Mount Hood, Oregon

William Keith climbed Mount Hood in 1868, when he was commissioned by the Oregon Navigation and Railroad Company to paint scenes of the Pacific Northwest. In the painting’s foreground, Keith inserted a group of Native people at a seasonal hunting camp—a poignant element, in view of how the railroad hastened the removal of Native Americans by opening Indigenous lands to colonization.

Called nífti yángint (meaning “Big Mountain”) by the Molalla tribe, the mountain-volcano was renamed Mount Hood in 1792 by a British explorer after the naval officer Alexander Arthur Hood, who never saw it.