Bill Winlow
Editor

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.50.26

A year or two ago I was contacted by Professor Owen Wade regarding the adventures of Walter Cannon, best known for his gastroenterological work, but who, with his wife Cornelia and a French-Canadian squatter named Comeau, was first to climb a local mass previously called Goat Mountain on 17 July, 1901. This may have been during Walter and Cornelia’s honeymoon and could have ended in disaster, since on their way back they were almost killed by a landslide: ‘we saw a huge rock come rolling off the top of the mountain… followed by a continuous stream of small stones which poured on the very spot where we had been eating our lunch’.

It seems that Walter and Cornelia were in what is now Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park by Lake McDonald in Montana when they spotted Goat Mountain. They were told it had never been climbed, so off they went with hobnail boots, backpacks and minimal other gear. After a fairly hard climb, with Walter getting stuck in a crevice at one point, they worked their way up a narrow shelf on the bare mountainside, up a difficult scree and thence to the top. The views were magnificent with snow-capped peaks, glaciers and lakes. That night they made it back to their camp and next morning were awakened by a horseman with a string of pack animals. He was working for the US Geological Survey and had tried to reach the top of Goat Mountain a few weeks earlier. They told him of their adventure and he took their names.

Seven years passed and they were invited to dine with a colleague in the Harvard Department of Geology, where they were introduced to a topographer from the Geological Survey and recounted their tale to him. ‘A few days later the mail brought a beautiful contour map of the area of Glacier National Park, and there, at the head of the Lake, was Mt. Cannon. Because there were two Goat Mountains in the region another name for one of them had to be found, and the government had given our name to the one we had been first to climb.’

The area is phenomenally beautiful and unspoilt and it must have been a great thrill for the Cannons to have the mountain, albeit a relatively small one, named after them. As Professor Wade says at the end of his letter “I do not know of any other geographical feature named after a physiologist [or even a physiologist’s spouse, Ed.] – I expect there are some and perhaps publication will reveal others known to members of the Society!”

So there’s the challenge, are any other geographical features named after physiologists? Please tell us if you know of one. Whatever it is you don’t have to climb or swim it or whatever, unless of course you actually want too!

Quotations in italics are from : Walter Cannon (1945). The Way of an Investigator. Norton and Co. Inc., New York. The book is difficult to find, but Professor Wade found a copy in Birmingham University library.