Mount Baker - History

History

Mount Baker was well-known to indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest. Indigenous names for the mountain include Koma Kulshan or Kulshan (Lummi, qwú’mə, "white sentinel", i.e. "mountain", and kwəlshé:n, "puncture wound", i.e. "crater"); Quck Sam-ik (Nooksack: kw’eq sámit, "white mountain"); Kobah (Skagit: qwúbə’, "white sentinel", i.e. "mountain"); and Tukullum or Nahcullum (in the language of the unidentified "Koma tribe"). Mount Rainier, called "Tacoma", effectively means "larger than Koma (Kulshan)".

In 1790, Manuel Quimper of the Spanish Navy set sail from Nootka, a temporary settlement on Vancouver Island, with orders to explore the newly discovered Strait of Juan de Fuca. Accompanying Quimper was first-pilot Gonzalo Lopez de Haro, who drew detailed charts during the six-week expedition. Although Quimper's journal of the voyage does not refer to the mountain, one of Haro's manuscript charts includes a sketch of Mount Baker. The Spanish named the snowy volcano "La Gran Montana del Carmelo", as it reminded them of the white-clad monks of the Carmelite Monastery

The British explorer George Vancouver left England a year later. His mission was to survey the northwest coast of America. Vancouver and his crew reached the Pacific Northwest coast in 1792. While anchored in Dungeness Bay on the south shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, third lieutenant Joseph Baker made an observation of Mount Baker, which Vancouver recorded in his journal:

About this time a very high conspicuous craggy mountain ... presented itself, towering above the clouds: as low down as they allowed it to be visible it was covered with snow; and south of it, was a long ridge of very rugged snowy mountains, much less elevated, which seemed to stretch to a considerable distance ... the high distant land formed, as already observed, like detached islands, amongst which the lofty mountain, discovered in the afternoon by the third lieutenant, and in compliment to him called by me Mount Baker, rose a very conspicuous object ... apparently at a very remote distance.

Six years later, the official narrative of this voyage was published, including the first printed reference to the mountain. By the mid-1850s, Mount Baker was a well-known feature on the horizon to the explorers and fur traders who traveled in the Puget Sound region. Isaac I. Stevens, the first governor of Washington Territory, wrote about Mount Baker in 1853:

Mount Baker ... is one of the loftiest and most conspicuous peaks of the northern Cascade range; it is nearly as high as Mount Rainier, and like that mountain, its snow-covered pyramid has the form of a sugar-loaf. It is visible from all the water and islands ... and from the whole southeastern part of the Gulf of Georgia, and likewise from the eastern division of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It is for this region a natural and important landmark.