American History – June 2019

44 AMERICAN HISTORY

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and Van Trump came to a massive square outcropping left

by glaciers. Clinging to the rock, they felt for footholds along

a narrow debris-covered saddle. As they shuffled, their boots

loosened stones that clattered into the icy abyss.

After 400 yards, the ledge intersected a snowfield leading

to the dome high above. As the men climbed a slick gutter

where glacier met rock, boulders and ice thundered down.

One struck the staff in Van Trump’s hand.

In late 1857, when his father’s term as governor expired,

Hazard and the rest of the family moved east to Boston. In

1860, he entered Harvard College. When war broke out in

1861, his father assumed command of the 79th New York

Highlander Volunteers. After freshman year, Hazard joined

that unit. That September Isaac Stevens wrote to his wife to

report proudly that he had appointed their 19-year-old his

adjutant general. A year later, at the Battle of Chantilly, Vir-

ginia, Brigadier General Stevens was killed leading a charge;

young Captain Stevens lay wounded on the same field.

Margaret Stevens begged her son to come home to help

raise his sisters. Hazard rejoined the Army of the Potomac.

He wrote almost daily to his mother, sending every dime of

salary he could spare, along with the proceeds of bets he won

racing on horseback. “Happy are they who die nobly on the

battlefield, instead of disgracing their manhood by staying at

home at a time like this,” he wrote his mother. He fought at

Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Petersburg,

and elsewhere. During the siege of Suffolk, Virginia, on April

19, 1863, he led a charge under heavy fire across the Nanse-

mond River to capture a fort. “I have seen so much of life

that I can take mighty good care of myself,” he wrote home.

Van Trump’s stick disappeared, caroming into Nisqually

Glacier. To keep from joining the wayward staff, the men

climbed onto the snowfield and took turns hacking steps

with an ice axe. The arduous process brought them to the

crevasse, on whose far side an ice pinnacle rose about 12 feet.

Trusting in hemp, frozen water, and his knot-tying skills,

Stevens lassoed the ice spike. Tightening the noose and

swinging on the rope, he and Van Trump each crossed to the

far wall and clambered hand over hand to solid ground. The

mountain’s southwest peak was in sight but thin air forced

them to rest often as they crept in a violent wind from the

snowfield to a 10-foot wide ledge poking from the main cone.

At the highest point, which they named Peak Success, they

fastened a flag to Stevens’s staff and stood, shouting in tri-

umph. “And weak cheers they seemed, for at that lonely

height there was nothing to echo or prolong the sound,” Van

Trump said later. “The wind was now a perfect tempest, and

bitterly cold; smoke and mist were flying about the base of

the mountain, half hiding, half revealing its gigantic outlines;

and the whole scene was sublimely awful,” Stevens wrote.

From Another Angle

Emmons Glacier, on

Rainier’s northeast

flank, is the largest of

the peak’s 25 ice flows.

Namesake and Legacy

British Admiral Peter

Rainier, left, lent his

name to the mountain

that, upon that first as-

cent, became wildly pop-

ular with climbers.