The Mountain that was God | Page 8

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, and the land they left bare became covered with blue
grass and wild flowers--a great sunny country where, before, the dark
forest had been. Borrowing a word from the French coureurs des bois
who came with the Hudson's Bay Company, the later Indians
sometimes called this region "the Big Brulé"; and to this day some

Americans call it the same. But for the Big Brulé the Indians had, from
ancient times, another name, connected with their ideas of religion. It
was their Saghalie Illahe, the "Land of Peace," Heaven. Our name,
"Paradise Valley," {p.031} given to the beautiful open vale on the
south slope of the Mountain, is an English equivalent.
Here was the same bar to violence which religion has erected in many
lands. The Hebrews had their "Cities of Refuge." The pagan ancients
made every altar an asylum. Mediæval Christianity constituted all its
churches sanctuaries. Thus, in lawless ages, the hand of vengeance was
stayed, and the weak were protected.
[Illustration: Exploring an Ice Cave, Paradise Glacier.]
So, too, the Indian tradition ordained this home of rest and refuge.
Indian custom was an eye for an eye, but on gaining this mountain
haven the pursued was safe from his pursuer, the slayer might not be
touched by his victim's kindred. When he crossed its border, the
warrior laid down his arms. Criminals and cowards, too, were often
sent here by the chiefs to do penance.
[Illustration: Junction of North and South Tahoma Glaciers, viewed
from Indian Henry's. The main ice stream thus formed, seen in the
foreground, feeds Tahoma Fork of the Nisqually River. The Northern
part of North Tahoma Glacier, seen in the distance beyond the wedge
of rocks, feeds a tributary of the Puyallup.]
The mountain divinity, with his under-gods, figures in much of the
Siwash {p.032} folklore, and the "Land of Peace" is often heard of. It is
through such typical Indian legends as that of Miser, the greedy hiaqua
hunter, that we learn how large a place the great Mountain filled in the
thought of the aborigines.
[Illustration: Anemones, a familiar mountain flower.]
This myth also explains why no Red Man could ever be persuaded to
an ascent beyond the snow line. As to the Greek, so to the Indian the
great peaks were sacred. The flames of an eruption, the fall of an

avalanche, told of the wrath of the mountain god. The clouds that
wrapped the summit of Tacoma spelled mystery and peril. Even so
shrewd and intelligent a Siwash as Sluiskin, with all his keenness for
"Boston chikamin," the white man's money, refused to accompany
Stevens and Van Trump in the first ascent, in 1870; indeed, he gave
them up as doomed, and bewailed their certain fate when they defied
the Mountain's wrath and started for the summit in spite of his
warnings.
[Illustration {p.033}: Copyright 1910, A. H. WAITE. North