48 AMERICAN HISTORY
FRO
MT
O
P
:^ LIBR
A
R
Y^
O
F^C
O
N
G
R
ESS/G
ETTYIMA
G
ES;^ WASH
ING
TON
HISTOR
ICA
L^
S
O
C
IET
Y^experience, not everyone believed their extraordinary feat.
However, two months later, when a second party sought the
Rainier summit, its members found the crevasse-crossing
rope hanging where Stevens had left it. On subsequent
ascents, Stevens and Van Trump would search for their
plaque and canteen, but never find them.
The government hired Van Trump as the first ranger in
what in 1899 would become Mount Rainier National Park. By
1900, more than 100 people had summited Rainier. A profes-
sional guide service established in 1905 brought those ranks
to multiple hundreds. Van Trump remained at the center of a
debate over the mountain’s name, arguing passionately and
in vain for preservation of the Indian appellation, Takoma.
Stevens’s unexcused 17-day absence cost him his job as a
federal revenue collector. He had his law license to fall back
on, and went to work for the Northern Pacific Railway,
chasing timber thieves. In 1874 President Ulysses S. Grant
appointed him commissioner to investigate remaining Brit-
ish claims on the San Juan Islands, an archipelago on the
Canadian border that had been awarded to the United States
through international arbitration.
In 1875, the Stevens family again moved to Boston. Haz-
ard Stevens opened a law practice and flirted with politics.
In 1894, the U.S. Army awarded him the Medal of Honor for
valor at Suffolk. Denied a generalship at the outbreak of the
Spanish War, he published The Life of Isaac Ingalls Stevens,
a passionate 1,000-page defense of his father’s legacy, in
- Stevens never married. Still smitten with Rainier, he
returned to Washington in 1916, living in Olympia. On Octo-
ber 11, 1918, less than two months after climbing to his base
camp on Rainier at 76, the conqueror of the highest peak in
the Cascades died.
He had fallen down the stairs of his farmhouse. +
Their St. Crispin’s Day
At the Washington State Historical Society in
Tacoma, Stevens, left, and Van Trump hold the
flag they carried on their August 1870 ascent.
Harbor View
An 1887 stereograph vividly
illustrates the mountain’s
presence in the region.