The Rocky Mountains Were Once the Shining Mountains

Before they were the Rocky Mountains, they were the Shining Mountains, the Stony Mountains and, to one French officer in the 1750s, the montagne de Roche. The name that stuck is the plainest of the lot: mountains made of rock, which came into English from the French, as a 1902 history of the fur trade tells it.

Carver’s Shining Mountains

Jonathan Carver traveled through the interior of North America in 1766, 1767 and 1768, and he published his book about it in 1778. Some of what he wrote about the far West came from what Indians “further told” him. The mountains west of the River St. Pierre, he said, “are called the Shining Mountains, from an infinite number of chrystal stones, of an amazing size, with which they are covered, and which, when the sun shines full upon them, sparkle so as to be seen at a very great distance.”

He didn’t think small. The whole range, he wrote, was “calculated to be more than three thousand miles in length,” and he guessed it might someday turn out to hold more riches than the Peruvian mines. You won’t find his crystal-covered peaks on a modern map, but you’ll find the range.

A fort at the “montagne de Roche”

The rock version is older than Carver’s book. Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre was a French officer in Canada charged with “la découverte de la mer de l’Ouest,” the discovery of the Western Sea. In his account of the voyage, which runs from 1750 to 1753, he says that on May 29, 1751, ten of his men went up the Paskoya River in two canoes “jusqu’à la montagne de Roche,” as far as the mountain of rock, and built a post he named Fort La Jonquière.

Notice that it’s singular, and that it’s well north of today’s United States. When Lawrence Burpee quoted the passage in English in 1907, it simply read “as far as the Rocky Mountains.” The historian Pierre Margry had printed the French text in 1886, in a volume whose title promised the “découverte des Montagnes Rocheuses.” That’s the oldest use of the rock name we could actually read. It may not be the first one anybody wrote down.

Stony, Stoney and rocky

English-speaking traders kept the idea and changed the adjective. Edward Umfreville, who spent the winters of 1784 to 1787 on a large river that empties into Cedar Lake, wrote in 1790 that, by Indian information, the river was formed by streams flowing out of “an extraordinary ridge of Rocks, called the Stony Mountain.”

Alexander Mackenzie used the other word. On May 17, 1793, paddling up toward the Pacific, he wrote that “the rocky mountains appeared in sight, with their summits covered with snow.” His book came out in 1801. Even so, the Stony version hung on. Mathew Carey’s 1814 map of Missouri Territory, now in the Library of Congress, runs the words “Stoney Mountains” right down the spine of the range.

“Not a happy choice”

Hiram Chittenden, who wrote a big history of the fur trade in 1902, sorted out the pile of names. “Early writers refer to these mountains as the Missouri, Mexican, Shining, Snowy, and Stony mountains,” he wrote, “until finally from the French Montagnes Rocheuses came the modern name.” He also wrote that to the traders and trappers, the Rocky Mountains meant the Continental Divide and the ranges right around it. That’s the world of men like the trapper the town of Provo, Utah is named for.

Chittenden wasn’t a fan, though. “The name itself is not a happy choice,” he wrote, “for it might apply with equal propriety to any range of mountains in the world.”

Rock shows up in Plains Cree, too. A modern Cree dictionary gives asinîwaciy for the Rocky Mountains, and the same word is also glossed “mountain” and “rock hill, rock cliff.” That’s a parallel, not a pedigree: none of the sources we read connects the Cree word to the French or English name.

Seven states, one dot on the map

The federal place-names database, kept by the U.S. Geological Survey, lists Rocky Mountains as the official name by a decision of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names dated May 13, 1954. It pins the whole range to a single point in Teton County, Wyoming, and keeps some old names: “Stoney Mountains,” from Carey’s map, and “Steinigtes Gebürge,” from a German map of 1817. It also lists several other variants, such as Heska and Iyaxe, with no source and no translation.

That one dot doesn’t tell you much about where the mountains go. The National Park Service says they stretch from Canada to central New Mexico, with the northern Rockies covering much of western Montana and north-central Idaho and reaching a little into eastern Washington, and the middle Rockies mostly in Wyoming, with arms into Montana, Colorado, Utah and Idaho. One of those states took its whole name from the high country: Montana is Latin for “mountainous.”

Chittenden had a better name in mind. Geographers once called the whole system the “great Chippewyan system,” and he wrote that “it would have been well if this name had survived.” It didn’t. The plain one won.

Historical Sources & References

• Jonathan Carver, Travels Through the Interior Parts of North-America (1778). The nations west of the Shining Mountains, as Indians told him (p. 118); the name “Shining Mountains” and the “chrystal stones” (p. 121); “more than three thousand miles in length” and the comparison with the Peruvian mines (p. 122).
• Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, Mémoire ou journal sommaire du voyage, in Pierre Margry, ed., Découvertes et établissements des Français, vol. 6 (1886). Saint-Pierre’s title and mission (p. 637); the ten men who went up the Paskoya “jusqu’à la montagne de Roche” on May 29, 1751, and Fort La Jonquière (p. 642); the post “à la montagne de Roche” again (pp. 650–651). The volume’s title uses “Montagnes Rocheuses.”
• Lawrence J. Burpee, ed., York Factory to the Blackfeet Country: The Journal of Anthony Hendry, 1754–55 (1907). The same passage quoted in English, “as far as the Rocky Mountains,” and his discussion of where the fort stood (pp. 318–319).
• Edward Umfreville, The Present State of Hudson’s Bay (1790). His winters of 1784 to 1787 (p. 147) and the rivers flowing from “an extraordinary ridge of Rocks, called the Stony Mountain” (p. 148).
• Alexander Mackenzie, Voyages from Montreal (1801). The entry for May 17, 1793: “the rocky mountains appeared in sight, with their summits covered with snow” (p. 164).
• Mathew Carey, Missouri Territory formerly Louisiana (map, 1814), Library of Congress. The label “Stoney Mountains” along the range.
• Hiram Martin Chittenden, The American Fur Trade of the Far West, vol. 2 (1902). The older names, the French Montagnes Rocheuses as the source of the modern one, the traders’ and trappers’ use, “not a happy choice,” and the “great Chippewyan system” (p. 728).
• itwêwina Plains Cree Dictionary, University of Alberta. The entry asinîwaciy, glossed “rock hill, rock cliff,” “mountain” and “the Rocky Mountains,” from Arok Wolvengrey’s Cree: Words (2001).
• GNIS feature 897520, Rocky Mountains (U.S. Geological Survey). The official name, the Board decision of May 13, 1954, the point in Teton County, Wyoming, and the variants Stoney Mountains (Carey, 1814), Steinigtes Gebürge (Reichard, 1817) and Rockies.
• National Park Service, Rocky Mountain System Provinces. The range from Canada to central New Mexico and the states in each province.