Mount Rainier and Indian Economies of Place, 1850–1925

Abstract

T JL he mountain called Rainier is the tallest peak in Washington's northern Cascade range, forty miles southeast from the city of Tacoma, and at the intersection of Nisqually, Yakama, Puyallup, Muckleshoot, and Upper Cowlitz (Taidnapam) ancestral lands. On a clear day the mountain can be seen from a hundred miles in every direction rising dramatically above nearby hills and prairies. Endowed with significance beyond its physical fact, the mountain has been and continues to be an element crucial to northwesterners* sense of place. The mountain's meaning goes beyond aesthetics and sentiment, however. Indians and whites negotiated the meaning of Mount Rainier in both material and non-material ways, creating an economy of place in the process. The mountain itself has served as a marketplace in which the rules of exchange were worked out and place gained value; that American economic rules came to dominate should not obscure the negotiations and alternative economic possibilities that Rainier represents. Most published narratives about Mount Rainier detail one of three major facets of human engagement with the iconic place: exploration and early mountaineering (1850-1890), the creation of Mount Rainier National Park (1899), and the lengthy debate over the official name (1890-1925). This article will revisit these three familiar episodes but tie them together as related moments in an evolving economic negotiation of Rainier as a western place. Throughout the period from 1850-1925, non-Indians sought out Native peoples for information about the mountain and Indians responded by situating the mountain within their social world. Native people did not think of economic life as distinct from other aspects of life, and their responses to white settlers' inquiries reveal largely unrecognized (to their white audiences) facets of Native political economies. White people at the time, and later historians, interpreted Indians'