Ever Wild: A Lifetime on Mount Adams

18 Ever Wild
A Native American man picks
berries and carries intricately
patterned baskets woven
from beargrass leaves and
western redcedar bark. (U.S.
Forest Service)
A Native American woman
dries huckleberries on banks
sloped toward a smoldering
fire. Known as wiwnu to the
Yakamas, huckleberries were
a sacred food. (U.S. Forest
Service)
This pattern of Native use in the Mount Adams high country had been
repeated over the millennia. Certainly, events like wildfires, climate fluctuations,
and volcanic eruptions would have caused interruptions. Lava
flows accompanied by light ash fall erupted from ten flank vents on Mount
Adams between about seventy-seven hundred and a thousand years ago.
A small steam explosion on the summit occurred about five thousand
years ago. While active lava flows would have disrupted Native use and
travel on the mountain, dormant periods between eruptions lasted far
longer. The jagged, dark andesite lava flows—up to eighty feet high and
nearly seven miles long—forced long detours in Native travel routes from
one side of the mountain to another. On the northeast side, early people
on foot or horseback had to climb almost to 8,000 feet to safely skirt the
extensive Muddy Fork lava flow and much larger glaciers during the Little
Ice Age.
Far bigger and more frequent explosive eruptions of Mount St. Helens
were orders of magnitude more lethal and disruptive than any post-Ice
Age volcanic event on Mount Adams. The Smith Creek Eruptive Period
from 3,900 to 3,300 years ago created severe interruptions to Native use
of the upper Cowlitz and Lewis River watersheds, and probably kept
Indians completely off Mount Adams for decades. Mount St. Helens
eruptions that greatly exceeded the volume of the 1980 event continued
intermittently through the 1700s, but dormant periods of as long as several
hundred years would have allowed access to Mount Adams from
the west and north.
A peril far worse than volcanic eruptions faced tribal populations when
the first white explorers and fur traders made their way into the region. In
the late 1700s and early 1800s, deadly diseases such as smallpox, influenza,
and “fever and ague” (malaria) were accidentally introduced. It is truly a
horrible and tragic story. The Natives had no immunity, and by 1840 these
diseases had wiped out roughly 65 to 95 percent of Northwest Indian populations,
according to the University of Washington’s Center for the Study
of the Pacific Northwest.
Indians closest to Mount Adams belonged to the Yakama and Klickitat
tribes to the east and south. They lived primarily along the Yakima,
Klickitat, and White Salmon rivers, and spoke the Sahaptin language of
the Columbia Plateau. The Yakamas called the mountain Pahto (also
Pátu), and considered it sacred as a symbol of continuity and a source
of prosperity. Columbia River tribes downriver of Celilo also shared the
mountain. They spoke a Chinookan language, but each language had its
subdivisions. Klickitat is another name given to Mount Adams, derived
from the Chinook word meaning “beyond,” such as “beyond the Cascade
Mountains.” The Wishram and Cascades tribes made regular trips to
Mount Adams, as did the Cowlitz and Taidnapam people coming in from
the north and west. The various tribes traded food and other items in a
widespread subsistence network.