<P> In 1829 Hall J. Kelley led a campaign to rename the Cascade Range as the President's Range and also to rename each major Cascade mountain after a former President of the United States . In his scheme Mount St. Helens was to be renamed Mount Washington . </P> <P> The first authenticated eyewitness report of a volcanic eruption was made in March 1835 by Meredith Gairdner, while working for the Hudson's Bay Company stationed at Fort Vancouver . He sent an account to the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, which published his letter in January 1836 . James Dwight Dana of Yale University, while sailing with the United States Exploring Expedition, saw the quiescent peak from off the mouth of the Columbia River in 1841 . Another member of the expedition later described "cellular basaltic lavas" at the mountain's base . </P> <P> In late fall or early winter of 1842, nearby settlers and missionaries witnessed the so - called Great Eruption . This small - volume outburst created large ash clouds, and mild explosions followed for 15 years . The eruptions of this period were likely phreatic (steam explosions). Josiah Parrish in Champoeg, Oregon witnessed Mount St. Helens in eruption on November 22, 1842 . Ash from this eruption may have reached The Dalles, Oregon, 48 miles (80 km) southeast of the volcano . </P> <P> In October 1843, future California governor Peter H. Burnett recounted a story of an aboriginal American man who badly burned his foot and leg in lava or hot ash while hunting for deer . The likely apocryphal story went that the injured man sought treatment at Fort Vancouver, but the contemporary fort commissary steward, Napoleon McGilvery, disclaimed knowledge of the incident . British lieutenant Henry J. Warre sketched the eruption in 1845, and two years later Canadian painter Paul Kane created watercolors of the gently smoking mountain . Warre's work showed erupting material from a vent about a third of the way down from the summit on the mountain's west or northwest side (possibly at Goat Rocks), and one of Kane's field sketches shows smoke emanating from about the same location . </P>

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