.
(_Allen: "Battles of the British Navy,"_ Vol. I., London, 1872).

Before quitting with Vancouver and eighteenth-century history of the Mountain, I note that our peak enjoyed a further honor. Captain Vancouver records an interesting event that took place on the anniversary of King George's birth;--"on which auspicious day," he says, "I had long since designed to take formal possession of all the countries we had lately been employed in exploring, in the name of, and for, His Britannic Majesty, his heirs and successors." And he did!

After Vancouver's brief mention, and the caricature of our peak printed in his work, literature is practically silent about the Mountain for more than sixty years. Those years witnessed the failure of England's memorable struggle to make good Vancouver's "annexation." Oregon was at last a state. Out of its original area Washington Territory had just been carved. In that year of 1853 {p.102} came Theodore Winthrop, of the old New England family, who was destined to a lasting and pathetic fame as an author of delightful books and a victim of the first battle of the Civil War. Sailing into what is now the harbor of the city of Tacoma, he there beheld the peak. We feel his enthusiasm as he tells of the appeal it made to him.

We had rounded a point, and opened Puyallop Bay, a breadth of
sheltered calmness, when I was suddenly aware of a vast white
shadow in the water. What cloud, piled massive on the horizon,
could cast an image so sharp in outline, so full of vigorous
detail of surface? No cloud, but a cloud compeller. It was a
giant mountain dome of snow, swelling and seeming to fill the
aerial spheres, as its image displaced the blue deeps of tranquil
water. Only its splendid snows were visible, high in the
unearthly regions of clear blue noonday sky.

Kingly and alone stood this majesty, without any visible consort,
though far to the north and the south its brethren and sisters
dominated their realms. Of all the peaks from California to
{p.103} Frazer's River, this one before me was royalest. Mount
Regnier[5] Christians have dubbed it, in stupid nomenclature
perpetuating the name of somebody or nobody. More melodiously the
Siwashes call it Tacoma,--a generic term also applied to all snow
peaks. Tacoma, under its ermine, is a crushed volcanic dome, or
an ancient volcano fallen in, and perhaps not yet wholly
lifeless. The domes of snow are stateliest. There may be more of
feminine beauty in the cones, and more of masculine force and
hardihood in the rough pyramids, but the great domes are calmer
and more divine.

[Footnote 5: Winthrop's error was a common one at that
time and has remained current till to-day. The admiral's
grandfather, the Huguenot exile, was "Regnier," but his
descendants anglicized the patronymic into "Rainier."]

No foot of man had ever trampled those pure snows. It was a
virginal mountain, distant from human inquisitiveness as a marble
goddess is from human loves. Yet there was nothing unsympathetic
in its isolation, or despotic in its distant majesty. Only the
thought of eternal peace arose from this heaven-upbearing
monument like incense, and, overflowing, filled the world with
deep and holy calm.

Our lives demand visual images that can be symbols to us of the
grandeur or the sweetness of repose. The noble works of nature,
and mountains most of all,

"have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence."

And, studying the light and the majesty of Tacoma, there passed
from it and entered into my being a thought and image of solemn
beauty, which I could thenceforth evoke whenever in the world I
must {p.104} have peace or die. For such emotion years of
pilgrimage were worthily spent. ("_The Canoe and the Saddle_,"
published posthumously in 1862).

In the controversy over the Mountain's name, some persons have been misled into imaging Winthrop a fabricator of pseudo-Indian nomenclature. But his work bears scrutiny. He wrote before there was any dispute as to the name, or any rivalry between towns to confound partisanship with scholarship. He was in the Territory while Captain George B. McClellan, was surveying the Cascades to find a pass for a railroad. He was in close touch with McClellan's party, and doubtless knew well its able ethnologist, George Gibbs, the Harvard man whose works on the Indian languages of the Northwest are the foundation of all later books in that field. Although he first learned it from the Indians, in all likelihood he discussed the name "Tacoma" with Gibbs, who was already collecting material for his writings, published in the {p.107} report of the Survey and in the "Contributions" of the Smithsonian Institution. Among these are the vocabularies of a score of Indian dialects, which must be mentioned here because they are conclusive as to the form, meaning and application of the name.

In his vocabulary of the Winatsha (Wenatchee) language, Gibbs entered: "T'koma, snow peak." In that of the Niswalli (Nisqually), he noted: "Takob, the name of Mt. Rainier." "T'kope," Chinook for white, is evidently closely allied. Gibbs himself tells us that the Northwestern dialects treated b and m as convertible. "Takob" is equivalent to "Takom" or "T'koma." Far, then, from coining the word, Winthrop did not even change its Indian form, as some have supposed, by modifying the mouth-filling "Tahoma" of the Yakimas into the simpler, stronger and more musical "Tacoma." This is as pure Indian as the other, and Winthrop's popularization of the word was a public service, as perpetuating one of the most significant of our Indian place-names.

I have said thus much, not to revive a musty and, to me, very amusing quarrel, but because correspondents in different parts of the country have asked regarding facts that are naturally part of the history of the Mountain. Some would even have me stir the embers of that ancient controversy. For instance, here is the _Bulletin of the Geographical Society of Philadelphia_ taking me to task:

This book would also do a great service if it would help
popularize the name "Tacoma" in spite of the Mountain's official
designation "Rainier"--a name to which it has no right when its
old Indian name is at once so beautiful and appropriate. It is to
be regretted that a more vigorous protest has not been made
against the modern name, and also against such propositions as
that of changing "Narada Falls" to "Cushman Falls."

The mistaken attempt to displace the name of Narada Falls was still-born from the start, and needed no help to kill it. There are many unnamed landmarks {p.108} in the National Park ready to commemorate Mr. Cushman's ambition to make the Mountain a real possession of all the people. As to the other matter--the name of the peak itself,--that may safely be left to the American sense of humor. But what I have said is due in justice to Winthrop, one of the finest figures in our literary history. His work in making the peak known demands that his name, given by local gratitude to one of its important glaciers, shall not be removed.

A word about the industrial value of the Mountain may not be without interest in this day of electricity. Within a radius of sixty miles of the head of Puget Sound, more water descends from high levels to the sea than in any other similar area in the United States. A great part of this is collected on the largest peak. Hydraulic engineers have estimated, on investigation, an average annual precipitation, for the summit and upper slopes, of at least 180 inches, or four times the rainfall in Tacoma or Seattle. The melting snows feed the White, Puyallup and Nisqually rivers, large streams flowing into the Sound, and the Cowlitz, an important tributary of the Columbia. The minimum flow of these streams is computed at more than 1200 second feet, while their average flow is nearly twice that total.

The utilization of this large water supply on the steep mountain slopes began in 1904 with the erection of the Electron plant of the Puget Sound Power Company. For this the water is diverted from the Puyallup river ten miles from the end of its glacier, and 1750 feet above sea level, and carried ten miles more in an open flume to a reservoir, from which four steel penstocks, each four feet in diameter, drop it to the power house 900 feet below. The plant generates 28,000 horse power, which is conveyed to Tacoma, twenty-five miles distant, at a pressure of 60,000 volts, and there is distributed for the operation of street railways, lights and factories in that city and Seattle.

A more important development is in progress on the larger White river near Buckley, where the Pacific Coast Power Company is diverting the water by a dam and eight-mile canal to Lake Tapps, elevation 540 feet above tide. From this {p.111} great reservoir it will be taken through a tunnel and pipe line to the generating plant at Dieringer, elevation 65 feet. The 100,000 horse power ultimately to be produced here will be carried fifteen miles to Tacoma, for sale to manufacturers in the Puget Sound cities.

Both these plants are enterprises of Stone & Webster, of Boston. A competitive plant is now nearing completion by the city of Tacoma, utilizing the third of the rivers emptying into the Sound. The Nisqually is dammed above its famous canyon, at an elevation of 970 feet, where its minimum flow is 300 second feet. The water will be carried through a 10,000-foot tunnel and over a bridge to a reservoir at La Grande, from which the penstocks will carry it down the side of the canyon {p.112} to the 40,000 horse-power generating plant built on a narrow shelf a few feet above the river. The city expects to be able to produce power for its own use, with a considerable margin for sale, at a cost at least as low as can be attained anywhere in the United States.

The rocks of which the Mountain is composed are mainly andesites of different classes and basalt. But the peak rests upon a platform of granite, into which the glaciers have cut in their progress. Fine exposures of the older and harder rock are seen on the Nisqually, just below the present end of its glacier, as well as on the Carbon and in Moraine Park. This accounts for the fact that the river beds are full of granite bowlders, which are grinding the softer volcanic shingle into soil. Thus the glaciers are not only fast deforming the peak. They are "sowing the seeds of continents to be."

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