American History – June 2019

42 AMERICAN HISTORY

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Most days, the convergence of

warm ocean air and cold

mountain drafts shrouded

the active volcano in a cap

of elliptical clouds. In

clear weather, the moun-

tain’s snowy dome,

adorned with three dis-

tinct peaks and a pair of

craters formed 2,000

year ago in Rainier’s last

significant eruption, was

visible for more than 100

miles in any direction.

Seeing the mountain from

Puget Sound in 1792,

English explorer George Van-

couver had named it for his

friend, Rear Admiral Peter Rain-

ier. Most local Indians knew the

stone mass as Takoma, by various

spellings, meaning “mother of waters.”

More than two dozen glaciers extended from

the dome, carving the mountain’s iconic shape of

broad ridges and deep snowy valleys and giving milky life,

thanks to finely ground stone dust suspended in melt water,

to six river systems feeding dense evergreen forests stretch-

ing miles in every direction.

Rainier’s virgin summit had long taunted would-be con-

querors. The most promising route to a point from which to

ascend was the bed of the Nisqually River, which flowed

from a glacier by the same name and made a sharp turn

west at the sawtooth Tatoosh Range that guarded Rainier’s

southern flank. En route to the Puget Sound, the river

passed the nearest road’s end at Yelm Prairie, some

30 miles east of Olympia.

Native Americans hunted mountain goats as

high as Rainier’s snowline, but would go no

farther, fearing an evil spirit said to rule over

a lake of fire at the summit. In 1833, Scottish

doctor William Fraser Tolmie was the first

white man to approach Rainier on foot. Tol-

mie, who had come searching for medicinal

herbs, wrote in his journal that he had had to

stop short of the mountain when he came to

“inaccessible precipices.” In the decades since,

topographers and engineers had made attempts

at summiting Rainier. The most recent, Augus-

tus Kautz, had come within 400 feet of the

summit in July 1857 when nasty weather turned

him back. The next year, hoping to build a

wagon road across the Cascades, local pioneer

James Longmire helped cut a crude trail from

his home at Yelm Prairie to

the foot of the Tatoosh

Range, a craggy gateway

to Rainier’s forested base.

In 1867, Stevens met

Van Trump, who had

learned to climb in the

Rockies. They shared

an ambition to summit

Rainier; Van Trump

could have been speak-

ing for them both when

he described Stevens as

“a young man of indomi-

table energy and push, on

whom obstacles acted only

as spurs to action.” Forest

fires the summers of 1868 and

1869 forced them to postpone an

attempt. In early August 1870, they

traveled to Yelm Prairie to hire Long-

mire as a guide. As dusk fell, they stopped to

admire the mountain, that day without its usual

cloud cap. “Rainier loomed up directly in front in full view

over the fringe of forest, and the declining sun lit up with a

crimson glow the whole white mass, bringing out in bold

relief every rugged, rocky outline,” Stevens wrote later in

The Atlantic Monthly. “Our admiration was not so noisy as

usual. Perhaps a little of dread mingled with it.”

Stevens and Van Trump returned to Yelm on August 8

with Edmund T. Coleman, 46. Two years before, Coleman,

an Englishman experienced at Swiss alpine ascents, had

been among the first to scale 10,781-foot Mount Baker,

100 miles north of Rainier. Brimming with opti-

mism, the three climbing partners carried a pair

of flags—a 13-star revolutionary version, and a

contemporary 32-star version—and a brass

plate bearing their names, which they

planned to plant at the summit. Longmire

again bushwhacked his trail for more than

60 miles up the Nisqually, delivering the trio

to Bear Prairie, where Rainier towered.

“Startlingly near it looked to our eyes, accus-

tomed to the restricted views and gloom of

the forest,” Stevens wrote. The climbers hired a

Yakama Indian guide, Sluiskin. Each was to

pay Sluiskin $1 per day to supply fresh meat

and convey them to Rainier’s permanent

snowline, where the buckskin-clad guide

would leave them to ascend the mountain. The

Indian swore the best approach was to depart

the Nisqually and cross the Tatoosh Range.

Like Father, Like Son

Hazard Stevens, top,

learned to be a man

from his father Isaac

Ingalls Stevens.