Mount St. Helens is best known for the epic eruption of 1980 when it spewed its guts 90,000 feet in the air and spread the debris around the globe. Far less known is that 75 years before the eruption, some of Mount St. Helens’ innards made their way to Portland, Oregon, in a much less violent manner. The material though was well-traveled, having gone from the mountain to New York before returning west. And, when it returned, it was in a new form, having been turned into a statue of Sacagawea, which was unveiled on July 6, 1905, at Portland’s Lewis and Clark Exposition.

The creation story of the statue begins with two German farmers on a hunting trip around Mount St. Helens in the 1880s. Out in the field, they came across some beautiful boulders rich in sparkly bits. They told others about their pretty rocks, word spread, and within three years 500 men were seeking their fortune. Included in this scrum were the owners of a German language newspaper based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who ponied up $20,000 (about $700,000 in 2025) to find the reported ores rich in gold, silver, and copper. As has happened with many a mineral seeker, their hoped-for boom was a bust, so bad that it shut down the entire district.

Of course that didn’t stop anyone. On May 26, 1901, the Oregonian published an article titled “One of Nature’s Greatest Mineral Storehouses.” The unnamed author reported that four railroads were working on lines to reach the St. Helens mines. Despite the previous failures, a new round of prospectors had arrived in 1898 at Mount St. Helens, equipped with more money, drills, and explosives, as well as yet another healthy belief that they would succeed where others had failed.

If you spend much time reading about early miners, you cannot help but notice the they failed but I will succeed attitude, often aligned with their excuses for why they didn’t succeed. For example, consider this litany by an anonymous gold seeker in 1860, “Their failure to realize their ‘piles’ was not owing to the scarcity of the precious deposit; but they failed because the season of their arrival was too early or too late; the river was too high or too low; it was too wet or too dry; too much or too little snow; or they could not find the spot after leaving it once; or the men failed from fatigue; their provisions failed because laboring men would eat; or they had no rocker, or tom, or pick, or spade, etc.”

Leading the mineral-hungry pack at the end of the 19th century was Dr. Henry Waldo Coe of Portland. A physician who had spent time in North Dakota and Alaska, he was a bank president, besotted with mineral fever at the volcano, and friends with President Teddy Roosevelt. Coe eventually sold $700,000 in shares of the Mount. St. Helens Consolidated Mining Company, including to the President. The company worked several mines with names such as Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. They eventually drilled the longest tunnel in southwest Washington, 2,291 feet into the Swedish mine, and by 1910, prospectors had dug test pits and drilled more than 11,000 feet of tunnels.

With the advantages of new technology and the soon-to-arrive rail lines, success was clearly imminent for Dr. Coe and his investors. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t. Coe never came close to recovering his and others investments at Mount St. Helens. A 1977 Washington Department of Natural Resources report listed the total value of the gold, silver, and copper extracted from Mount St. Helens during Coe’s time as $385.

Transportation was always an issue. To reach the closet point that railroads ever got to the mines—Castle Rock—ore had to be floated two-plus miles across Spirit Lake and hauled 48 miles by wagon road. It appears that Coe’s company only accomplished this once, when a 20 ton shipment arrived in late 1904.

But Dr. Coe appears to be a man who pushed aside his failure and found a way to make lemonade from his lemon. He and his wife decided to donate the pure copper, after smelting, from Mount St. Helens to the Henry Bonnard Bronze Company in New York. At the foundry, the copper would be mixed with tin to make bronze, which would be used for the Sacagawea sculpture for the Lewis and Clark Exposition.

Alice Cooper was the sculptor of the monument. Born in Iowa, she attended school in Chicago but spent most of her adult life in Denver. She may have worked on sculptures for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair but not enough is known about her to confirm. Newspaper articles from the era report that various people sent photos/drawings to Cooper to help her imagine Sacagawea. After making the initial model in clay, it was created in bronze at the New York foundry and then shipped back to Portland.

For the next 76 years following Coe’s single, sort of successful extraction of ore, numerous groups and individuals alternatively praised (“an extremely valuable mine” valued at more than $2 million ore) and condemned (“disappointing results and general barrenness”) the potential for success. The naysayers were clearly correct. By 1974, just $26,056 of ore had been pulled from the mountain. Six years later, Mount St. Helens crushed all hopes of future mineral riches, when billions of tons of rocks and ash dumped into Spirit Lake, raising its level high enough to cover the old mine adits used by Coe.

Now all that remains of the hoped for glories of the mines of Mount St. Helens is the statue to Sacagawea. Certainly a far better tribute than one left by decades of plundering.

While researching this newsletter, I couldn’t remember if the L&C Expedition had seen MSH erupt so I did what we all do and typed a few words into Google. Here’s what I typed and the AI response. To paraphrase what I have heard about some people, AI has an acute grasp of the obvious.

November 15, 2025 – Wild in Seattle/Seattle Walks – Burien Public Library – 3:00 P.M. – I’ll be talking about my books Wild in Seattle and Seattle Walks.

November 22, 2025 – Holiday Bookfest – 2:00 – 4:00 P.M. – Phinney Neighborhood Center – I’ll be joining a wonderful group of writers selling our books…just in time for the upcoming holidays. Always a fun event.

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