mained unknown. The
natives of the Cook Inlet country on the east knew it as Doleika, and
tell you that it is the rock which a god threw at his eloping wife. They
say it was once a volcano, which is not the fact. The Aleutes on the
south called it Traleika, the big mountain. The natives of the Kuskokwim
country on the west knew it as Denalai, the god, father of the great
range. The Russians who established the first permanent white settlement
in Alaska on Kodiak Island knew it as Bulshia Gora, the great mountain.
Captain Cook, who in 1778 explored the inlet which since has borne his
name, does not mention it, but Vancouver in 1794 unquestionably meant it
in his reference to "distant stupendous mountains."

After the United States acquired Alaska, in 1867, there is little
mention of it for some years. But Frank Densmore, an explorer of 1889,
entered the Kuskokwim region, and took such glowing accounts of its
magnificence back to the Yukon that for years it was known through the
settlements as Densmore's Mountain. In 1885 Lieutenant Henry C. Allen,
U.S.A., made a sketch of the range from his skin boat on the Tanana
River, a hundred and fifty miles away, which is the earliest known
picture of McKinley.

Meantime the neighborhood was invaded by prospectors from both sides.
The Cook Inlet gold fields were exploited in 1894. Two years later W.A.
Dickey and his partner, Monks, two young Princeton graduates, exploring
north from their workings, recognized the mountain's commanding
proportions and named it Mount McKinley, by which it rapidly became
known, and was entered on the early maps. With crude instruments
improvised on the spot, Dickey estimated the mountain's height as twenty
thousand feet--a real achievement. When Belmore Browne, who climbed the
great peak in 1912, asked Dickey why he chose the name, Dickey told him
that he was so disgusted with the free-silver arguments of men
travelling with him that he named the mountain after the most ardent
gold-standard man he knew.

The War Department sent several parties to the region during the next
few years to explore, and the United States Geological Survey, beginning
in 1898 with the Eldridge-Muldrow party, has had topographical and
geological parties in the region almost continuously since. In 1915 the
Government began the railroad from Seward to Fairbanks. Its course lies
from Cook Inlet up the Susitna River to the headwaters of the Nenana
River, where it crosses the r