The Mountains of Oregon Part 3

SADDLE MT.--Called by the Indians, "Swallalahoost." Named by Wilkes, Saddle Mountain (1842), on account of its shape.

ST. HELENS, MT.--Discovered by Broughton of Vancouver's party, October 20, 1792, and named in honor of His Majesty's amba.s.sador at Madrid.

Known among Americans as Mt. Was.h.i.+ngton (1846), as also Mt. John Adams.

Called by the Indians Lou-wala-clough, meaning smoking mountain.

TILLAMOOK HEAD.--(1806), originally spelled Killamook. Lewis and Clark refer to it as "Clark's Point of View."

TACOMA, MT.--See Rainier, also pages 55, 57 and 59.

MOUNT RAINIER.

U. S. INDIAN SERVICE.

NISQUALLY AND SKOKOMISH AGENCY, } TACOMA, W. T., Dec. 8, 1886. }

W. G. STEEL, _Portland, Oregon_:

DEAR SIR:--I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of Sept. 21st, making certain inquiries about the change of the name of Mt.

Rainier to that of Tacoma. Upon careful and diligent inquiry among the Puyallup Indians, I find the following to be the true condition of things:

There is a general impression that the name Tacoma was the original name of the mountain among Indians, and that it signified "nouris.h.i.+ng mother," and was so named on account of its being the source of a number of rivers which head there and flow into the waters of Puget Sound.

This, I find to be entirely erroneous. The Indian word is _Ta-ko-bet_ or _Ta-ke-man_, the first being the most general p.r.o.nunciation used among these Indians, but both words are used, being the different p.r.o.nunciation used by the dialects. It means a white mountain, and is a general name for any high, snow-covered, or white, treeless peak. It is applied to this mountain by the Indians of this vicinity, because it is the only, or most prominent one of the kind in the vicinity. They use the word as we would speak of "The White Mountain," there being but one near us. In the Skadgit language, the word is a little different, and is there called _Ko-ma_, and is applied by these Indians to Mt. Baker, it being the mountain in that vicinity of the kind. The word _Squa-tach_, or _Squat-letsh_, is a general name for a range of mountains, while _Ta-ko-bet_ or _Ta-ko-man_ or _Ko-ma_ is the name of the snow covered or white peaks in the range.

This information I have gained from inquiry of the Indians with whom I have come in contact and who live near here. I inclose a statement written out by Rev. Peter Stanup, an educated Indian of the Puyallup tribe, and who is unusually well informed on such matters.

As to when it was first applied and by whom I am not so well advised; but from what I do know, I understand that it was first applied to the mountains by the whites about twelve years ago, and at the same time that the town of Tacoma was laid out and located by the Northern Pacific Railroad Company, or some of its attaches. I understand that the attempt was made by the N. P. R. R. Co. to have the name changed, and that it still makes strenuous efforts to do so. The people of the town of Tacoma, and the members of the Tacoma Land Company as well as the R. R.

Co., above named, all try hard to have the mountain called by that name; while the residents of the other part of the Territory, west of the Cascade mountains and especially of Seattle, are very much opposed to the change, and continue to call it by its first name. I think that the facts are that the name Tacoma is an attempted imitation of an Indian term applied to any high, snow-covered peak, but which was supposed to be the special name of this peak, because generally used by the Indians of this vicinity, and that it was applied to this mountain at the time the town of Tacoma was located and named by the N. P. R. R. Co., for the purpose of bringing into note its western terminus.

Yours Respectfully,

EDWIN EELLS, U. S. Indian Agent.

Statement of Rev. Peter Stanup.

_Ta-ko-man_ is a name used by many different Indian tribes of this Territory, with the same meaning and a slight variation of p.r.o.nunciation by each different tribe. It is the name or word from which Tacoma was derived. It originated among the inland Indians. The meaning of _Ta-ko-man_ is a high, treeless, white or light colored peak or mound.

The name is applicable to any peak or mound as described, but is generally used for one that is distinguished, or highly honored. And _Squa-tach_, to climb, and _Sba-date_ mountain, are mostly used for all mountains and peaks. The individual name of Mt. Tacoma is _Twhauk_, which was derived from _Twheque_, snow, and _Swheque ad_. Bright, clear, cloudless sky. _Ta-ko-man_ is mostly used for the Mt. Tacoma, as it is held with much respect and esteemed by nearly all the Indians of the Northwest. The reason for conferring the great honor upon _Twhauk_, is that the second syllable _ko_, means water, corresponding with the water, or little lake on top of the mountain, and also in that lake is a great abundance of valuable sh.e.l.ls, from which the Indians made their nose and ear-rings, and other valuable jewelry.

THOUGHTS ON THE NAME "TACOMA."

This beautiful name of the city whose rapid and marvellous growth and development have been unparalleled even in our Western civilization, is a pure invention. Its very euphony divests it of all claim as the Indian nomination of Old Mount Rainier, the name conferred by the ill.u.s.trious circ.u.mnavigator, George Vancouver, borne for a century upon the map of the world.

Tacoma is a word of extremely modern origin, invented, or used first by Lieut. Theodore Winthrop, U. S. Army, in his readable book--"Canoe and Saddle." The writer of these thoughts first heard it late in the "sixties," when Capt. D. B. Finch, among the pioneers of steam navigation on Puget Sound, presented a building in Olympia to the Good Templars, and his gift was christened "Tacoma Hall." Contemporaneously Tacoma City, now the first ward of Tacoma, was thus named by some Portland town-builders--Gen. McCarver, Lewis M. Starr and James Steel.

The then leading hotel of Olympia, about the same time, a.s.sumed that t.i.tle and wore it for several years; but a whole decade pa.s.sed before the attempt was made to obliterate the time-honored name of the great mountain peak of Northwest America, conferred at the first visit of white men to Commencement Bay in 1792. Late in 1878, a lithograph map and bird's-eye view of the embryo city of New Tacoma was published under the patronage of the Tacoma Land Company, ent.i.tled--"New Tacoma and Mount Rainier"--issued in 1880. At that date the name "Tacoma" existed, but it was not applied to the mountain; nor was it even dreamed that the town was named from the Indian name of the mountain. The fact is that the name, "Mount Tacoma," has been recently conferred on the mountain by white men. A decade back, the name will not be found on the maps of Was.h.i.+ngton Territory, and it is to be hoped that the attempt to obliterate from the map of the world the name conferred by that ill.u.s.trious contributor to geographic science, Captain George Vancouver, R. N., will prove unsuccessful.

When Gen. Hazard Stevens, and that splendid scholar and writer, P. B.

Van Trump, Esq., ascended the grand old mountain, the p.r.o.nunciation and spelling of the name which Gen. Stevens, in his narrative, ascribed to the mountain, was still unsettled. He spelt the word Te-ho-ma. The "h"

being aspirated really represents an Indian guttural grunt without beauty or even resolving itself into a well-defined consonant.

In the year 1882, the writer was invited to perform the role of orator on Independence Day at the beautiful settlement called Puyallup. The committee coupled with the invitation the expressed desire that the theme should be Puget Sound reminiscences--the early settlement of Pierce county. He adopted as a starting theme the thoughts suggested by the words "Tacoma" and "Puyallup," or their origin thus euphonized into household words of significance and anglicised beauty, bearing but little resemblance in sound to the half-uttered nasal grunts of the fish-eating natives of Puget Sound, whose syllables are "without form and void;" their language, if such it be considered, acquiring meaning or intensity of signification when accompanied by pantomimic motion, speaking far more than all their syllabic combinations. Through the valued a.s.sistance of that veteran Indian student and interlocutor, John Flett, some twenty aged, prominent Indians, who would not deign to talk other than their own dialect, who despised even the Chinook Jargon, but adhered to the grunts and syllabic utterances and the pantomime of their race for the ages before the advent of the Hudson's Bay Company or American settlers, gathered in the writer's office in New Tacoma, as the city of Tacoma was then called, and seated on the floor for hours discussed what they called the mountains and mountain range, its surrounding and attributes. About half were of the White river bands, those who originally lived on the sources of the streams issuing from Mount Rainier. The remainder were Puyallups and 'Squallys, whose original haunts were near the Sound. The form was to put the writer's question or wish for information into Chinook Jargon, which was then translated into the Indian dialect. The old men expressed themselves in their native utterances. It would be the grossest perversion to call their answers "words." They were not so couched--at best, strong syllabic utterances--mere grunts, at times which, with eloquent pantomime, a.s.sumed grand and eloquent thought and meaning, when translated, to give just expression arising to poetry of ideas, but as a language, technically so considered, poverty-stricken to the greatest degree, and without its accompanied earnestness of movement, without a single attribute of beauty or euphonism.

That interesting study and those comparative views, by old men of the mountain and the sea, extended through hours; and the writer will never forget the eloquence of action required and used by those aged natives, which more than compensated that paucity of syllables or words, which we call language. No such word of beauty as "Tacoma" could possibly be coined by them, nor result from any combination of their uttered but significant grunts, their attempted vocalization of thoughts or ideas.

True, there were syllabic emissions of sound which might be resolved into words by toning down grunts and inharmonious belchings of thoughts rather than their legitimate utterances. The manner of conducting that "interview" was the a.s.sumption that the word "Tacoma," or some kindred appropriate word identified the grand old mountain in their language; in other words, their attention was invited to the fact, that our people had been told that "Tacoma" was the native name of the mountain. Then began the expression by all, in turn, as to the Indian method of referring to great landmarks, mountains individual and in range, rivers, etc., when talking with each other. Their views on the information communicated found expression in several varied, combined characteristic grunts and shrugs, which were interspersed with some a.n.a.logous syllables or utterances from which Indian philologists have resolved words, some of which have more or less resemblance to some of the syllables embraced in the word Tacoma, or that word as spelled by different writers. They then detailed their reasons for so speaking of the mountain or any of its natural surroundings or physical features. In that colloquy, no two of those Indians p.r.o.nounced the same word or used that same guttural utterance or combination of syllables. All were especially interrogated as to the snow-capped mountain. All gave the meaning or idea that they knew as to the cause for a name, by which any other could identify it, and the significance of the utterances by each adopted in referring to it.

Each band, not to say each individual, had a peculiar reason for his name of it, contingent upon color, shape or function. In that interview, the literal translations of their syllabic combinations appertaining more or less in sound to the syllables const.i.tuting the name Tacoma--Te-ho-ma, Ta-ko-ber, Tak-o-man, etc., as rendered by the venerable John Flett, a truthful, skillful and reliable Indian authority was--"A woman's breast that feeds," a "nouris.h.i.+ng breast." To one band, the shape of the cone suggested the breast shape for a name; to another, the milky whiteness was a reminder of the source of nourishment; to another, the color of the streams which flow down from the mountain in the annual freshets, gave origin to the idea of the generous fountain of the great milk-white breast-shaped sentinel for ages; while the Puyallups and 'Squallys, more practical in view, a.s.sociated the fact that from the mountain rushed the torrents of white water, resembling milk, which fertilized the valleys of Puget Sound. While such was the conversation and speech of those old patriarchs, several of whom had lived to become octogenarians, communicated as above stated, the writer is well aware that across the mountain chain, residing in the vicinity of the mountain, that several bands of the Klickitat nation attach different meanings for synonymous syllabic combinations approximating in sound to the combinations referred to used by Western Was.h.i.+ngton bands, with shades of meaning more practical, less figurative, less Indian; but the writer has been content to accept as authority, at all events so far as the Aborigines of Western Was.h.i.+ngton are concerned, the result of the conference of Indian patriarchs convened at his instance in 1882. While that conference failed to establish that there was such an Indian word as "Tacoma," or that these Indians had any distinctive Indian names for "Mount Rainier," or that there was any recognized Indian name known to the several tribes; yet, the different bands did use such syllabic utterances, by which they referred to the mountain chain, to the leading mountain of the chain. That color, shape, and attributed function, suggested such expression, and that the combination of syllables which have been so euphoniously metamorphosed into the beautiful word "Tacoma," when p.r.o.nounced by them in its native utterances, meant as herein expressed. The writer, however, finds no warrant for adopting Tacoma as an Indian word, nor does he believe that such word, or its approximate, was a name conferred by Indians upon the mountain, or exclusively recognized as the name of the mountain by the original natives of this region.

ELWOOD EVANS.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PRESIDENTS OF THE OREGON ALPINE CLUB.]

OREGON ALPINE CLUB.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The Oregon Alpine Club was organized in 1887, and incorporated October 7th of that year. It was originally intended merely as an organization among half a dozen friends who were in the habit of seeking adventure and recreation in the mountains.

After considering the matter for a time a meeting, was called, and more persons attended than were expected. A committee was appointed on rules, the adoption of which required several meetings, so that when the organization was completed there were over seventy charter members on the roll.

The inst.i.tution grew and its objects increased until a Scientific Staff was formed and a public museum became an important object. Hon. H. W.

Corbett was elected President, and served until October, 1888, when Hon.

D. P. Thompson was chosen. Mr. Thompson served until the close of 1889, when a re-organization was effected, as outlined by the subjoined const.i.tutions. Mr. Geo. B. Markle was at this time elected, and is now the very efficient President of the Club. The Alpine Club is a public inst.i.tution and is deserving of the liberal support of the city and State. The following is a list of officials, as also the Const.i.tutions of the Club and its various Departments:

CONSt.i.tUTION.

OFFICERS.

_President_, GEO. B. MARKLE

{W. G. STEEL _Vice Presidents_, {W. W. BRETHERTON {JOHN GILL