CHAPTER VIII
EXPLORATIONS OF THE DENALI REGION AND PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS AT ITS ASCENT
The first mention in literature of the greatest mountain group in North America is in the narrative of that most notable navigator, George Vancouver. While surveying the Knik Arm of Cook’s Inlet, in 1794, he speaks of his view of a connected mountain range “bounded by distant stupendous snow mountains covered with snow and apparently detached from each other.” Vancouver’s name has grown steadily greater during the last fifty years as modern surveys have shown the wonderful detailed accuracy of his work, and the seamen of the Alaskan coast speak of him as the prince of all navigators.
Not until 1878 is there another direct mention of these mountains, although the Russian name for Denali, “Bulshaia Gora,” proves that it had long been observed and known.
Harper, Densmore, Dickey
In that year two of the early Alaskan traders, Alfred Mayo and Arthur Harper, made an adventurous journey some three hundred miles up the Tanana River, the first ascent of that river by white men, and upon their return reported finding gold in the bars and mentioned an enormous ice mountain visible in the south, which they said was one of the most remarkable things they had seen on their trip.
In 1889 Frank Densmore, a prospector, with several companions, crossed from the Tanana to the Kuskokwim by way of the Coschaket and Lake Minchúmina, and had the magnificent view of the Denali group which Lake Minchúmina affords, which the present writer was privileged to have in 1911. Densmore’s description was so enthusiastic that the mountain was known for years among the Yukon prospectors as “Densmore’s mountain.”
Though unquestionably many men traversed the region after the discovery of gold in Cook’s Inlet in 1894, no other public recorded mention of the great mountain was made until W. A. Dickey, a Princeton graduate, journeyed extensively in the Sushitna and Chulitna valleys in 1896 and reached the foot of the glacier which drains one of the flanks of Denali, called later by Doctor Cook the Ruth Glacier. Dickey described the mountain in a letter to the New York Sun in January, 1907, and guessed its height with remarkable accuracy at twenty thousand feet. Probably unaware that the mountain had any native name, Dickey gave it the name of the Republican candidate for President of the United States at that time—McKinley. Says Mr. Dickey: “We named our great peak Mount McKinley, after William McKinley, of Ohio, the news of whose nomination for the presidency was the first we received on our way out of that wonderful wilderness.”