Terra Incognita: Untangling the Le Conte name

On this 1863 map, Mount Le Conte was still labeled as Bullhead. The name is hard to read over the terrain. Look closely above the K in SMOKY. The names for Clingmans Dome, Mount Mingus, Mount Guyot, Laurel Top, Snow Bird Mountain, and Max Patch were already settled by this time.

Joseph Le Conte in 1875

 When Marty Polk signed in at LeConte Lodge on Oct. 2, 2019, she left an intriguing comment in the logbook, identifying herself as a "distant niece of Joseph Le Conte."
 Joseph Le Conte was the namesake of Mount Le Conte, according to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. However, he made no such claim in his autobiography, which casts doubts on the the government registry. We know that Joseph was not shy about putting his name on mountains, because his book uses the caption Le Conte Dome for Yosemite's South Dome, which is now known as Mount Starr King. (Thomas Starr King was a Unitarian preacher who was instrumental in the movement to establish Yosemite National Park.)
 The Tennessee mountain we call Le Conte was known as Walasi'yi or Mylegony to the Cherokee and Bullhead to early settlers, until Princeton professor Arnold Guyot renamed it sometime after his 1859 and 1860 expeditions to measure the Great Smoky Mountains. In hindsight, it appears that Guyot intended to honor Joseph's older brother, Professor John Le Conte. See this footnote by Ken Wise in the book Terra Incognita: An Annotated Bibliography of the Great Smoky Mountains.

 While Guyot, Samuel Buckley, and Gen. Thomas Clingman explored the mountaintops of the Smokies, the scientifically trained Le Conte brothers were supposedly responsible for monitoring a stationary barometer in Waynesville, N.C., that was used to calibrate the summit measurements. 
 Apparently, Joseph was elsewhere. In his autobiography, Joseph never mentions Waynesville, Bullhead, nor the expeditions of Guyot, Buckley, and Clingman. He respected Professor Guyot on an academic level and described him as "a lifelong friend," so if he had been involved in this project, he certainly would have mentioned it. 
 In 1858, at age 35, Joseph wrote that he climbed "Black Mountain (Mount Mitchell)*, the highest peak in the Appalachians, 6,710 feet high." If it was a clear day, he might have seen Bullhead 66 miles west. If not, then he probably never laid eyes on the mountain that made him famous. Since he spent the summer of 1858 in the N.C. mountains, it is possible that he had a role in Buckley's survey, which measured Bullhead at 6,670 feet.

John Le Conte

 In 1859, Guyot measured Bullhead at 6,613, missing the modern standard of 6,593 by just 20 feet. Meanwhile, Joseph Le Conte said he spent most of that year in Columbia, S.C.
 The Le Conte brothers were from a Hugenot family who fled from France because of religious persecution. John Le Conte (1818-1891) and Joseph Le Conte (1823-1901) were raised on a rice plantation in coastal Georgia. Both graduated from Franklin College (the forerunner of the University of Georgia) and earned MD's in New York. They taught at South Carolina College during the Civil War era and moved west in 1869, when John became the first president of the University of California.
 Joseph became a professor of geology and was a charter member of the Sierra Club along with his friend John Muir. You'll find Joseph's name on 13,930-foot Mount Le Conte in California, the Le Conte Glacier in Alaska, and Le Conte Falls in Yosemite. Because he was a slaveowner, his name was removed in 2016 from Yosemite's Le Conte Memorial Lodge (now known as the Yosemite Conservation Heritage Center.
 His son Joseph Nisbet Le Conte (1870-1950) succeeded Muir as president of the Sierra Club in 1915 and was noted for his maps and photographs, which caught the eye of Ansel Adams.

Le Conte means "the tale." The Le Conte brothers usually spelled their name with a space, which is how Mount Le Conte is labeled on USGS topographic maps and registered with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. However, the space is often omitted in modern usage, such as the name of Tennessee's LeConte Lodge. I've chosen to keep the space in the name of this blog.

* The name of Mount Mitchell was not settled until after Dr. Elisha Mitchell was buried on the summit in 1858. The official elevation is now 6,684 feet. Dr. Mitchell measured it in 1835 at 6,476—proving that North Carolina outranked New Hampshire (Mount Washington was listed as 6,234 then and 6,288 now) as the highest point in the eastern U.S.