XIII. OREGON AND WASHINGTON SNOW-PEAKS.

FROM PORTLAND TO TACOMA—VIEWS OF AND FROM MT. HOOD—AMERICAN SCENERY—ADVANTAGES OF ISOLATION—ASCENT OF MT. ST. HELENS—MASCULINE AND FEMININE PEAKS—TACOMA AND THE JUNGFRAU—AMERICAN NAMES FOR AMERICAN MOUNTAINS—INDIAN NAMES—A HOP VALLEY—CASCADE DIVISION OF THE NORTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD—MT. TACOMA—ITS FOURTEEN GLACIERS AND FIVE RIVERS.

There is geological evidence that Washington’s great inland sea, Puget Sound, the Pacific Mediterranean, once extended as far south as the Willamette Valley in Oregon. To-day, Portland and Tacoma are about one hundred and fifty miles apart, and the trip may be made either by boat down the Columbia and through the Straits of Juan de Fuca into the Sound, or by the branch road of the Northern Pacific Railroad overland. In either case, if the view is not impeded by smoke or clouds, a magnificent panorama of snow-peaks is unfolded as the boat or train moves along. Ruskin’s assertion that “mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery” is strikingly verified on this route. Oregon without Mt. Hood, Mt. Jefferson, and the Three Sisters, Washington without Mts. St. Helens, Adams, and Tacoma, would be robbed of half their scenic charms. All of these mountains, except Jefferson and the Three Sisters, are seen to best advantage on this trip,—Hood, Adams, and St. Helens before reaching the Columbia River (which the train crosses on a large ferry-boat), and Tacoma at the other end.

Although these peaks resemble each other in standing each in selfish, proud isolation, far from neighbors, and high above the general crests of the Cascades, which barely rise to their snow-line; and although they are all more or less regularly conical in shape, broad at the base and gradually tapering to a point, there is still quite enough difference in the details of their conformation to give them a distinct individuality of appearance. Mt. Hood, as seen from Portland, bears a striking resemblance to Mt. Hecla in Iceland. The south side, which slopes more gradually than the north side, is one vast snowfield, with hardly a dark spot of bare rock, till late in summer. In the forenoon the mountain often throws such deep shadows that it seems as if the snow had melted from its sides; but the noon sunlight reveals it all in its old place. During a long warm summer the snow-line recedes considerably, but the upper half of the mountain is crowned with everlasting snow; and it is for this reason that Hood seems larger and higher than Shasta in summer, though it is half a mile lower: for white makes every object seem larger or broader than black or gray. Over the peaks of Washington, Mt. Hood has at present this advantage, that it alone is accessible by a road; and more than this, a hotel was opened in 1889 above the snow-line, and only a few hundred yards from the great glacier; so that Portlanders can transfer themselves half-way up their favorite mountain in about eight hours by rail and stage.

Mountains are not only the beginning and end of all natural scenery, but they are the scenic feature of which one is least apt to tire. A snow-mountain is a fresh object of interest every clear morning. Unlike a leopard, it constantly changes its spots under the influence of the sun’s rays; and when these dark patches have become too numerous and too large to be ornamental, a snow-storm comes along and covers it with a new white magnifying cloak. Surely the man who has no love of mountains in his soul is fit for treason, stratagem, and crime.

Mr. James Bryce, who has given us the most just and discriminating work on this country ever written by an Englishman, but who, as noted in a previous chapter, speaks somewhat disparagingly of the mountain scenery of the United States as compared with that of Europe, was nevertheless compelled to pay his tribute of admiration to “the superb line of extinct volcanoes, bearing snow-fields and glaciers, which one sees rising out of vast and sombre forests, from the banks of the Columbia River and the shores of Puget Sound.” These are encouraging and kind words, coming from an English source, but they hardly do justice to the subject. It is not only from the banks of the Columbia and the Puget Sound region that these giant peaks are visible, but there is hardly a place in Western Oregon or Washington, elevated above the level of the forests, whence one does not enjoy a superb view of from one to six isolated snow-mountains. This isolation must be again and again emphasized, not only because to it these Oregon and Washington mountains owe their individuality and unique grandeur, but also because the view from any one of these isolated peaks is much more striking and comprehensive than a mountain view in ranges where the peaks are grouped closely together. Everybody knows that the Rigi owes its world-wide fame solely to the fact that its isolation enables tourists to get a comprehensive view of the Swiss Alps from its summit. Now our North Pacific peaks are even more isolated than the Rigi, which has the Pilatus for its immediate neighbor, and they are, moreover, twice as high as Rigi. Imagine, therefore, the grandeur of the view from their summits. I have made the ascent of some of the highest Swiss peaks, and of Mt. Hood; and although in the latter case I missed the bewildering view of closely grouped snow-peaks which meets the eye on a Swiss summit, there was something to compensate for this in the superior restfulness, individuality, and comprehensiveness of a Pacific scene which included only eight or nine isolated snow-peaks, but with an illimitable ocean of green forests between them. All the Oregon and Washington peaks were visible, and had the air been perfectly clear, even Mt. Shasta, two hundred and fifty miles away, might have been seen with a telescope. Add to this the mountains which encircle the Umpqua and Rogue River valleys, on the south, and Puget Sound with the snowy Olympic mountains on the north, and by way of contrast, the Columbia River and Willamette valleys on the west, and the vast plains of Eastern Oregon on the opposite side, and you get a faint idea of the grandeur of the view from the summit of Mt. Hood, provided there is no smoke or haze in the air.

I cannot stop to describe all the peaks in Oregon and Washington, but a few remarks on the two best known Washington peaks—St. Helens and Tacoma—may not be unwelcome while our train is speeding on towards Puget Sound, through a region which, except for these glimpses of superb mountains, would be a monotonous ride across a dreary, desolate forest wilderness.

Mt. St. Helens is so prominent an object as seen from the streets of Portland, that tourists are apt to fancy that it must be an Oregon mountain, like Hood. But it must be remembered that the Columbia River, which forms the boundary between Oregon and Washington, is only twelve miles distant from Portland, and that East Portland is practically situated on a peninsula formed by the approaching Willamette and Columbia rivers. Being farther north than Mt. Hood, Mt. St. Helens retains somewhat more of its snowy whiteness in summer; but there is a place near the summit which is always kept bare by its internal volcanic heat. The slopes of St. Helens are steeper than those of Hood, and its conical shape is beautifully symmetrical and smoothly rounded, as compared with the more rugged Hood, which gives it a feminine appearance. The Indians have a legend that when St. Helens, Hood, and Adams were created, they were big women who had one husband in common. The result was jealousy, and a fight in which St. Helens whipped Hood and the other mountains, and made slaves of them. In this legend the Indians did not, I think, show their usual poetic imagination. The lovely, rounded, and regular appearance of St. Helens should have suggested a legend in which this mountain was made the wife of the more irregular, muscular, and sinewy Hood.

St. Helens, although its slopes are steeper than those of Hood, is considered quite as easy of ascent. But the attempt is very rarely made at present, because the mountain is so inaccessible,—Woodland, the nearest place where supplies can be obtained, being nearly fifty miles away, and the path very indistinct. Two years ago the Oregon Alpine Club decided to put a copper box and a record book on the summit of every snow-peak on the Pacific Coast. In pursuance of this object, a party last summer made an ascent of Mt. St. Helens, of which Mr. W. G. Steele wrote an interesting account in the Oregonian (July 27, 1889). About twelve miles from the mountain they came across Trout Lake, in which two of the party caught one hundred and fifty pounds of trout in a day. The base of the mountain has an elevation of 4625 feet, and from this point St. Helens seems higher than Hood, because it rises more rapidly from the surrounding country. The main summit was found to be 11,150 feet high. “Judging the mountain as it appears from Portland,” Mr. Steele says, “we had been led to suppose that the summit would be almost a perfect circle. Instead of that, however, it is slightly inclined to a square, and probably contains half a section of land, or rather snow.” Magnificent rugged glaciers were found near the summit, and on the way up the party made the interesting discovery that beneath the confused masses of scoria which made up the mountain side, an immense glacier was concealed, “which day after day moves downward with its marvellous load, that is being ground into powder or hurled to the plain below.”

One of the most interesting facts regarding St. Helens is that it has given more recent evidence of its volcanic origin than any other of the Pacific peaks; namely, as late as 1853 and 1854, if Winthrop and Swan may be credited. Corroborative evidence is furnished by the Indian name of the mountain, Lou-wala-clough, which means, “the Smoking Mountain.”

About thirty miles south of the city of Tacoma, Mt. Tacoma suddenly emerges into sight from behind the trees which had previously hidden it from the passengers on the Northern Pacific train, and soon it stands before them in life size, and follows them up to the Sound, with that peculiar ease which mountains that are supposed to be firmly rooted in the soil have in keeping up with an express train,—frisking around it, now on one side, now on another, like a gambolling white elephant. From this point of view the mountain bears some resemblance to the Jungfrau; but whereas that beautiful Swiss peak weakens the impression of her grandeur and power by putting her arms for support on the neighboring Mönch and Ebenefluh, almost equal to her in height, Tacoma stands in solitary grandeur, appearing more sublimely isolated even than Hood or Shasta; for the range on which it rises seems merely a hill. And whereas the tourist who sees the Jungfrau at Mürren, or the Matterhorn at Zermatt, or Mont Blanc at Chamounix, is already five or six thousand feet high, and therefore gazes at a mountain whose summit is only eight or nine thousand feet above him, Tacoma, on the other hand, is seen from the very level of the sea, and therefore rears the whole of its three miles of sloping snow-fields and glaciers before the awed spectator. Its exact height is 14,444 feet, or just four feet higher than Shasta. But thanks to its magnifying snow-mantle, which never disappears, and the fact that it is seen from ocean level, it seems much higher and grander than California’s finest peak. Tacoma, indeed, is the king of all our mountains, from the tourist’s and artist’s point of view; for although Fairweather and St. Elias in Alaska are higher still, they are beyond the range of excursion steamers, and are, moreover, generally buried behind clouds; while Mt. Whitney in Central California is almost equally inaccessible in the Sierra wilderness, and in beauty of outlines does not bear comparison with Tacoma for a moment, lacking as it does its fine conical shape and the advantage of isolation.

Such being the case, it is surely the height of absurdity to continue naming the grandest mountain in the United States after an obscure English lord. When Vancouver first discovered all these North Pacific mountains, in 1792, he had a perfect right to name them after anybody he pleased; but Washington now happens to belong to the United States, and every American with a spark of patriotic feeling in his constitution must feel that Anglo-mania could not show a more humiliating form than in the disposition still shown by many persons on the Pacific Coast, to use Lord Rainier’s name in designating the king of all our mountains. The same objection might be urged against Hood, which bears the name of Lord Hood; but in this case it happens that the name is appropriate, for this peak is hood-shaped, and the uninformed always fancy that to this fact it owes its name; so it may be allowed to stand. Louwala, too, would be a more musical and acceptable name than St. Helens, and there is no reason on earth why a mountain in Washington should bear the name of a British ambassador in Madrid. But in this case also the matter may be overlooked, since the name St. Helens, like the shape of the mountain itself, has a vague feminine suggestiveness. But for Rainier there is no excuse whatever, as we have an infinitely more euphonious name for it in Tacoma, which, moreover, designates the mountain’s character exactly; for in the Indian dialect it means “the mountain.” The fact that the Northern Pacific Railroad, which really “created” the State of Washington, by first developing its resources, always has Mt. Tacoma on its maps, has already done much to popularize this musical name, and to oust the memory of the English lord; and if all tourists of taste will unite in tabooing Rainier, they will soon succeed in effacing that name from all the maps. Tacoma cannot fail to triumph in the long run, just as the attempt made some time ago to name Lake Tahoe after a governor of California failed, the original Indian name being instinctively and unanimously preferred by tourists to such an ugly word as Bigler. Even the Seattle people will find that they will gain more in the estimation of other Americans if they will allow a sentiment of national patriotism to override the local pride and jealousy of a neighboring town which now make them act in a very silly manner when you use the expression “Mount Tacoma.”

To those Pacific Coast people who stubbornly cling to such words as Rainier and Bigler, I commend chapter twenty-three of Washington Irving’s “Astoria,” where he laments “the stupid, commonplace, and often ribald names entailed upon the rivers and other features of the Great West by traders and settlers.... Indeed, it is to be wished that the whole of our country could be rescued as much as possible from the wretched nomenclature inflicted upon it by ignorant and vulgar minds; and this might be done, in a great degree, by restoring the Indian names,” which are “in general more sonorous and musical.”

In insisting so strongly that the monarch of American mountains should have an American name, and not be called after an obscure English lord, I intend no offence to English sentiment, but merely wish to emphasize a patriotic right. No Englishman would fail to express his disgust and indignation if an attempt were made to name the grandest scenic feature in one of the British colonies after an American president or statesman. Finally, it must be remembered that along the line of the Canadian Pacific Railroad in British Columbia there are scores of superb peaks on which the English may without protest bestow the names of earls, lords, sirs, esquires, and ambassadors, if they choose. In my opinion, however, there is something equally ludicrous and presumptuous in naming a mountain after a puny mortal, however great he may seem to his generation. The mountainous map of the Pacific Coast is marred by too many of these blunders. To realize their full significance, read Tourgenieff’s wonderful dialogue between the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn, in his “Prose Poems.” The futility of man’s pretensions to immortality has never been more vividly portrayed than in this dialogue, resumed at intervals of hundreds of thousands of years, and commenting on the intervening changes, till finally the whole earth is covered with a sea of ice, amid which the Jungfrau and Finsteraarhorn still rear their now silent heads unchanged.

Thanks to its great height and complete isolation, Mt. Tacoma is visible as far as Portland to the south, one hundred and twenty miles in an air-line, and one hundred and fifty miles to the east. One of the most perfect views of it is obtained from the piazza of the large Tacoma Hotel. Though it is over forty miles away, it seems so near, when the air is clear, that tourists are apt to fancy they could stroll to its base after dinner. To see it at its best, however, Mt. Tacoma should be viewed from the deck of a Sound steamer, or, better still, from the car windows on the Cascade Division of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Tourists who do not use the Northern Pacific Railroad, either going or returning, should by no means fail to make an excursion on this Cascade Branch, in order to get a view of Mt. Tacoma from within fifteen miles of its base. To do this it is not necessary to go as far as Pasco Junction, in Eastern Washington, where the cactus blooms in the sandy plains in June, as in Arizona and Southern California; but one can get off at Clealum or thereabouts, and return to Tacoma next day. Much of the land through which the Cascade Branch passes is disfigured by dead black trees and stumps. Other portions are in full cultivation, and the crop most favored appears to be hops, especially in the Puyallup Valley, where these vines attain a most luxuriant and prolific growth. Indians are still employed in considerable numbers during the hop-picking season, when they come in canoes from all parts of the coast. Oddly enough, this valley is the most pronounced “temperance” region in the Northwest, and one of the largest hop-growers will not, under any circumstances, allow a saloon to be opened within his extensive domain; though he seems to see nothing sinful or inconsistent in accumulating wealth by selling his hops to wicked brewers.

This hop valley lies between Tacoma and the Cascade mountains, and—aside from the picturesque hop-vines and a mountain stream with waters so clear that the passengers can see the fish in it from the car windows, for half an hour, as the train speeds along—it is in these mountains that the scenic attractions centre. Unfortunately, one of the most fascinating and exciting features of this route—the Switchback—has ceased to exist. This was a part of the road where the train ascended the mountain range by a series of zigzag movements, like a sailing-vessel tacking at sea. There was one monstrous one-hundred-and-ten-ton engine in front of the train, and another one behind, and when the train had reached a certain point, it was switched off and started ahead in the opposite direction. This was done repeatedly, until a place was reached where as many as six parallel tracks could be seen, each a few hundred yards higher than its predecessor. Several times the train ran over trestle-works of a most giddy height, and looking so frail as to make timid passengers wish they were back in Tacoma. But this “elevated” railway was merely a temporary arrangement, constructed at a cost of six hundred thousand dollars, in order that the Northern Pacific Railroad might not be dependent on the tender mercies of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company for a Pacific Coast terminus, pending the completion of the Stampede Tunnel, which has now taken the place of the Switchback.

The chief attraction of the Cascade route is of course Mt. Tacoma, which can be seen from many points of view, as the train sweeps around it in a wide curve, somewhat similar to the way in which Mt. Shasta is circumvented. When Tacoma was ascended for the first time, about thirty years ago, by Lieutenants Kautz and Slaughter, the party required nine days from Steilacoom on Puget Sound and back. Since the completion of the railway, however, a trail has been made from the nearest point on the road, from which tourists can ascend the mountain on horseback to a height of about two miles, where the Puyallup and Carbon glaciers may be seen to advantage. The remaining mile offers difficulties and dangers sufficient to daunt any but the bravest and most expert Alpine climbers. Perhaps the summit of Tacoma will always remain as inaccessible to ordinary tourists as the Matterhorn; but so few parties have as yet made the ascent that a route may yet be found, by which the summit will be made as easy of access as that of Mt. Hood. But it must be borne in mind that even from the lower point now accessible to all, Tacoma is nearly as high as Hood; and those who are averse to endangering their life for the sake of seeing the craters at the summit, two hundred or three hundred yards in diameter, now filled with snow, but still having enough heat and sulphur vapor in their environs to save a party caught in a storm from freezing (see Hazard Stevens’s article in Atlantic Monthly, November, 1876), will thus find infinite enjoyment in viewing the extensive scene, and in exploring the glaciers and the grand cañons leading from them, with the rivers of ice-water and their innumerable rapids, cascades, and falls. There are fourteen living glaciers on the sides of Tacoma. At the latitude of this mountain the vast snow-fields cannot disappear airwards by evaporation, and therefore they follow the law of gravitation downwards as glaciers, till the melting-line is reached, which becomes the birthplace of mighty rivers. Of these solidified snow-fields, or ice-rivers, some are from two to four miles wide, and the Nesqually, Wenass, and White River glaciers are respectively four, five, and ten miles long. Of the rivers which find their sources in Tacoma’s glaciers, five are from seventy to a hundred miles long, and three—the White, Puyallup, and Cowlitz—are navigable.

Surely there is reason to believe that when tourists once begin to realize the grandeur and the still largely unexplored attractions of the mountain region of our Northwest, Switzerland will be neglected for a time, and the cities of Tacoma and Portland will become the Interlaken and the Zermatt of America.