General Hazard Stevens.
VI. FIRST SUCCESSFUL ASCENT, 1870
By GENERAL HAZARD STEVENS
General Hazard Stevens was born at Newport, Rhode Island, on June 9, 1842. His father was Major General Isaac I. Stevens, and his mother, Margaret (Hazard) Stevens, was a granddaughter of Colonel Daniel Lyman of the Revolution. In 1854 and 1855, while the son was only thirteen years of age, he accompanied his father, then the first governor of Washington Territory, on treaty-making expeditions among the Indian tribes. Later he accompanied his father into the Union Army as an officer on his father's staff. He was severely wounded in the same battle where his father was killed while leading the charge at Chantilly, September 1, 1862.
Hazard Stevens continued in the army, and at the end of the war he was mustered out as a brigadier general of volunteers. He then returned to Washington Territory and went to work to support his mother and sisters. On August 17, 1870, he and P. B. Van Trump made the first successful ascent of Mount Rainier.
In 1874, he followed the other members of the family back to Boston where he remained until his mother's death, a few months ago. He then returned to Puget Sound, and is now a successful farmer near Olympia.
His companion on the ascent, P. B. Van Trump, remained in Washington. For a number of years he was a ranger at Indian Henry's Hunting Ground in the Mount Rainier National Park. There he was a quaint and attractive figure to all visitors. In 1915, he returned East to live among kinsfolk in New York State.
The names of both Stevens and Van Trump have been generously bestowed upon glaciers, creeks, ridges, and cañons within the Mount Rainier National Park.
General Stevens prefers to call the mountain Takhoma. The full account of the ascent was published by him under the title of "The Ascent of Mount Takhoma" in the Atlantic Monthly for November, 1876. It is here reproduced by permission of the editor of that magazine.
Mr. Van Trump made several ascents after that first one, and in 1905 General Stevens also made a second ascent. He searched in vain for the relics he had deposited at the summit thirty-five years earlier. The rocks that were bare in 1870 were under snow and ice in 1905.
When Vancouver, in 1792, penetrated the Straits of Fuca and explored the unknown waters of the Mediterranean of the Pacific, wherever he sailed, from the Gulf of Georgia to the farthest inlet of Puget Sound, he beheld the lofty, snow-clad barrier range of the Cascades stretching north and south and bounding the eastern horizon. Towering at twice the altitude of all others, at intervals of a hundred miles there loomed up above the range three majestic, snowy peaks that
"Like giants stand
To sentinel enchanted land."
In the matter-of-fact spirit of a British sailor of his time, he named these sublime monuments of nature in honor of three lords of the English admiralty, Hood, Rainier, and Baker. Of these Rainier is the central, situated about half-way between the Columbia River and the line of British Columbia, and is by far the loftiest and largest. Its altitude is 14,444 feet, while Hood is 11,025 feet, and Baker is 10,810 feet high. The others, too, are single cones, while Rainier, or Takhoma, [21] is an immense mountain-mass with three distinct peaks, an eastern, a northern, and a southern; the two last extending out and up from the main central dome, from the summit of which they stand over a mile distant, while they are nearly two miles apart from each other.
Takhoma overlooks Puget Sound from Olympia to Victoria, one hundred and sixty miles. Its snow-clad dome is visible from Portland on the Willamette, one hundred and twenty miles south, and from the table-land of Walla Walla, one hundred and fifty miles east. A region two hundred and fifty miles across, including nearly all of Washington Territory, part of Oregon, and part of Idaho, is commanded in one field of vision by this colossus among mountains.
Takhoma had never been ascended. It was a virgin peak. The superstitious fears and traditions of the Indians, as well as the dangers of the ascent, had prevented their attempting to reach the summit, and the failure of a gallant and energetic officer, whose courage and hardihood were abundantly shown during the rebellion, had in general estimation proved it insurmountable.
For two years I had resolved to ascend Takhoma, but both seasons the dense smoke overspreading the whole country had prevented the attempt. Mr. Philomon Beecher Van Trump, humorous, generous, whole-souled, with endurance and experience withal, for he had roughed it in the mines, and a poetic appreciation of the picturesque and the sublime, was equally eager to scale the summit. Mr. Edward T. Coleman, an English gentleman of Victoria, a landscape artist and an Alpine tourist, whose reputed experience in Switzerland had raised a high opinion of his ability above the snow-line, completed the party.