but probability makes the claim.
Whether or not in their decline the canoes of prehistoric men found
harbor by guidance of their pillars of fire by night, and their pillars
of smoke by day is less probable but possible. One at least of the giant
band, Lassen Peak, is semi-active to-day. At least two others, Mount
Rainier and Mount Baker, offer evidences of internal heat beneath their
mail of ice. And early settlers in the northwest report Indian
traditions of the awful cataclysm in which Mount Rainier lost two
thousand feet of cone.

LASSEN PEAK NATIONAL PARK

Lassen Peak, the last of the Cascades in active eruption, rises between
the northern end of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, of which it is locally
but wrongly considered a part, and the Klamath Mountains, a spur of the
Cascades. Actually it is the southern terminus of the Cascades.

* * * * *

Though quiet for more than two hundred years, the region long has
enjoyed scientific and popular interest because it possesses hot
springs, mud volcanoes and other minor volcanic phenomena, and
particularly because its cones, which are easily climbed and studied,
have remained very nearly perfect. Besides Lassen Peak, whose altitude
is 10,437 feet, there are others of large size and great interest close
by. Prospect Peak attains the altitude of 9,200 feet; Harkness Peak
9,000 feet; and Cinder Cone, a specimen of unusual beauty, 6,907 feet.

Because it seemed desirable to conserve the best two of these examples
of recent volcanism, President Taft in 1906 created the Lassen Peak and
the Cinder Cone National Monuments. Doubtless there would have been no
change in the status of these reservations had not Lassen Peak broken
its long sleep in the spring of 1914 with a series of eruptions covering
a period of nineteen months. This centred attention upon the region, and
in August, 1916, Congress created the Lassen Volcanic National Park, a
reservation of a hundred and twenty-four square miles, which included
both national monuments, other notable cones of the neighborhood, and
practically all the hot springs and other lesser phenomena. Four months
after the creation of the national park Lassen Peak ceased activity with
its two hundred and twelfth eruption. It is not expected to resume. For
some years, however, scientists will continue to class it as
semi-active.

These eruptions, none of which produced any considerable lava flow, are
regarded as proba