On the west summit of the Grand Teton, a few hundred feet below the true top, stands a ring of upright granite slabs about six feet across, known as the Enclosure. Nobody knows who built it or when, only that people climbed high on this mountain long before any survey party came to Jackson Hole, perhaps many times. Who first stood on the summit itself is a question that has been argued, in print and with real heat, for more than a century.
Langford and Stevenson, 1872
In July 1872 the southern division of Ferdinand Hayden's government survey camped west of the range, on the Idaho side. Before dawn on July 29 eleven men set out from the head of Teton Creek. One by one they turned back until two went on: James Stevenson, Hayden's executive officer, and Nathaniel Langford, a Montana businessman who had just been named Yellowstone's first superintendent, without pay. Langford wrote the climb up for Scribner's Monthly the next year as the ascent of Mount Hayden, the survey's name for the peak. He described the Enclosure exactly, which puts the two men at least that high. His account of everything above it is vague.
Owen, 1898
On August 11, 1898, William Owen, a Laramie surveyor then serving as Wyoming's state auditor, reached the summit with the Reverend Franklin Spalding, an Episcopal priest and veteran Colorado climber, and two Jackson Hole ranch hands, Frank Petersen and John Shive. Spalding led the hard climbing near the top, on the line still called the Owen-Spalding route. Two days later the four went up again, this time with a camera.
Owen announced in Forest and Stream that his party had been first. They had found no cairn and no sign of an earlier visit, and he picked Langford's account apart: the size of the summit, his description of it as smooth and bare, the absence of anything left behind. Langford replied that he stood by what he had written. Stevenson had died in 1888 and could not answer.
Owen pressed his claim in newspapers and magazines for the next thirty years. In 1929 he persuaded the Wyoming Legislature to pass a resolution, signed by Governor Frank Emerson, declaring his party the first to climb the Grand. He and his wife, Emma, paid for a cast plaque, and on July 30, 1929, the day after Grand Teton National Park was dedicated, it was fixed to the summit. It disappeared in 1977 and has never been found.
The letter in the files
There was a third claimant, and Owen knew about him. In April 1899 an Army surgeon who had been stationed at Fort Yellowstone, Captain William Kieffer, wrote to say that he and two enlisted men had climbed the Grand over four days in September 1893, and sent a sketch of their route. Owen never mentioned the letter. It turned up in his papers at the University of Wyoming in 1959. Climbers who studied the sketch placed the route near the Exum Ridge, which no one is known to have climbed until 1940.
None of it settles anything. A photograph William Henry Jackson took within days of the 1872 climb shows almost no snow above the Upper Saddle, which undercuts the old theory that Langford and Stevenson got past the summit cliff on a drift. In 1998 two climbers who knew the mountain well retraced Langford's day from Teton Creek to the Enclosure and back in thirteen hours, and judged that the summit would have added two more. The historian Leigh Ortenburger's verdict still seems the fairest: Langford and Stevenson may have reached the top in 1872, Kieffer's party may have in 1893, and Owen's party certainly did in 1898. The route carries Owen's name either way.