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Reviews
Range of Glaciers: The Exploration and Survey of the Northern Cascade Range
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By Fred Beckey
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Oregon Historical Society Press, Portland, 2003. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 568 pages. $40.00 cloth.
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Reviewed by William B. Beyers and Stephen J. Hyde
University of Washington, Seattle
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| To most outdoor enthusiasts, the name Fred Beckey is indelibly tied to his unsurpassed number of first ascents in the North Cascades and to the trilogy of climbing guides he coauthored. The guides' introductory sections have brief descriptions of the vegetation, geological structure, and history of human use of the Cascades, but they are largely descriptions of climbing routes with records of first ascents. Range of Glaciers, in contrast, presents a detailed description of the exploration and survey of Beckey's beloved North Cascades and represents the result of fifteen years of research in libraries and archives flung far and wide across North America and Europe. It will be of interest to both climbers and people interested in the history of the Pacific Northwest region. |
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Allow us to pause for a disclosure: we know that Beckey is a tenacious researcher from firsthand experience. In the summer of 1995, Steve and Fred retreated from the coast range of British Columbia and found refuge at the University of British Columbia libraries. Fred knew of a good place to bivouac among the pines on campus. They spent the next day scouring aerial photographs and alpine journals in search of historical accounts of exploration. By the end of the day, they had deduced what had been climbed in a particular region and had taken note of all unclimbed mountains. |
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In Range of Glaciers, Beckey never really defines the North Cascades, which today are most commonly thought of as the Cascade Mountains from Stevens Pass to the Canadian border. His treatment basically covers the Cascade Mountains in Washington state, but he does discuss the British Columbia extension in chapter 6. He divides the book into three broad sections. The first addresses the early settlers, fur traders, and initial attempts at wagon roads and railroads. The second emphasizes the first international boundary surveys between 1857 and 1862 (precipitated by the boundary settlement with the British in 1846) and the surveys initiated by the Northern Pacific Railroad land grant. The third section addresses more contemporary matters, including the construction of highways, early climbing history, miners, the topographic mapping and geological description of the region, the second international boundary survey, and the imprint of the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service on the region. |
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Beckey supplements the text with historic photographs and copious references. There are also a number of maps, which are of varying quality and have been placed with varying utility. For example, the map of Native American trails on page 5 is set in the section on early navigators, and the map related to navigators is on page 15, in the section on Native peoples. Some information is missing on maps, such as the map of early overland exploration that leaves out Lewis and Clark's route. |
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Beckey provides extensive details and quotes from the diaries and reports of early explorers, which make for fascinating reading. The accounts of the railroad pass surveys and the boundary surveys are especially absorbing. So, too, are the accounts of early climbs and the judgments passed about the weather (awful) and the taste of game such as marmot and goat (awful). In general, the book paints a picture of the region as hostile, dismal, not conducive to settlement, and difficult to conquer for human purposes. Beckey's writing tends to be dry, descriptive prose, but it is quite readable and for the most part we found the content accurate. Place-names in the early accounts that he quotes are often different from those used today, and only Beckey could know the landscape of the North Cascades so well as to interpret the contemporary locations of these places. |
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There are a couple of instances where we think that he has his history somewhat confused. In chapters 3 and 9, he indicates that the Northern Pacific Railroad did not reach Tacoma or Seattle until the late 1880s. It actually reached Tacoma in 1883 and Seattle in 1884 (see Louis T. Renz, The History of the Northern Pacific Railroad, 1980). In chapter 9, he notes that James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railroad eventually took control of the Northern Pacific, but it was nearly a century later (long after James J. Hill was dead) that the Great Northern Railroad and the Northern Pacific merged to become the Burlington Northern Railroad. The courts blocked the proposed merger of these two lines at the turn of the nineteenth century due to antitrust concerns. He also implies that it was Hill who obtained the Northern Pacific land grant west of the Cascades, but that was not the case. Frederick Weyerhaeuser and his partners purchased this land from the Northern Pacific to help it escape insolvency brought on by the competitive pressures of the Great Northern Railroad. In this same section, Beckey argues that the National Forests were reduced to checkerboards in the railroad land-granting process, but this was done out of the public domain administered by the U.S. Land Office decades before the Forest Service was created as a federal agency. These lapses appear to us to be rare instances of getting history wrong in this book. It would take another fifteen years to retrace Beckey's steps to verify this conclusion, however, and we would never be able to bring his personal knowledge of the North Cascades to the table in the process. |
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