Mount Rainier National Park guide · 2 min read
Tacoma: Native Peoples on the Mountain
Long before the park was founded, the people who lived around the mountain had their own names for it.
Lushootseed speakers call it Tacoma, pronounced Taquoma, the same name as a nearby city in the Puget Sound region. Speakers of Lushootseed and Cowlitz also used forms that later writers rendered as Tahoma, a phrase meaning snow-covered mountain.
The oldest known trace of people here is a projectile point, dated to roughly 4,000 to 5,800 years before present. Archaeologists recovered it along the Bench Lake section of the trail, the first stretch of today's Bench and Snow Lake Trail. Projectile points made 2,500 years ago add to that record, and the wider evidence points to hunting, gathering, and ceremonies on the mountain.
A larger discovery is a rock shelter near Fryingpan Creek, east of Goat Island Mountain. Hunting artifacts turned up inside. Because people could not have stayed there year-round, the shelter probably served during certain seasons. Connections to cultural groups point to use by Columbia Plateau Tribes between roughly 1,000 and 300 years before present. Archaeological evidence also places seasonal camps in the high meadows along the mountain's sides.
Visitors can walk the same trail where the oldest point turned up. The route starts on Stevens Canyon Road and runs southeast to Bench Lake, a brief walk to a subalpine lake from which Mount Rainier can be seen. Keep going, and the trail turns south and climbs to Snow Lake, with the rocky Tatoosh Range rising behind it.
In 1963 the National Park Service hired Washington State University to study Native American use of the area. Researchers concluded that people used the area most heavily between about 8,000 and 4,500 years before present. Interviews with elderly Native Americans, along with a review of ethnographic writing, found no sign of permanent settlement inside the park.
