Ever Wild: A Lifetime on Mount Adams

12 Ever Wild
Compounding the white man’s confusion about the existence of Mount
Adams was a muddled effort in the early 1840s for the Cascade volcanoes
to be named after former U.S. Presidents. It was a scheme devised
by Bostonian author Hall J. Kelley, who renamed Mount Hood as Mount
Adams after the second president, John Adams. Kelley knew nothing of
the great Pátu north of the Columbia River. In his 1839 memoir, he wrote:
“These isolated and remarkable cones, which are now called among the
hunters of the Hudson’s Bay Company by other names, I have christened
after our ex-Presidents, viz.: 1. Washington [St. Helens], latitude 46 deg. 15
min.; 2. Adams [actually Hood], latitude 45 deg. 10 min.”
Navy Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, the first American to chronicle Mount
Rainier in 1841, went on to describe Mount Adams to the south and named
it “Mt. Hudson.” Wilkes wrote: “… another snowy peak visible from the
plain very much resembling Mt. Rainier. It appears Eastward of the Range.
Not being represented on my chart I called it Mt. Hudson after the commander
of the Peacock.” Lieutenant Wilkes and Lieutenant William L.
Hudson commanded ships in the four-year-long Wilkes Expedition that
explored the Pacific Ocean and surrounding lands. His surveys included
the Columbia River as far as Fort Walla Walla, but his maps failed to show
any mark of the peak that resembled Rainier. The name “Mount Hudson”
faded away into obscurity.
A few years later in 1843, New Englander and author Thomas J.
Farnham attempted to implement Hall J. Kelley’s “President’s Range”
plan. However his knowledge of the region’s geography was even worse
than Kelley’s. In a book about his grim Oregon Trail journey, Farnham
wrote: “Mount Adams lies under the parallel of forty-five degrees, about
twenty-five miles north of the cascades of the Columbia. This is one of
the finest peaks of the chain, clad with eternal snows, five thousand feet
down its sides.” Farnham may have intended the new name for Mount
St. Helens, assuming his “cascades” were located at today’s Bridge of the
Gods. But the 45th parallel was long known to pass through northern
Oregon. As it turned out, the name Mount Adams stuck to the far more
massive and higher volcano (Pátu) that towered nowhere near the location
that Farnham described.
The first published map that correctly positioned Mount Adams was
made in 1853–54 by Captain George McClellan’s Pacific Railroad Survey
expedition. McClellan’s job was to scout a route for the first part of a transcontinental
railroad. It was a large expedition consisting of sixty-one men,
one hundred sixty horses and mules, three hunters, fifteen non-Native
guides and twenty-nine soldiers. Using Native guides, his expedition in
August 1853 followed an old Indian route, then called the Klickitat Trail.
Their route passed through the present-day Trout Lake Valley and eastward
along the southern edge of “Tahk Plain” (later named Camas Prairie
and Glenwood Valley). Topographer John Lambert added notes about the
terrain, but gave no estimates of elevations.