The Mountain that was God | Page 7

party of English visitors that in a few generations more, had not the white man seized their fishing grounds, the squatting Siwashes would have had no legs at all!
[Illustration: Great Crag on the ridge separating the North and South Tahoma Glaciers, with Tahoma Fork of the Nisqually visible several miles below. This rock is seen right of center on page 27.]
[Illustration: The Marmot, whose shrill whistle is often heard among the crags.]
Stolid and uninspired as he seemed to the whites, the Indian of the Sound was not without his touch of poetry. He had that imaginative curiosity which marked the native {p.028} American everywhere. He was ever peering into the causes of things, and seeing the supernatural in the world around him.[1]
[Footnote 1: Among those who have studied the Puget Sound Indians most sympathetically is the Rev. Mr. Hylebos of Tacoma. He came to the Northwest in 1870, when the census gave Tacoma a white population of seventy-three. In those days, says Father Hylebos, the Tacoma tideflats, now filled in for mills and railway terminals, were covered each autumn with the canoes of Indians spearing salmon. It was no uncommon thing to see at one time on Commencement Bay 1,800 fishermen. This veteran worker among the "Siwashes" (French "sauvages") first told me the myths that hallowed the Mountain for every native, and the true meaning of the beautiful Indian word "Tacoma." He knew well all the leaders of the generation before the railways: Sluiskin, the Klickitat chief who guided Stevens and Van Trump up to the snow-line in 1870; Stanup, chief of the Puyallups; Kiskax, head of the Cowlitz tribe; Angeline, the famous daughter of Chief Seattle, godfather of the city of that name, and many others.]
[Illustration {p.027}: View from Beljica, showing the deeply indented west side of the Mountain. Beginning at extreme right, the glaciers are, successively: Kautz, South Tahoma, North Tahoma and Puyallup. In the left foreground is the canyon of Tahoma Fork of the Nisqually, which is fed by the Tahoma glaciers.]
[Illustration: Copyright, 1897, By E. S. Curtis. Mountain Pine, one of the last outposts of the forest below the line of eternal snow.]
To the great Snow Mountain the Indians made frequent pilgrimages, for they thought this king of the primeval wild a divinity to be reckoned with. They dreaded its anger, seen in the storms about its head, the thunder of its avalanches, and the volcanic flashes of which their traditions told. They courted its favor, symbolized in the wild flowers that bloomed on its slope, and the tall grass that fed the mowich, or deer.
[Illustration: Copyright, 1897, By E. S. Curtis. Mount Wow, or Goat Mountain, above Mesler's.]
As they ascended the vast ridges, the grandeur about them spoke of the mountain god. There were groves of trees he must have planted, so orderly were they set out. The lakes of the lofty valleys seemed calmer than those on the prairies below, the foliage brighter, the ferns taller and more graceful. The song of the waterfalls here was sweeter than the music of the tamahnawas men, their Indian sorcerers. The many small meadows close to the snow-line, carpeted in deepest green and spread with flowers, were the gardens of the divinity, tended by his superhuman agents. Strange as it may seem, the nature-worship of the silent Red Man had many points in common with that of the imaginative, volatile Greek, who {p.030} peopled his mountains with immortals; and no wood in ancient Greece was ever thronged with hamadryads more real than the little gods whom the Indian saw in the forests watered by streams from Tacoma's glaciers.
[Illustration {p.029}: Rounded Cone of Mt. St. Helens, seen from Indian Henry's, forty-five miles away.]
[Illustration: View northward in early summer from Eagle Peak, at western end of the Tatoosh. Gibraltar Rock and Little Tahoma break the eastern sky-line. On the extreme right lies Paradise Valley, still deep in snow, with the canyon of Paradise River below it. Next is seen the Nisqually Glacier, with Nisqually River issuing from its snout. Then come Van Trump Glacier (an "interglacier"), and the big Kautz Glacier, dropping into its own deep canyon. Beyond the Kautz, Pyramid Peak and Iron and Copper Mountains rise on the Indian Henry plateau. The Tahoma Glaciers close the view westward.]
[Illustration {p.031}: Copyright, 1907, By Pillsbury Picture Co.]
[Illustration: Copyright, 1909, By Linkletter Photo. CO. Eagle Peak (Indian name, Simlayshe) at west end of the Tatoosh. Altitude about 6,000 feet. A pony trail three miles long leads up from the Inn.]
Countless snows had fallen since the mountain god created and beautified this home of his, when one day he grew angry, and in his wrath showed terrible tongues of fire. Thus he ignited an immense fir forest on the south side of the peak. When his anger subsided, the flames passed,