The Mountain that was God | Page 7

in the saddle beyond with
Peak Success towering far above.]
No wonder that this mountain of changing moods, overtopping every
other eminence in the Northwest, answered the idea of God to the
simple, imaginative mind of the Indians who hunted in the forest on its
slopes or fished in the waters of Whulge that ebbed and flowed at its
base. Primitive peoples in every land have deified superlative
manifestations of nature--the sun, the wind, great rivers, and waterfalls,
the high mountains. By all the tribes within sight of its summit, this
pre-eminent peak, variously called by them Tacoma (Tach-ho´ma),
Tahoma or Tacob, as who should say "The Great Snow," was deemed a
power to be feared and conciliated. Even when the missionaries taught
them a better faith, they continued to hold the Mountain in superstitious
reverence--an awe that still has power to silence their "civilized" and

very unromantic descendants.
[Illustration: Cutting steps up Paradise Glacier.]
The Puget Sound tribes, with the Yakimas, Klickitats and others living
just beyond the Cascades, had substantially the same language and
beliefs, though differing much in physical and mental type. {p.026}
East of the range, they lived by the chase. They were great horsemen
and famous runners, a breed of lithe, upstanding, competent men, as
keen of wit as they were stately in appearance. These were "the noble
Red Men" of tradition. Fennimore Cooper might have found many a
hero worthy of his pen among the savages inhabiting the fertile valley
of the Columbia, which we now call the Inland Empire. But here on the
Coast were the "Digger" tribes, who subsisted chiefly by spearing
salmon and digging clams. Their stooped figures, flat faces, downcast
eyes and low mentality reflected the life they led. Contrasting their
heavy bodies with their feeble legs, which grew shorter with disuse, a
Tacoma humorist last summer gravely proved to a 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