James Longmire

Of all the pioneers of Mount Rainier, none left a mark as indelible as James Longmire.

Explorer, guide, mountain climber, road builder, legislator and entrepreneur - Longmire seems to have been everywhere in the mountain's early history of white settlement. Between 1853, when he first saw it, until he died in 1897, he did more than anyone to change Rainier from wilderness to tourist destination.

He was already a hero the day he arrived in Washington Territory in 1853. He and his family were in the first wagon train to cross the Cascades through the old Naches Pass. White settlers already in the Puget Sound lowlands greeted them like long-lost relatives.

The Longmires settled on the Yelm Prairie, homesteading a claim with a spectacular view of the mountain. Longmire grew familiar with the area and turned that knowledge into profit, becoming a much sought-after guide and provider of pack animals.

In 1870, he played a key role in the first ascent of the mountain, guiding Hazard Stevens and Philemon Van Trump to the base of the mountain and setting them up with the Indian guide Sluiskin.

Longmire himself made the third ascent of Mount Rainier, in 1883, in the company of Van Trump and George Bayley, a California climbing enthusiast. The trip changed Longmire's life, and the course of Rainier history as well.

One of his pack horses wandered away from base camp on the Nisqually River. Longmire tracked it into an area he hadn't previously explored. He found the horse - and unusual-looking stream beds, their banks crusty white.

He put his hand in the water and was startled to find it was warm and effervescent, with dissolved mineral gases.

At the time, bathing in mineral springs was a health fad on the East Coast, and Longmire regarded the find as if it were a vein of gold.

Longmire had already filed his allotted 160-acre homestead claim at Yelm, so he couldn't legally file another. Instead, he filed an 18-acre mining claim, supposedly for extracting red paint pigment from rocks surrounding the springs.

He and his sons cleared a trail from Yelm to the springs. He built a log cabin with five cots upstairs. Soon he was advertising "Longmire's Medical Springs" in Tacoma newspapers.

The water was "an antidote for disease, prepared in Nature's own laboratory.... Why go abroad,'' Longmire's ad read, "when you may find Nature's own restoratives at your very doors?"

As traffic to the mountain increased, Longmire's son Len branched into guide work, charging $1 to lead climbers to the summit. His wife, Virinda, grew famous for her huckleberry pies.

In 1893, with the help of his family and Indian laborers, Longmire widened the trail to the springs into a rough wagon road. By 1896, the road was negotiable by stagecoaches. Gradually, the enterprise grew into a full-fledged tourist attraction, with a hotel, guest cabins, two bathhouse and stables.

Longmire died in 1897, but his family continued to expand facilities after Mount Rainier became a national park, adding a barbershop, a photo studio, stock pastures and a pool hall.

The new park eventually surrounded the Longmire enterprise, and federal officials tended to eye with disfavor the rough buildings and wire fencing hung with advertisements. In a 1918 report to his boss, park supervisor DeWitt Reaburn called the Longmire Hotel "unsightly and utterly useless."

After years of negotiating and arm-twisting, the park service succeeded in buying out the Longmire spread in 1939 for $30,000. The buildings were torn down or burned.

Longmire Springs faded away, but the Longmire name remains, immortalized in park lore. (Published 1999)