Human History
Before the arrival of white settlers, the areas surrounding Lassen Peak, especially to its east, south, and southeast, were the traditional homeland of the northeastern Maidu American Indians.
Lassen Peak was named in honor of the Danish blacksmith Peter Lassen, who guided immigrants past this peak to the Sacramento Valley during the 1830s. The trail that Lassen blazed never found generalized long-term use because it was considered unsafe. This trail was replaced by the Nobles Emigrant Trail, named for the guide, William Nobles, which linked the Applegate Trail in northwestern Nevada to the northern part of the Sacramento Valley.
In 1864, Helen Tanner Brodt became the first woman to reach the summit of Lassen Peak. A tarn lake on Lassen Peak was named "Lake Helen" in her honor.
Beginning in 1914 and lasting until 1921, Lassen Peak emerged from dormancy with a series of phreatic eruptions (steam explosions), dacite lava flows, and lahars (volcanic mud flows). There were 200 to 400 volcanic eruptions during this period of activity. Because of the eruptive activity and the area's stark volcanic beauty, Lassen Peak, Cinder Cone and the area surrounding were designated as the Lassen Volcanic National Park on August 9, 1916.
Read more about this topic: Lassen Peak
Famous quotes containing the words human and/or history:
“I ask whether the mere eating of human flesh so very far exceeds in barbarity that custom which only a few years since was practised in enlightened England:Ma convicted traitor, perhaps a man found guilty of honesty, patriotism, and suchlike heinous crimes, had his head lopped off with a huge axe, his bowels dragged out and thrown into a fire; while his body, carved into four quarters, was with his head exposed upon pikes, and permitted to rot and fester among the public haunts of men!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)