Commodore Joel Abbot, Camp No. 21

Brigadier General Hazard Stevens

Medal of Honor Citation:

STEVENS, HAZARD

Rank and organization: Captain and Assistant Adjutant General, U.S. Volunteers. Place and Date: At Fort Huger, Va., 19 April 1863. Entered service at: Olympia, Washington Territory. Born: 9 June 1842, Newport, R. I. Date of issue: 13 June 1894. Citation: Gallantly led a party that assaulted and captured the fort.

Biography:

Hazard Stevens became the second Washingtonian to be accorded the nation's top combat award.

Stevens descended from a long line of leaders. As far back as 1642, one of his ancestors, John Stevens of Caversham, Oxford, England, founded Andover, Massachusetts. Other Stevens figured in the initial founding of our country. Hazard's father, Isaac Stevens, served simultaneously as a Major General in the Army and Governor of Washington Territory from 1853 to 1857.

Young Hazard accompanied his father on expeditions to various Indian tribes of the Northwest. When only thirteen years of age, he joined his father and a party of twenty-five white men to begin a 3,000 mile trip. Their nine month journey, long and dangerous, extended as far east as the Missouri River. Fraught with cold and ice, treacherous Indians and inadequate communications, the expedition matured the young boy.

When Isaac Stevens was elected to Congress in 1860, Hazard entered Chauncey Hall in Boston, Massachusetts to prepare for acceptance to Harvard University. At the start of the Civil War, Isaac resigned from Congress and volunteered for active duty in the Army. He was assigned as a Colonel to the 79th Highlanders, New York Volunteer Army.

Hazard, then a freshman at Harvard, left college and also volunteered. He joined the 1st Brigade which his father commanded. By October of that first year he advanced to Captain and Assistant Adjutant General of the Brigade. In 1862 Hazard fought in Pope's Campaign, the 2nd Battle of Bull Run and the Battle of Chantilly. At Chantilly he was wounded twice and his father was killed on September 1, 1862 at forty-four years of age.

After two months hospitalization, Hazard Stevens was assigned to the 3rd Division, 9th Corps. He fought at Fredericksburg, the James River Campaign and at the capture of Fort Huger on the Nansemond River. He planned, led and successfully carried out the attack on Fort Huger. Thirty-one years later, on June 12, 1894, a General Order awarded a Medal of Honor to Hazard Stevens for bravery displayed during the capture of the Fort.

In the battle of the Wilderness Stevens served as Inspector General and Adjutant General of the 2nd Division, 6th Corps of the Army of the Potomac. This bloody hunt to the death in Northern Virginia, led by General U.S. Grant, cost the Union forces 17,500 casualties. Stevens was wounded again. By the time he had received three brevets for exceptional performance on the battlefield.

Stevens' last brevet promoted him to Brigadier General on April 2, 1865 for heroism at Petersburg and Richmond, Virginia. Not yet twenty-three years of age, he became the youngest general in the Civil War.

After the War between the States, Hazard Stevens collected revenue for Washington Territory and was employed for four years by the Oregon State Navigation Company. On August 17, 1870 he became one of the first two men to climb to the top of Mount Rainier, the third highest peak in the United States.

He continued his varied career, read law privately, was admitted to the bar and served as attorney for Northern Pacific Railroad and as President of Olympia Light and Power Company and Olympia Railroad Union.

Stevens returned to Boston in 1875 to set up a law practice and to care for his widowed mother. In 1885 he was elected to the Massachusetts General Court,. For the next four decades he returned annually to the Olympia area to develop a dairy farm and to oversee his other businesses. Cloverfields Dairy Farm consisted of 320 acres surrounding a large Dutch Colonial house which featured a huge formal reception hall used for lavish entertainment.

General Stevens, as he was called, returned to Olympia in 1916 to write a history of his father's life. The General died in 1918 at the age of seventy-six, still a bachelor. Bits and pieces of the land had been sold off over the years. In 1977 the house and last four and a half acres were sold by the widow of one of Isaac Stevens' great grandsons. Four generations of the Stevens family had lived at Cloverfields, now being considered for listing in the National Registry of Historic Places.

Hazard Stevens is called, in one history book, "one of the state's most distinguished pioneers." Who will contest that?

Biography courtesy of Isaac Stevens, Camp No. 1, SUVCW.

The first well-documented ascent of Mount Rainier was made in 1870 by General Hazard Stevens and Philemon Van Trump. When Stevens, a Civil War hero, returned to Washington Territory after the war, he became determined to climb Mount Rainier. He found a kindred spirit in Van Trump, the private secretary to the territorial governor.

They were taken to the lower slopes by James Longmire, then guided to the timberline by a Yakama tribesman named Sluiskin, who warned them, "Your plan to climb takhoma is all foolishness. at first the way is easy...[but] if you reach the great snowy dome, then a bitterly cold and furious tempest will sweep you off into space like a withered leaf." Undaunted, the climbers forged ahead. But they underestimated the time and found themselves near the summit, with a storm approaching as night fell. Stevens and Van Trump probably would have died of exposure had they not smelled sulfur fumes and followed their noses to a cave melted in the ice by a steam vent. The men crawled inside and survived the night, alternately overheated by 170deg.F steam and frozen by the frigid air at the 14,000-foot elevation. They reached the summit in a one-day climb from their camp at Sluiskin Falls. Back at base camp, Sluiskin had given the men up for dead. When they finally returned, he ran to the tired climbers, embracing them and crying, "Skookum tillicum! Skookum tumtum!" ("Strong men! Brave hearts!").

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