MAGAZINES 
When the future Rocky Mountain National Park was proposed for northwestern Colorado in 1909, only Grand Lake, five peaks and a few of the rivers had names on the map. It soon became apparent that a map with more names would help win approval in Washington, D.C., for the new park. The park’s biggest advocate, the fledgling Colorado Mountain Club, appointed a nomenclature committee to come up with appropriate names from early Colorado history. One committee member, Harriet Vaille, chose the task of researching Indian names.
Harriet Vaille was the daughter of F. O. Vaille, the man who brought the telephone to Denver. She graduated from Denver’s first high school, East High School, attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, and graduated from the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, a new kind of school that prepared women to teach physical education. An avid outdoorswoman, she joined the CMC soon after it formed in 1912.
The nearest place with information on Indians was the Newberry Library in Chicago, but Harriet didn’t find what she needed there. When she returned to Colorado, she decided to find some Indians who had lived in the area and bring them back to the park site. Dr. Livingston Farrand, then president of the University of Colorado, suggested she try the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, where the Northern Arapaho had been moved after living for countless generations in the area of the proposed park. Harriet asked a friend, Edna Hendrie, to help her.
Edna grew up in another wealthy, influential Denver family. Her family had been early pioneers in Central City and Denver, and her father founded the Hendrie-Boltoff company, which manufactured much of the mining equipment used in Colorado and elsewhere. Edna also attended East High School, and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1899.
laying the groundwork
Probably in the spring of 1914, “armed with an effective letter, which the magic name of Colorado Mountain Club procured for Miss Hendrie in Washington from the Indian Department without the usual red tape, [we] took the train for Lander and the stage for Fort Washakie,” Harriet wrote years later.
At Washakie, the two women found “great enthusiasm for our project and every assistance in helping us to find our Indians. Horses and rigs were placed at our disposal and mounted Arapaho policemen sent in all directions to locate old men who might remember Colorado. There turned out to be about six possibilities. We had an interesting interview with old Shoulder Blade, or Shovel Foot, aged 93, in his teepee. … He spoke almost entirely by signs, and the interpreter Tom Crispin said that he was saying that he knew every foot of the country from Pikes Peak to the Medicine Bow Range. He said that he would love to see some of it again before he died.” But the old man soon became completely blind, and in his place they chose Sherman Sage, 63, the reservation’s police chief. “Everyone said that we must have him: he was such a bright keen spirit.”
Stepping off the train in Longmont in July 1914 were Sage; Gun Griswold, 73, whose only luggage was an eagle-feather fan; and their much younger Northern Arapaho interpreter, Tom Crispin. Crispin carried his luggage with an air of sophistication that spoke of his ability to be equally comfortable in white or Indian culture.
no girls allowed
Harriet and Edna enlisted their fathers’ automobiles to drive the party to Longs Peak Inn. They engaged Shep Husted, a local guide who knew the area well. But although Harriet and Edna were experienced mountaineers, social mores at the time wouldn’t allow them to join the exploring party. They hadn’t been able to find an anthropologist willing to travel with the Indians through the wild country of the proposed park, so Harriet had asked her cousin Oliver Toll, a law-school student, to conduct the trip.
Toll turned out to be a good choice. He allowed the Arapaho to do the talking and wrote down their observations without editorializing. He wasn’t a linguist, but his unique system for writing and pronouncing Arapaho words is still usable today. He even had the foresight to make a recording of the Arapaho speaking about their trip.
The five men traveled by horseback, circling the proposed park. Toll wrote down everything the Arapaho said, and 48 years later he published Arapaho Names and Trails: A Report of a 1914 Pack Trip, a slim compilation of his notes. Recently reissued, his account is still “delightful, often humorous, and filled with information, much of which has proven reliable,” according to James Benedict, an author and founder of the Center for Mountain Archeology.
After the Indians returned to Wyoming, Harriet’s involvement with finding names continued. As secretary of the newly formed Colorado Geographic Board, she read books and helped James Grafton Rogers and George Barnard of the CMC interview local residents and lug surveying instruments up mountains to determine their altitudes.
The Native American names in our nearby mountains remind us that we weren’t the first to use the paths through them, to hunt there, or to enjoy their beauty. Names like Never-No-Summer Mountains (shortened to Never Summer), Neota, Nokhu and Tonahutu came from the trip organized by Harriet Vaille and Edna Hendrie. The two women “deserve much more recognition for their efforts than they have received,” says William B. Butler, Rocky Mountain National Park archaeologist, speaking almost a century after the 1914 trip. The authors of High Country Names note that “this is one of the greatest concentrations of Indian names in one small area on the face of the U.S.A.”
pioneer daughters’ private lives
What motivated Harriet and Edna, two pampered women from wealthy families, to take on such a project almost 100 years ago? Both came from pioneer Denver families that had found success in businesses that promoted the frontier city. Maybe that was the source of their daughters’ service ethic. They both had varied, though similar, interests, including Denver’s new library and the Colorado Mountain Club. Harriet’s interests included historical societies, and she maintained her interest in Indian culture. She lectured about the 1914 trip several times, and KOA broadcast one of her talks.
Both women married a bit late in life, in 1917. Edna married Chalmers Hadley, Denver’s first librarian, at the age of 44. Thirty-seven-year-old Harriet met Judge Francis E. Bouck on a CMC outing, and married the widower with two daughters.
Both women also had sisters who have overshadowed them in history’s accounts. Edna’s sister Marion is widely credited as one of the founders of the Denver Art Museum with her art collection and donations of cash. Harriet’s sister Agnes was one of Colorado’s most famous female climbers. She died in January 1925 in a daring first winter ascent of Longs Peak, and their father built the stone hut at the Keyhole in her memory.
When Edna’s husband became chief librarian in Cincinnati and president of the American Library Association, they moved to Cincinnati with Edna’s sisters. Their chauffeur recalled the days they would go for a drive in the family’s Cadillac, always carrying a bottle of brandy and paper cups marked with their initials. After lunch, they would stop by the side of the road for a nip and a nap. They also brought along a cookbook so if they stopped at a restaurant, they could ask the cook to make what they wanted. A friend of the Hadley-Hendrie family said they were “almost conventional but not quite,” noting that he was once offered a Martini at 11 in the morning.
As for Harriet, her life after marriage wasn’t quite as cushy as Edna’s. While Judge Bouck served as a city attorney and district attorney in Leadville, Harriet took on the responsibilities of a housewife and mother in the primitive high-altitude community. When the judge was appointed to the Colorado Supreme Court, the family moved back to Denver. There, Harriet continued to volunteer for her causes—perhaps the most long-lasting of which was her passion for preserving our past through Native American names. u
Kay Turnbaugh is the author of The Last of the Wild West Cowgirls: A True Story, Around Nederland and The Mountain Pine Beetle: Tiny but Mighty.
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