The Measure of a Mountain, page 4
Tacoma’s early prosperity emboldened the advocates of “Mount Tacoma.” Completion of the Northern Pacific railhead in 1883 brought boomtime to the city. Westward immigrants turned the village of 1,098 people in 1880 into a city of 36,006 by 1890—a city that challenged the dominance of the 42,000-strong Seattle. Confidence ran so high that some Tacoma boosters suggested that Washington state change its name to The State of Tacoma.
Then Tacoma’s good fortune faltered. In 1892 the newly formed U.S. Board on Geographic Names issued its inaugural report, a list of about two thousand official American place names. To counteract the thousands of free “Mount Tacoma” maps distributed by the Northern Pacific, the board ruled that Washington state’s high peak be named “Rainier, Mt.” Tacomans suspected foul play. An apocryphal story circulated about the Seattle Brewing and Malting Company delivering free kegs of Rainier Beer to a late-night geographic board meeting. The story gained credence only in Tacoma, where the town fathers gathered for a fight.
The Tacoma Commercial Club hired British Arctic adventurer Frederick Schwatka to explore the mountain, scout new trails, and write a book celebrating “Mount Tacoma.” Unfortunately for Tacoma, Lieutenant Schwatka’s explorations went astray. In his off-hours the lieutenant enjoyed roaming the Pacific Northwest’s seamier districts, which in the 1890s were legendary. (The very term “skid row” comes from Seattle’s skid road, a logging skid at the center of a large liquor and prostitution industry.) At three a.m. on November 2, 1892, six weeks after Schwatka’s Tacoma debut, a policeman in Portland, Oregon, rolled a passed-out drunk from a First Street gutter. Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka lay in disgrace, a bottle of laudanum tinkling at his hip. Two hours later he was dead.
The city pressed on without him. Early the next year Mount Tacoma advocates gathered at the Tacoma Academy of Science to hear Judge James Wickersham argue their cause. Wickersham blasted “Rainier,” with written testimonials from Indians, soldiers, famous writers, and pioneer climbers. All testified to the rightful claim of “Tacoma,” but everyone had a different interpretation of the word: “the mountain,” “the snow mountain,” “rumbling noise,” “nourishing breast,” “near to heaven,” “the gods,” “friend at first sight,” and “the place from which you get coal.” This confusion went unnoted in Wickersham’s brief; Mount Tacoma advocates would regret the oversight.
The federal government stepped up its protection of the mountain due in part to the publicity generated by Tacoma’s campaign. In 1893 the U.S. Department of the Interior preserved a twenty-thousand-acre skirt around the peak and called it the Pacific Forest Reserve. Five years later Congress voted to expand the reserve and rename it “Washington National Park.” Tacomans weren’t thrilled with the name, though they were pleased to see their mountain protected. But before President William McKinley could sign the act creating the park, an Iowa congressman named John Lacy slipped in a midnight amendment replacing “Washington” with the name of the grandson of Huguenot refugees: On March 2, 1899, President McKinley signed “Mount Rainier National Park” into existence.
At first Tacoma’s campaign to rename Rainier struck me as folly, Tacomans’ delusion of grandeur. But as I spent more time on the mountain I came to sympathize with Judge Wickersham. Despite the West’s reputation for rugged individualism, much of the real power in the territory’s early days was exercised by Eastern and Midwestern bankers, railroad tycoons, and lumber concerns. Sometimes all the early settlers owned was the land they lived on. Their sense of ownership strengthened after they had survived a winter or two, living through hard times and hard weather. Changing the name to Mount Tacoma would have been a bold act of cultural reclamation, a proclamation that the mountain belonged to the people who lived with it, not to the British Admiralty and the geographic names board. (The irony of whites restoring the mountain’s Native name while stealing the Nisqually and Yakama land around it couldn’t have been lost on Northwest Indians.)
That the same impulse to ownership exists today testifies to the cultural power of the mountain. When visitors drop in and stake an unearned claim, we look at them as poachers. The impulse may be ungenerous—This is ours, not yours—but it can’t be denied. I’ve felt it myself. A few years ago I took a grand-opening tour of a shopping mall—the SuperMall of the Great Northwest in Auburn. The mall’s construction manager, who hailed from back East, told us how she’d developed a great love for Mount Rainier. Whenever it came into view, she said, she’d call friends and tell them, “Look! My mountain’s out!” Steam escaped from my ears.
By early 1917 public opinion had swung Tacoma’s way. “The fact is that nobody likes the name ‘Mount Rainier,’” said U.S. Interior Secretary Franklin Lane. Newspapers around the nation adopted “Mount Tacoma” as their house style. Even Helen Keller, in town on a lecture tour, agreed that “Mount Tacoma” seemed “the only sensible and suitable name.” Sam Wall, a Tacoma newspaperman who once shot a man for questioning his hometown loyalty, adopted the name change as his personal crusade. Wall’s perseverance earned him a hearing before the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, but his testimony failed to sway the board. “No geographic feature in any part of the world can claim a name more firmly fixed” than Mount Rainier, declared chairman C. Hart Merriam in his May 1917 ruling. Wall’s cause came undone partly because nobody could prove which version of “Tacoma” was correct, or what the word even meant. In the years since Judge Wickersham’s call to arms, the etymology of “Tacoma” had grown ever more confused. Because Pacific Northwest Indian languages are exclusively oral, any of a dozen phonetic renderings might be accurate. Among those offered were Tacoma, Tahoma, Tahoba, Takhoma, Tachoma, Tachkoma, Tagoma, Taghoma, Tachhoma, Tachkoma, Tacobah, Takoman, Takeman, Ry-ah-ku, Ta-ho-bet, Ta-ko-bet, Tacobet, Tacobed, Tacob, Tacoba, Tacope, Dacobed, Tahchobet, Tahobet, T’koma, T’choba, T’chakoba, Tach-ho-ma, Tahhohmah, Tahkobed, Takeman, Takob, Takobid, Takoman, Takkobud, Haik-Tacomas, Puskehouse, Tuahku, Tawauk, Twauk, Tuhkobud, Twahwauk, Stiquak, Yalemite, Nebat, Tiswauk, and Sawhle Tyiee. One expert claimed “Tacoma” originated with the Algonquin Indians and traveled across the continent on the tongues of various tribes; another believed the word originated in Mongolia. Others argued that the word came out of Japan, or was invented by Spanish or Norwegian explorers. C. Hart Merriam had little patience for Tacoma’s flimsy case. The Puyallup and Nisqually tribes near the mountain called it “Tuahku,” “Stiquak,” and “Puskehouse.” “Has any citizen of Tacoma,” wrote Merriam, “ever suggested the adoption of any one of them?”
Tacoma fretted about its mountain while entire industries skipped town. In 1920 the Northern Pacific Railroad, Tacoma’s raison d’être, moved its operations north to Seattle. “As children we didn’t care about the loss of the termini,” recalled historian and native Tacoman Murray Morgan. “What bothered us was the loss of our Mountain.”
No straw was too brittle to be grasped. In 1921 a group of Civil War veterans petitioned the geographic names board to change Mount Rainier’s name to “Mount Lincoln.” Before dismissing the claim, the board heard Colonel Beverly Coiner of Tacoma entreat the government to nullify “Rainier” because of a typo. In Vancouver’s Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, Coiner testified, the British navigator sites the peak at “N. 42 E.” from Marrowstone Point, a spot halfway between Mount Baker and Glacier Peak, about one hundred miles north of Mount Rainier.
It was just a typo. Mount Rainier’s position should have read “S. 42 E.” But the colonel’s contention enticed me. I bought a plastic protractor at a neighborhood drugstore and traced directional rays across a Rand McNally road atlas. The colonel had a point! By centering the protractor at Marrowstone Point and marking off 42 degrees, my pencil cruised across Puget Sound, mowed through Issaquah, and ended up burrowed in a flattish section of southeastern King County. Impossible. I checked again. The adrenaline of a scoop rushed within my reporter’s brain. I spent an excited hour imagining myself announcing George Vancouver’s two-hundred-year-old deception. This must have been how Colonel Coiner felt. Why had no one listened to him?
Before I bumbled further down the colonel’s path, a friend whose knowledge of compasses wasn’t limited to N, S, E, and W broke the news that Vancouver knew something about magnetic variation that the colonel and I did not. The Earth’s longitudinal lines converge at the true North Pole, but the globe’s shifting magnetic fields meet farther south, in Canada’s Queen Elizabeth Islands. The difference between geographic north and magnetic north is a given area’s variation. Protractor in hand, I adjusted the setting for Puget Sound’s variation of 22 degrees, at which point Mount Rainier intersected the plastic dimple exactly 42 degrees east from south. Having felt Beverly Coiner’s excitement, I was able to empathize with the humiliation that must have begun the moment I imagine a member of the geographic names board said, Pardon me, Colonel, but if you’ll adjust your reading by 22 degrees . . .
Even so, one wonders how Coiner imagined Vancouver spotting, where’s that atlas . . . Gee Mountain (5,030 feet) and missing the 14,000-foot colossus dominating the entire Puget Sound. In the colonel’s world, and for an hour mine as well, Vancouver stood a mad wizard on the bridge, indulging no But sir’s from his men and bellowing , Pay no attention to that mountain in the east!
In January 1924, at the request of Mount Tacoma advocates, the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution publicly endorsed “Mount Tacoma,” signaling the beginning of the final bitter fight against “Rainier,” one that would be fought with the weapons of the desperate: character assassination and patriotic gore. With the SAR’s backing, Senator C. C. Dill of Washington state, introduced federal legislation to change the name to Mount Tacoma.
As the campaign progressed, Peter Rainier became a target of outrage and ridicule. Mount Rainier advocates recast his gallant action in the American Revolutionary War as pernicious treason. The San Francisco Journal ridiculed him as “King George III’s fat old Admiral.” A Manchester, New Hampshire, editorial described him as a pirate, a murderer of women, and “a fiend in human form.” An editorial cartoonist depicted “that old blighter Rainier” as a white-wigged fool hoisting a pint of Rainier Beer; another supplied him with a crag tooth and a witch’s nose.
In fact, Peter Rainier was no pirate, no murderer, and nobody’s fool. He did, however, look peculiar—at least in the portrait of him that’s come down to us: His white hair marks him as a man well past his sailing days—he was sixty-four at the sitting—and the portraitist has done embarrassingly well in capturing the rumpled bulge of belly that has sprung Rainier’s southernmost vest button from its embroidered constraints. The man in the picture gazes calmly past our right shoulder, years on land having stripped this admiral of the whip-cracking glare evident in so many portraits of his colleagues. He does not exude the confidence of Caesar. What stands out above all are his glasses: spectacles like bicycle tires. Naked before God and his mountain, the admiral could barely see.
He did other things well, chiefly winning naval battles and accumulating the spoils of empire. Rainier went to sea at fifteen and saw action in the East Indies before leaving the service eight years later. At twenty-six he rejoined the Navy as a lieutenant and worked his way up under the command of Sir Alan Gardner, under whom Vancouver also served. Rainier served in the West Indies before being awarded his own ship, the Ostrich, in time to enter the American Revolutionary War. In July 1778 the Ostrich traded cannon fire with the Polly, an American privateer near Savannah, Georgia. Rainier’s breast caught a ball from a Polly musket, but he refused to relinquish command, staying on to direct the fight against the better-armed American brig. The Polly surrendered after three hours, having seen her captain and more than two dozen men die in the battle. The Ostrich lost seven men.
After his brush with mortality, Rainier sailed to the East Indies before returning home in 1790 to serve in the Channel Fleet, England’s main line of defense against France. There he met and befriended George Vancouver. Within the year both men set sail for opposite ends of the globe. Rainier returned east while Vancouver went west to survey Alaska and the American Northwest. In financial terms, Rainier’s was the wiser choice. The trouble with uncharted land is that it’s very often empty. In the 1790s Alaska and the Pacific Northwest were bare cupboards, bootywise. The years when British crews could trade a handful of trinkets for a treasure of sea otter pelts were long past. Fur traders in the 1790s dealt with Indians who knew the meaning of market price.
The East Indies, key ports in the spice trade, were veritable warehouses of wealth. British naval officers playing by eighteenth-century rules stood to win a fortune in battle prizes. When a ship’s captain took a town, he took the town. In February 1796, Rainier led five heavily armed ships into the port of Amboyna, in what are now the Moluccan islands of Indonesia, and scooped up both the town and a Dutch brig without firing a shot. Two weeks later he stormed into nearby Banda Neira and accepted the surrender of the Banda Islands by sunset. At both places Rear Admiral Rainier, following common practice, commandeered stores of valuable spices before strolling into the local treasury and withdrawing sackfuls of the public trust. A captain’s share of the Amboyna and Banda Neira prize money is said to have been 15,000 pounds sterling. Bear in mind, the yearly wage for a rear admiral was 637 pounds; medium-rank officers (lieutenants and such) went to sea for a mere 8 pounds per month. In Patrick O’Brian’s novel H.M.S. Surprise, a grizzled seaman making passage to the East Indies advises a young sailor hoping to find fortune in the spice islands that “not since Admiral Rainier cleaned up Trincomalee” had there been much in the way of spoils for an honest seaman to claim.
Unlike his contemporary William Bligh, Peter Rainier was no keelhauling killjoy. Upon his retirement in 1805, Rainier’s men gave him a rousing sendoff at a Madras banquet hall fitted with fine linen and chandeliers. Caskets of claret fueled dozens of toasts and drunken songs composed for the occasion:And tho’ relentless Time hath spread
His silver honours o’er his head,
While Commerce triumphs in India’s fame,
Rainier! her happy sons shall venerate thy name.
The rear admiral did not retire from table until three o’clock in the morning.
Despite the acclaim in Madras and a 250,000-pound fortune back home, Peter Rainier disappeared from English memory with sobering haste. The Naval Chronicle, the journal of record for His Majesty’s fleet, recorded the deaths of ten notable officers in its 1808 edition. Some were killed in gallant attack; others died of mundane afflictions (“a mortification in his foot”). The final entry contained a single line: “Lately, at Bath, Admiral Rainier.”
The U.S. Senate voted to rename the peak Mount Tacoma in April 1924, but the bill stalled in the House of Representatives. The House Committee on Public Lands, preoccupied with the Teapot Dome scandal, held a one-day hearing on the matter before referring it to a council more experienced in the ways of place names: the Board on Geographic Names.
The names board was tired of Tacoma’s game, and took pains to refute the city’s case, going so far as to mock Tacoma’s Anglophobia: “If our sense of patriotism should lead us to cancel English names because we were once at war with England, would not the map of the United States look like a skinned cat?” With the names board against it, Tacoma’s cause fell apart. During the House hearings, the Tacoma News Tribune railed against Seattle’s attempt to “pack the room with their clackers,” but Seattle needn’t have bothered. The tide had turned. The bill failed by a vote of nine to four.
In the decades since, the Mount Tacoma cause has mouldered in Washington state’s cabinet of odd causes. In 1939 the Tacoma Chamber of Commerce agreed to use “Mount Rainier” in its promotional literature, ending the city’s official role in the campaign. At the office of the state Board on Geographic Names, in Olympia, the file on Mount Rainier contains only two recent challenges. One includes a recording of Spokane native Bing Crosby scolding the people of Puget Sound for abandoning Mount Tacoma. The other was filed in 1984 by a New Age guru who believed the mountain housed an ancient race of space aliens that had built a landing strip near Ashford to facilitate their homecoming. Both claims were dismissed.
AERIAL PLANKTON
Over winter the mountain reclaims its territory. From Seattle its shoulders rise and extend and it looks as if the entire chain of Cascadian mountains has flowed out of Rainier’s caldera. So much snow falls on Mount Rainier that you can walk up to the Paradise Inn and look into its third-story windows without a ladder. The same weather pattern that douses the lower mountain with rain dumps about 600 inches of snow on Paradise every winter. Some winters it snows so much you think the sun’s never coming back. During the winter of 1971–72 more than 93 feet (1,122 inches, exactly) of snow buried Paradise. Each year from November through April, the entire park shuts down except for the Longmire-to-Paradise road, which crews keep open by plowing continually.
On the lower reaches of the mountain, winter rain and snow eats away at civilization’s relentless paving project. In the late 1980s a series of glacial floods wiped out a section of West Side Road, a tourist drive that dead-ended halfway to Mowich Lake. The floods turned an already primitive road into Fish Creek. Two months after my aborted Wonderland trek, November’s rainy floods poured out of the mountain and continued the reclamation project.
During a lull in the storms, I bicycled up the remains of West Side Road and saw how quickly all trace of human incursion could vanish. Deep veins cut through the path. I braided through mounds of mud, rocks, and limbs. The mountain, which hadn’t been “out” for weeks, remained locked in heavy vapor. Glacial flour milking up Tahoma Creek offered the only clue that the big icegrind was still in business up high. I stopped to listen to the creek turn its boulders and devour its banks, remaking its bed minute by minute. I rode past drooping cedars and lightning-struck hemlocks and a secret glade where emerald moss comforts the forest floor. Three miles up the road, knee-deep mud forced me to abandon my bike. On the south side of Dry Creek, I looked down to see my feetless legs disappear into the gooey muck. I pulled one out with a slurp and set it on a boulder, which sank as the other foot emerged from the liquid road. Across the creek I boulderhopped, the rocks burbling into quickmud as fast as I could bound. At a spot where I remembered a concrete stream culvert having been, I dug through the mudwash with a cedar branch. Through a yard of mountain I dug and still couldn’t reach the old bunker. The next summer it took a bulldozer crew five days to uncover it.
