The name layers on
‘Going to the Sun’
By Emmett Berg
The dedication of the Going-to-the-Sun Road at Logan Pass July 15, 1933. The road’s namesake mountain serves as a dramatic backdrop for photographer George A. Grant. Photo courtesy Glacier National Park Archives.
Why, when and how did we get to Going-to-the-Sun?
In short, it’s special: a name-bridge for the Mountain, the Road, and our little magazine. In real ways, the name mirrors Glacier’s meta-sedimentary quartzite, siltite, argillite, limestone and dolomite. Like the alpine rocks in Glacier, the multiple iterations of Going-to-the-Sun have origins in uplift yet also experience erosion and change.
In the recorded tradition, Going-to-the-Sun came into the popular imagination in the winter of 1887-88 when the settler James Willard Schultz was puffing upon the pipe of Tail-Feathers-Coming-Over-the-Hill following a successful hunt for a bighorn ram on Red Eagle Mountain. Schultz saw his Pikuni friend “gazing constantly at a particularly beautiful mountain across [St. Mary Lake],” wrote Warren Hanna, Schultz’s biographer.
ABOVE: James Willard Schultz LEFT: Tail-Feathers-Coming-Over-the-Hill
Typical of Schultz’s florid melding of fact and legend, decades later he was able to recall
to Hanna in detail the following quotation, published 99 years later and attributed to Tail Feathers: “How very high it is, its summit far up into the blue. Of all the mountains I have ever seen I think it is the most beautiful. Were I younger and were it summertime, how I would like to climb up and lie on its summit, and fast, and pray to the Sun for a vision.” On the spot, Schultz decided to name it “Going-to-the-Sun,” which his companion agreed was “a powerful, sacred name. It could not have a better one!”
A tidy tale, and believable so far as the setting. From Red Eagle and St. Mary Lake, Going-to-the-Sun Mountain’s eastern buttresses present an impressive bulk, a diamond shape with a flat summit. The mountain predominates beyond the headwaters of the lake, sloping gracefully enough to lead director Stanley Kubrick to frame the opening sequence of The Shining along its flanks. Driving down through the East Side Tunnel, the regular angles of Going-to-the-Sun fill the view with alpine symmetry on an alluring scale. The mountain is, if anything, captivating to the human eye.The likelihood, however, is that the Schultz origin story is better understood as an amalgam of the past.
Blackfeet Tribal Band, 1933
A Mountain of Meanings
In the 10,000 years preceding Schultz, the Pikuni peoples (now the Blackfeet and Blood tribes, and the Siksika and Aapatohipiikunniwa nations of southwest Alberta) almost certainly came to the same conclusion as Tail-Feathers-Coming-Over-the-Hill, and acted upon it.
The Pikuni vision quest often involved a particular mountain observed during migration or hunting, a mountain that became a singular focus. To achieve the visions from Sun, the Pikuni would select a rock from the stream bed at the base of the mountain, according to Souta Calling Last, the Missoula-based founder of the educational organization Indigenous Vision. The rock would then be carried to the top of the mountain and placed on its summit, establishing a cairn and a catalyst for visions (accompanied by fasting). The Blackfeet word for mountain, miisták, literally means “forced up,”which displays a depth beyond sacred sites, including the Lewis Thrust Fault tens of millions of years ago that forced up the jagged beauty of the landscape.
Mountains all over Glacier country have cairns that began as sacred sites of vision quests. “Ten thousand years and beyond we have evidence on the ground that we were mountaineers,” said John Murray, the longtime Blackfeet tribal historical preservation officer. (The artifacts were documented in a 2001 archeology study by Brian Reeves and Sandra Peacock, Our Mountains Are Our Pillows.)
A white, settler-colonial name, and yet a “powerful, sacred” one. That connectivity — a nexus between cultures long in opposition — persists even from the point of view of Mike Bruised Head, an indigenous scholar whose own bloodlines trace back to the Baker Massacre, the 1877 killings of a band of peaceful Blackfeet led by Heavy Runner.
“In a way, Going-to-the-Sun is accurate and modernized,” said Bruised Head, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Lethbridge and member of the Kainai (Blood) Nation. “It does have an older name, almost a Napi name, when a spirit completed its work it went back home to the sun. I heard it from different elders.”
Bruised Head’s dissertation, which focuses on the disappearance of Blackfeet names on the Canadian side, has been complicated by the loss of oral tradition and memory with each passing generation of Blackfeet and their Pikuni cousins. The process of singling out a name becomes as thorny as hawthorn when names are changed or erased, or when origin stories are mingled with legends as told and invented by outsiders. Take, for example, the opera written in the early 20th Century to tell the story of the Blackfeet.
Blackfeet Legends as Sung in Carnegie Hall
“When I think of Going-to-the-Sun, I think of the pursuit of Scarface,” said Jesse DesRosier, a teacher at the Cuts Wood School in Browning, a Blackfeet language immersion educational program. “But that’s not for me to tell. You have to ask an elder.”
Poia: The Legend of Scarface was an opera written in 1909 by Arthur Nevin after spending two summers in Montana at the urging of an Ivy League adventurer, Walter McClintock, who was an early chronicler of Blackfeet legends. Nevin recorded Blackfeet songs and incorporated singing, dancing and lighting to bring oral traditions to the stage.
Though its musical score was well received at Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh, the opera was never performed in America, according to a 2005 article in the New York Times. In 1910, Scarface was shuttered after a single performance in Munich that was met with hisses and catcalls by theatergoers. Its storyline, that of a disfigured Blackfoot whose heroics reminded his people of the importance of the Sun Dance, was another example, like James Willard Schultz, of an outsider’s attempt to both preserve Blackfeet culture and gloss over inconsistencies in origin stories.
Thanks to the wealth of information contained within Glacier Park’s archives, and Park librarian Anya Helsel, we can piece together how the name of a mountain became the famous name of a road. A 1992 study by Kathryn Steen on the history of the Going-to-the-Sun Road notes that from the late 1910s onward, the east-west route was known as the “Transmountain Highway.”
Steen wrote that as completion neared and plans were drawn up for a dedication, the question of a more distinctive name eluded the involved engineers and officials, including Superintendent J.R. Eakin. “Congressman Louis C. Cramton, who had taken a particular interest in the park and had helped obtain the appropriation in 1924, recommended ‘Going-to-the-Sun Highway’ to Eakin. It is unknown whether the congressman came up with this idea on his own, but Eakin liked the name because ‘it gives the impression that in driving this road autoists will ascend to extreme heights and view sublime panoramas.’”
Despite this official record, George C. Ruhle, the Park’s first naturalist, appeared to take credit for the naming the road in his seminal “The Ruhle Handbook” of roads and trails in Glacier-Waterton. In a 1976 edition, Ruhle writes that the name for the Going-to-the-Sun Road “was suggested by the author to the Secretary of the Interior in 1931 to replace the earlier ‘Logan Pass Road.’ The name seems poetic and appropriate: legendary Going-to-the-Sun Mountain thrusts its magnificent uplift into the blue above the road modestly skirting its base.”
The tiebreaker appears to be between Ruhle and Cramton, who represented Michigan in Congress but left office after defeat in a 1930 primary election, a few years before the Sun Road dedication in the summer of 1933. However, Cramton was a special assistant to the Secretary of the Interior in 1931 and 1932 — a detail further complicated by a transition between Ray Wilbur and Harold Ickes as Interior secretaries in March 1933, four months before the ribbon-cutting.
Construction circa 1932 of the east side of the Transmountain Road set against Going-to-the-Sun Mountain, photographer unknown. Glacier National Park Archives.
Yet the final word appears to favor the naturalist. In a 1929 edition of Glacier Nature Notes, Ruhle editorializes about the upcoming completion of the monumental road and urges a name far from “overworked” monikers such as “Scenic Drive and Inspiration Point.” Ruhle asks his readers to “let me enter a plea for a name with Indian flavor as free as possible from the commonplace. The editor is yearning for such names as Trail-to-the-Sun and Going-to-the-Sun Point, and the establishment of a picturesque name such as ‘The Parting-of-the-Waters’ to the crossing of the highway over Hudson Bay Divide.”
(Apparently Ruhle had larger aspirations for Logan Pass, a footnote of history that makes the author ponder a Kalispell hospital changing its name not to Logan Health but the Parting of the Waters, an extrapolation that could be extended to the many children named Logan, a name that exploded in popularity during the “hiking revolution” of the 1970s. Pardon the digression. Ruhle did well to lean into Going-to-the-Sun and shun the commonplace. Kudos to Cramton.)
AT LEFT: Going to the Sun Road
The dedication came with some score settling. A 1933 press release Steen reviewed from the U.S. Department of the Interior celebrating the dedication of the road “told the story of the god Sour Spirit who came down from the sun to teach Blackfeet braves the rudiments of the hunt, and reproduced his image on the top of the mountain as a ‘perpetual source of inspiration.’” The communication went on to claim the name Going to the Sun was a contraction of the mountain’s original name, “The Face of Sour Spirit Who Went Back to the Sun After His Work Was Done” Mountain.
So, out with James Willard Schultz as the namer, according to the U.S. government. Yet what follows appears to suggest that the 1933 Sun Road dedication precipitated origin stories about the mountain that embraced depth of the kind that typifies Blackfeet language, a verb-driven tongue, with implied connections and animacy but also multiplicity.
Natósi-áitapo, Napi and a Magnifying Glass
“Most English is static and lumpy,” said Murray, the Blackfeet tribal historian. “English takes a bird to move it. It’s nothing like Blackfeet language, which is fairly well structured grammatically, and always chaotic and moving.” Going-to-the-Sun Mountain, a white place name in gerund form, indeed hints playfully at the Pikuni layers beneath.
Jack Holterman in his “Glacier Place Names” cites Schultz in 1929 as telling Ruhle and the Geographic Board on names “I myself named Going to the Sun Mountain…There is no Indian legend in connection with its name.” Holterman goes on to argue at least for shared credit with Tail Feathers, and also that Schultz eventually relocated his origin story to 1885 and the hunt to a different mountain, Sun Mountain, which he said had the Blackfoot name Natái-ispi-istaki, or Lone High Mountain."
Holterman presented multiple other avenues, noting that the Blackfoot version of the name can be Natósi-áitapo, ‘to-the-sun he/she goes’” but also cites the pioneering work of author Ella E. Clark. An English teacher with no formal training in ethnography whose influential work came after World War II, Clark interviewed an elder named Chewing Black Bones, who shared oral history that prefigures the Sour Spirit version.
Black Bones told Clark the mountain’s origin comes from a time when “Napi angered some of his people and is fleeing to the mountains. He passes St. Mary Lakes and scales the highest peak, where he ducks into a lofty ravine with just his face peering out. He turns into a rock and is up there still, looking over his people, errant as they may be, turning his face this way and that.”
“The profile on the mountain top,” Holterman quotes Clark as reporting, “however, is clearer as a snowfield than as a rock, and because of it, the peak has also been called Face Mountain and its spur is Mahtapi Peak, (matápi, -tapi: person, people).”
Holterman rounds out his investigation noting that George Bird Grinnell believed the peak is named for a person, Hugh Monroe, who displayed before an audience of Piegans under Lone Walker the ability to use a magnifying glass to light a fire, leading to the name Natósi-inipi, or “Brings Down the Sun.” In conclusion, Holterman begrudges Schultz naming rights but argues for an older version, citing an account by Canadian historian Hugh A. Dempsey that the year 1845 is remembered for a Kainai (Blood) of the name Natosipokomiw, who “had to hide from the Crees by crawling into a hole (something like Napi peering out from the mountain top.)”
‘This Was the Name I Wanted’
While the mountain and road origins have been spelled out but hardly seem stable, the GMS magazine held in your hands has a sure-footed, even wondrous provenance. Our own Denis Twohig has chronicled the early days of the Glacier Mountaineers in the 2021 issue of Going-to-the-Sun, and for the purposes of this article returned to the subject of his foray into publishing in 1979 and picking a suitable name. “I can only recall that this was the name I wanted for the magazine,” Twohig wrote in an email, “so I contacted the Park Service and they had no objections.”
Photo of GMS founder Denis Twohig from a Daily Inter Lake article, circa 1980.
In this age of contested intellectual property, one can only speculate how National Park Service officials would react today to the private use of a name so near and dear to a national park. For comparison, Yosemite National Park in 2019 settled a lawsuit for $12 million over a former concessionaire’s claim to own naming rights to the Ahwahnee Hotel. The concessionaire, Delaware North, had asked for $51 million. The comparison is apples to oranges, but the salient fact is that historic names are big business.
But Twohig didn’t just get the go-ahead from Glacier, but from state officials, too. “I then had local artist Jim Clayborn come up with a logo and registered the name and logo with the state of Montana,” Twohig recalled. “I actually had legal claim to the name Going-to-the-Sun, although I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant.”
Local media at the time of the magazine’s launch depicted Twohig as a bond broker-turned-publisher, who sold a ski magazine focused on Big Mountain (Whitefish Mountain Resort) in order to concentrate on Going to the Sun Magazine, which was envisioned as a twice-yearly magazine aiming for eventual production as a quarterly.
“The first copies on Flathead newsstands sold out in three weeks at $2.50 apiece,” reporter Jackie Adams wrote in the Daily Interlake. “As for material, Twohig says he doesn’t ever expect to run out.”
