On Mount Hood: A Biography of Oregon's Perilous Peak by Jon Bell

Author:Jon Bell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Natural History - Oregon - Hood, General, Mountaineering - Oregon - Hood, WA), Nature, Oregon, Pacific Northwest (OR, Mount - History, Mountaineers, State & Local, Mount, United States, Biography & Autobiography, Mount (Or.), Jon - Travel - Oregon - Hood, Mount (Or.) - History, Mountaineers - Oregon - Hood, History, Biography, Bell, Mountaineering, Mount (Or.) - Description and Travel, Natural History, Hood
ISBN: 9781570616921
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

JOEL PALMER didn’t ever walk to the very top of Mount Hood, nor did he own a pair of sneakers. But in 1845 the Canadianborn pioneer became the first known white man to ascend and explore Hood’s very upper reaches. The renowned Scottish botanist David Douglas may have headed high up on the mountain himself in 1833, but a near-fatal drop over a waterfall on British Columbia’s Fraser River that same year swallowed up his journal and washed away any definitive proof for later generations.

Palmer’s log, however, originally published in 1847 as Journal of Travels: On the Oregon Trail in 1845, survives. Over just four of its 300-plus pages, Palmer nonchalantly details the push he made toward the top of the mountain on October 12, 1845, essentially alone and in moccasins that eventually blew out and left him in bare feet somewhere above 9,500 feet on Hood’s south side, a push that unknowingly kicked off a long and colorful story of Mount Hood climbing.

Born October 4, 1810, in Elizabethtown, Ontario, Palmer grew up in a Quaker family who hurried to New York’s Catskill Mountains at the outbreak of the War of 1812. After four years of indentured servitude with another Quaker family, a sixteenyear-old Palmer struck out to explore the world a bit. He landed first in Philadelphia and then headed to Laurel, Indiana, where he worked as a canal-building contractor before being elected to his first of two terms in the state legislature in 1843.

But Palmer was a moving man, and in his Journal of Travels he notes that the “great inducements” of the Oregon Territory proved too tantalizing to keep him in Indiana. So in 1845, Palmer temporarily left his family behind and headed west on the Oregon Trail. With various parties, he traveled across Missouri, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, and on into Oregon, where he ran smack dab into a Columbia River bottleneck at The Dalles, a riverside settlement at the end of the Oregon Trail. Seems Palmer wasn’t the only pioneer in search of Oregon’s inducements, and with only two boats ferrying travelers and their wagons downstream—for a sum worth more than the cargo alone—no one was going anywhere very fast. Throw in a food and livestock feed shortage, and it’s no wonder Palmer got antsy and opted to head south, in search of an overland route through a mountain pass to Oregon City, the first incorporated city west of the Rocky Mountains.

Along with fifteen other families in a train of twenty-three wagons, Palmer set off and in just a few days came upon the wagons of Samuel K. Barlow near the White River on the southeast side of Mount Hood. Convicted but pardoned of manslaughter—he’d killed a man with an ax in Indiana—Barlow had made his own way west with his family, then stormed out of the backup at The Dalles, declaring that God had never made a mountain without some way to get around it.

The two men combined their teams and continued their journey together,

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