The Mountain by Any Other Name

So before about 1930 there’s an easy way to trace tourism and travel brochures related to the mountain. Anything produced in Tacoma, by the Northern Pacific or Milwaukee Road railroads or Pierce County cities and Chamber of Commerce groups faithfully avoided printing the two words Mount ( or Mt.) and Rainier together. The iconic mountain is always referred to as Mt. Tacoma, “The Mountain” or sometimes Mt. Tahoma. The park is unavoidable called Rainier National Park but most locally developed materials go to almost comical lengths to avoid any reference to a mountain with the name, Rainier. These were, of course, the contentious days of the mountain’s geographic name battle between Tacoma and Seattle fueled by competing newspapers, railroads and politicians. In its worthy and quixotic efforts to  synchronize the common name of the mountain with its own, Tacoma lost (more than once). The entire rest of the known world, including Seattle, continued to used the name Rainier when describing both the national park and the 14,409 foot mountain. These brochures from the early 20th Century, however are from Tacoma, the city where Rainier is a beer.