History
Native Americans in the area have composed many legends concerning the three "smoking mountains" that guard the Columbia River. According to the Bridge of the Gods tale, Wy'east (Mount Hood) and Pahto (Mount Adams; also called Paddo or Klickitat by native peoples) were the sons of the Great Spirit. The brothers both competed for the love of the beautiful La-wa-la-clough (Mount St. Helens). When La-wa-la-clough chose Pahto, Wy'east struck his brother hard so that Pahto's head was flattened and Wy'east took La-wa-la-clough from him (thus attempting to explain Adams' squat appearance). Other versions of the story state that losing La-wa-la-clough caused Pahto such grief that he dropped his head in shame.
In 1805 the Lewis and Clark Expedition recorded seeing the mountain. They misidentified it as Mount St. Helens which had been previously discovered and named. This is the earliest recorded sighting of the volcano by European explorers.
Between 1830 and 1834 Hall J. Kelley led a campaign to rename the Cascade Range as the President's Range and also to rename each major Cascade mountain after a former President of the United States. Mount Adams was not known to Kelley and was thus not in his plan. Mount Hood, in fact, was designated by Kelley to be renamed after President John Adams but a mistake by a mapmaker placed the Mount Adams name north of Mount Hood and about 40 miles (60 km) east of Mount St. Helens. By sheer coincidence there was in fact a large mountain there to receive the name. Since the mountain had no official name at the time, Kelley's name stuck even though the rest of his plan failed. In 1901, local settler and mountaineer C. E. Rusk led noted glaciologist Harry Reid to Adams' remote location. Reid conducted the first systematic study of the volcano and also named its most significant glaciers.
In 1929 and 1931 Wade Dean filed mining claims to the sulfur on Adams' 210-acre (0.8 km2) summit plateau. After building a horse and mule trail, he had a diamond-tipped drilling machine moved to the summit area and test pits were drilled. Although sulfur sludge was found, the amount and quality of the ore was never good enough to make the venture profitable and the project was abandoned in 1959. Adams is the only large Cascade volcano to have its summit exploited by commercial miners.
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