Henry Pittock & the Mazamas

by Mathew Brock, Mazama Library and Historical Collections Manager

In the mid to late 1800s, the mountains of the Cascades, especially St. Helens, Adams, and Hood, pulled early adventurers out of the growing metropolitan areas and into the wilderness. In the summer of 1853, Thomas Dryer and a party of other men stood on the summit of Mount St. Helens. During the early exploration and settlement of the Oregon Territory, few had the time or energy to climb mountains. However, a handful of individuals like Dryer were drawn to the mountains. His climb of Mount St. Helens marked the beginning of the golden age of mountain climbing in the Pacific Northwest. A year later, in 1854, Dryer climbed Mt. Hood. His claim of having reached the summit of Mt. Hood was challenged by his eager, young employee Henry L. Pittock.

Early Portland businessmen appear cold and calculating in their dark Victorian-era suits and stern expressions devoid of humor. Henry Pittock looked the part in many of his early photographs, but his public image was at odds with his passion for life and outdoor activities. Pittock was born in London, England on March 1, 1836, before moving to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his family. As a boy, he learned printing as part of the family business and studied at the Western University of Pennsylvania’s preparatory school. Pittock arrived in Oregon in 1853 at the age of 17 after crossing the Oregon Trail by covered wagon. Soon after, Thomas Dryer hired him to work at the Weekly Oregonian. Under Dryer, Pittock worked as a printer, handled distribution, and soon rose to be a shop foreman. By 1854, Pittock had risen through the ranks to the role of business manager. Unable to pay him, Dryer made Pittock his business partner. 

On August 6, 1857, Pittock, along with four others (L.J. Powell, William Buckley, Lyman Chittenden, and James Deardorff) made what is considered the first documented climb of Mt. Hood. Like Dryer three years earlier, Pittock and his party left Philip Foster’s farm in Clackamas County and made their way to the summit over five and a half hours, reaching the top at 12:30 pm. After eating lunch, they planted an alpenstock in the snow with a handkerchief which they left blowing in the north wind. Pittock, who was twenty-three years old at the time, and the other ‘boys’ then amused themselves for an hour by rolling rocks off the summit and watching them crash onto the outcroppings below. Pittock also recalled descending into one of the fumaroles on about 30 feet of rope and being unable to see the bottom. The snow on Hood that day was perfect for glissading and the party was off the mountain in just over two hours. 

After making their way back to Portland, James Deardorff, a member of Pittock’s party, published an account of their climb in the Democratic Standard, a rival publication to Dryer’s Weekly Oregonian. In his article, Deardorff gave his opinion, and it can be assumed one shared by Pittock and the other two climbers, that Dryer’s party had stopped some 300 feet shy of the summit back in 1854. What they found there differed in appearance from Dryer’s published account. Dryer reported finding a summit ridge running from southwest to north that was pockmarked with vents emitting sulfurous gas. Pittock’s party found a summit ridge that ran west to east and no evidence of smoking fumaroles, although they could see a scene that matched Dryer’s description some three hundred feet lower on the mountain’s slope. 

Needless to say, Dryer was less than pleased with Deardorff’s assertions and published a lengthy response in the next edition of his own paper. Over the next several weeks arguments volleyed back and forth in Portland’s newspapers. In his detailed assessment of the early years of the Mazamas, Erik Weiselberg notes that “Dryer sought to shift the terms of the argument, and to argue on the basis of respect, age, and gentlemanly behavior, rather than credibility and accuracy of reporting.” As K.F. Stewart notes in their biography of Henry Pittock, I Kept at Work, “what Dryer and Pittock said to each other while working together over the Oregonian’s presses went unrecorded, but they did continue their joint labor for another three years.” 

Pittock returned to climb Hood again in 1858 with a larger group that included two members of the 1857 climbing party. Pittock’s own recounting of that year’s climb notes that the climb up from Crater Rock was much more difficult than it had been the previous year. The party was forced to cut steps into the hard snow with the iron tips of their alpenstocks. Using a telescope, from the summit, they could see smoke from an Oregon City foundry, the windows of a Portland church reflected in the sun, the prairies of Central Oregon, and the peaks of St. Helens, Adams, and Rainier. Planted on the summit was a six-foot American flag, left from a previous party who summited on July 4th. Pittock and his party gathered around the flag, gave three cheers, and fired off pistols and lit firecrackers. The party was slowed on the descent due to everyone’s snowblindness. 

Pittock’s third climb of Mt. Hood, in 1859, turned out to be the most dangerous yet. The top 300 feet below the summit were almost bare of snow and the party was forced to pick their way over loose stones and gravel. Every few steps, someone would kick lose a stone that went rolling past everyone below. On the way up they noticed the tracks of a wolf, which they followed all the way to the summit. The tracks passed over and descended the other side. Upon reaching the summit they found it was covered with butterflies, some of which they captured and brought back as specimens. Also on the summit, they found a bottle containing the names of another party from a week prior and the remains of their firecrackers from the year before, however no sign of the flag or its pole. 

In what might be an indication of the relationship between Pittock and Dryer, it’s interesting to note that Pittock’s longtime friend George T. Meyer climbed Hood that year twice. The two men must have been on at least good enough terms to share a friend. Meyer climbed Mt. Hood once with Dryer in July of 1859 and then again with Pittock a month later. As a result, Meyer became the first person known to have climbed Mt. Hood twice in the same season. 

After scaling Mount Hood each year for three consecutive years, Henry took a decades-long break from climbing. In 1860, he married Georgiana Burton and assumed ownership of The Oregonian newspaper, and was likely focused on his growing family and building the newspaper into a successful business. Henry returned to mountaineering in the 1880s, this time bringing along his daughters, Kate and Lucy Pittock. As adults, Kate and Lucy embraced their father’s love of hiking and climbing. The sisters both joined the Mazamas in 1895 after climbing Mount Hood that same year. Lucy also climbed Mount McLoughlin (then known as Mount Pitt) along with her father in 1896 and summited Pinnacle Peak on the 1897 Mazamas Outing to Mount Rainier.

As the number of Portland-area climbing enthusiasts grew, so did the movement to create a group for like-minded individuals to join. In September of 1887, William Steel was one of a group of Portland climbers who lead the effort to establish the Oregon Alpine Club (OAC), the first mountaineering group west of the Mississippi. While we don’t know with certainty when Pittock and Steel first met, it’s likely they came in contact with each other through their involvement with the OAC. Pittock, his son-in-law Fredrick Leadbetter, and friend George Meyer were all members. The OAC reached the pinnacle of its glory in May of 1888 when it hosted a talk by the noted author Charles Dickens. 

The OAC struggled for seven years while it tried to find a focus and by 1891 it had collapsed. After the OAC went bankrupt, Steel and a handful of other mountaineers began meeting to form a new organization. In early 1894, they drafted a constitution, selected a name, and picked a slate of officers for the new organization. In March of 1894, they launched their new endeavor with ads in newspapers around the West. Pittock played a large part in the build-up to the establishment of the Mazamas. For the previous thirty years, the Oregonian printed little on Mt. Hood, as any further climbs were no longer “firsts.” As Stewart notes in their book, “One notable exception occurred in 1874 when a party came back from the summit with Pittock’s alpenstock, made from a sapling he had cut at timberline on his first climb in 1857, and which you will recall he left on the summit, planted like a flag. The alpenstock was inscribed with his name and the date. Pittock kept it proudly in his office until the flood of 1894 when it was lost, presumably floated downriver and out to sea.” For eleven days prior to and nine days after the selected date for the inauguration of the Mazamas, The Oregonian ran nine separate articles about the ascent. 

On the appointed day over 350 people from all walks of life assembled in the small hamlet of Government Camp, some of them having traveled three or more days by horseback or buggy, over rudimentary roads, where they set up an army of tents at the foot of Mt. Hood. The climb up was not without its dangers. At least two storms swirled around the mountain that day, forcing many climbers to turn back. In a story well known to most Mazamas, on Thursday, July 19, 1894, 155 men and 38 women reached the summit to inaugurate the Mazamas. 

Pittock and his two daughters were among those that were turned back by the weather. Pittock was a risk-taker, he wouldn’t have reached the summit of Hood or the Portland business establishment without being one, but he was not rash. The safety of his daughters and others came first. While the Pittocks were not listed as those on the summit, Henry was granted charter member status in the Mazamas in recognition of his 1857 first ascent.

In 1895, the year following the inauguration of the Mazamas, Pittock’s daughters Kate and Lucy, along with their brother-in-law Frederick Leadbetter, and Pittock’s nephew H. D. Stratton, made their own climb of Mt. Hood and became members of the Mazamas. 

Lucy accompanied her father on the 1986 Mazama Outing to Crater Lake that year. On August 16th, they were among the thirty-two people who ascended Mt. Pitt.  

In 1897 the members of the Mazamas elected Henry Pittock president of the organization. The minutes from Pittock’s year as president show that he appointed a committee to search for additional space to store publications, books, and curios. He and the executive council urged the US Geographic Survey to map the State of Oregon and Mt. Hood specifically. He signed on to a petition to create the Olympic Mountains Forest Reserve and urged for the creation of Crater Lake National Park. 

In the early years of the Mazamas, the Annual Outing was the big social event of the season. And under Pittock’s tenure, the location chosen for the 1897 outing was Mt. Rainier. Given the difficulty and time required, to say nothing of the logistics of reaching the mountains in the late 1800s, these outings were no small affairs. These often involved upwards of a hundred people or more, traveling by boat, train, wagon, and on horseback, over several days just to reach the site of their basecamp.  In addition to the climbers, there were cooks and camp porters, and wagon loads of supplies that were needed to support the huge party sometime for weeks in the wilderness.  

The outing to Mt. Rainier generated nationwide interest in the Pacific Northwest and its mountains, and contributed substantially to the creation of the Mt. Rainier National Park a year and a half later in 1899. In addition to over 40 Mazamas, a contingent of climbers from California’s Sierra Club, the Appalachian Mountain Club, and many eminent scientists were represented. In addition to Steel and Pittock, other notable members of the outing include Miss Fay Fuller; Dr. E. W. Young, and Edward Curtis, of Seattle. Edward Curtis would go on and become renowned around the world for his ethnographic work on, and portraits of, the Native Americans of the western United States. 

Even though there were other experienced Rainier climbers on the trip, Steel, Pittock, and Fuller among them, Curtis was selected as the climb leader due to his having spent considerable time on the mountain climbing and photographing its many changing seasons. Prior to the climb Curtis is said to have remarked to a friend, “It will be a grand trip, but there are too many inexperienced people in the party. I fear that before we return some accident will happen which will bathe the trip in gloom.” 

Pittock was one of the climb leaders who led the two-day climb to Rainier’s 14,410 foot summit. They reached the summit at 3:30 in the afternoon, although some of the party, including daughter Lucy, turned back due to altitude sickness. Pittock was sixty-three years old at the time of his Rainier climb. 

Of the 75 climbers who started out, 59 made the summit, a remarkable record for what we in modern times would consider amateurs. As Curtis had feared before the outing began, the death of Professor Edgar McClure, of the University of Oregon, who fell on the descent, put a terrible damper on what was an otherwise successful climb and gathering. 

At the annual meeting in October of 1897, Pittock lost his bid for reelection to the presidency of the Mazamas, on a vote of 17-2. His defeat didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for the Mazamas, thankfully. On July 21, 1898, Henry and Lucy celebrated with the Mazamas atop Mount St. Helens during that year’s Annual Outing. The following year, 1899, the Pittocks and the Mazamas traveled north to Lake Chelan in Washington state for that year’s Annual Outing. In the reporting of the outing, it’s noted that Henry and Georgiana Pittock arrived “just a little too late for the climb of Mt. Sahala.” The presence of Georgiana was more than likely an indication that Henry had no intention of climbing that year. 

In 1901 Pittock traveled south with a Mazama contingent that included Rodney Glisan and others, to join the Sierra Club’s outing to the High Sierra. In his photo album from the trip, Glisan included an image of the sixty-seven-year-old Pittock sitting in the shade with John Muir. It’s unknown the level of activity Pittock engaged in during the Sierra Club outing. 

Pittock makes one last appearance at the basecamp for the 1912 Mazama climb of Mt. Hood. He can be seen, in both photographs and in rare film footage, milling around with the other climbers in front of Cloud Cap Inn. This likely marks the end of Henry Pittock’s mountaineering career. He would have been 76 years old—at a time when age weighted more heavily on an individual than it does now. 

Henry Pittock’s death in 1919 corresponds with the end of the golden age of mountaineering in the region. He led by example, and had a profound impact on the development of mountaineering in the Pacific Northwest. Along with William Steel and the other founders of the Mazamas, he worked to promote mountaineering through word and deed. To paraphrase Erik Weislberg, they were part of a modernizing of American culture which emerged after the Civil War and whose scientific, nationalistic, reformist, and professional proclivities praised exploring, record-keeping, record-setting, publishing, and promoting. Their efforts acted as part of a process that made good citizens out of pioneers. With nationalism and public service in mind, they promoted themselves and their environment as they climbed mountains around the Northwest. 

The Thrill of the Climb: The Pittocks and early mountaineering in Oregon in on display at the Pittock Mansion through July 3, 2022. The exhibit, featuring over 40 artifacts from the Mazama Library and Historical Collections, explores the Pittock family’s love of the sport and the early history of mountaineering in Oregon. Go see it today!