In July of 1901 a young bride who has never climbed a mountain takes a dare on a peak above Lake McDonald that nobody has topped. Cornelia James Cannon's climb leaves behind a small bottle and a question that sits on the mountain for decades. Boone tells the tale on the road below it.
Charlie Howe said the wrong thing to the wrong bride. July of nineteen oh one, he was piloting a boat up Lake McDonald with Walter and Cornelia Cannon aboard, about three weeks married. She let it be known she'd like to climb every mountain in sight. So Howe pointed out the big one at the head of the lake, Goat Mountain. The worst in the region, he called it. Nobody had reached the top, and the first one up had the right to put a name on it. Neither had ever climbed a mountain. They came from Minnesota. On the nineteenth they started up with a guide, Denis Comeau, on boots and bare hands. A falling stone grazed her face. A wall of rock near a hundred feet high stopped all three. She went up a crack in it, and so did Comeau. Walter stuck fast, too thick, he reported, with hundreds of feet of mountainside under his boots. That groom coined a phrase in nineteen fifteen, by the way. Fight or flight. I won't say a crack in Goat Mountain gave it to him. I'll only say he'd had the practice. Comeau found another way, along a goat trail one foot wide and around a corner of rock six inches wide over open air. Near the summit she went on ahead, and when the men came up she was there to meet them. This is Cannon Mountain, she said. Walter penciled a certificate, sealed it in a bottle and piled rocks on it. She allowed she looked like an ex-prizefighter. But what of that, she said. We are immortal. The name held. The woman slipped away. By nineteen sixty the park's own history had it named for a young couple, and left it there. Late in July of nineteen eighty-five, two Montana climbers found a malted-milk bottle under a cairn on top, with a pencil note inside. Cornelia James Cannon was first to reach the top, it said. The way her own daughter tells it, the park smelled a hoax. An official said the lid looked wrong and the writing looked like it could have been done yesterday. A Harvard professor writing Walter's biography swore to the handwriting. For eighty-four years, all that held her claim to that summit was a slip of paper, a glass bottle and a pile of rocks with the wind on it.
Photo: NPS / Jacob W. Frank · Public domain