European settlers renamed many Washington mountains, too

If President Barack Obama starts a trend to change the name of a mountain back to the one used by a region’s original inhabitants, there’s plenty of possibilities in Washington state.

European late-comers to the Northwest made it a habit of sticking new names on many of the state’s peaks, from Mount Spokane to Mount Rainier.

Some people may assume Mount Spokane was named for the local tribe. That was part of the claim made by the local Chamber of Commerce, when asking the U.S. Geographic Board to officially change the name in 1912.

It would “further perpetuate the name of the Spokane Indians, whom we are advised by old settlers formerly inhabited this mountain and the surrounding region,” wrote C.L. Schuff, who operated the Spokane Washington Improvement Co., a development firm.

Apparently, there weren’t any Spokanes around to advise the chamber. The tribe didn’t call it Mount Spokane, Tribal Chairwoman Carol Evans said.

Contemporary news accounts suggest, however, the name change had as much to do with sharing the name of the city, county and river for a coherent marketing theme to bring in tourists at a time when a road was being developed to the peak. Gov. Marion Hay and other dignitaries had driven to the end of that road and hiked the rest of the way up that summer and “rechristened” the mountain as Mount Spokane. Before that, it was known as Mount Baldy, a name bestowed on it by John Mullan, who surveyed the area in the 1860s, or Mount Carlton, a name that the chamber argued no one knew. Several histories of the region have no mention of him, either.

The practice of white explorers naming and renaming – as a way of claiming – peaks in Washington dated to the 1790s, when Capt. George Vancouver sailed into Puget Sound, which he named for one of his officers, Lt. Peter Puget. He named Mount Baker for another officer, Lt. John Baker, supposedly the first one to spot it. Different tribes called it some variation of Kwelshen, which described the volcanic crater, or words that meant “white sentinel.”

By the time the HMS Discovery got in sight of the state’s highest peak, Vancouver had apparently run out of officers and named it after one of his good friends who wasn’t on board, Capt. Peter Rainier. The British Naval officer had fought on the losing side of the American Revolution and would achieve the rank of admiral, become a member of Parliament, and centuries later have a beer and a Triple-A baseball team named for him. But Rainier apparently never set foot in the Northwest. When Lewis and Clark saw the mountain, they may have thought it was named for some French guy and spelled it Regneire on their map.

The local tribes, however, called it Tacoma, Tahoma or Tacobeh, which may have meant “mother of waters” or bigger than the mountain the explorers were calling Mount Baker, so in other words, tallest mountain around.

When it came to making the name official, people in the city of Tacoma wanted the original Native American name – at least, the one they were using – and people in other parts of the state wanted Rainier. The tribes weren’t really consulted. In 1890, the Board of Geographic Names went with Rainier, although Tacomans tried for decades afterward to get it changed.

Vancouver also named Mount St. Helens after another buddy, Alleyne FitzHerbert, Baron St Helens, whose lofty title apparently did not include punctuation. The Klickitats called it Loowit, the name of a maiden in their creation legend, and the Cowlitz called it Lawetlat’la, which referred to the fact that smoke comes out of the volcanic mountain.

Mount Hood was named for Admiral Samuel Hood, another naval officer who commanded the British fleet for part of the American Revolution. The local tribes called it Wy’east, another character in their creation legend who was in love with Loowit.

Mount Adams was named for the second president in the 1830s, when a white settler was pushing to name several mountains after presidents. He actually wanted that to be the name of Mount Hood, but a mapmaker put the name in the wrong spot, and that just happened to be a mountain the tribes called Pahto, the third person in that legend.