In earlier times, Native Americans would set fires to clear the mountain slopes so deer and elk would have tender vegetation to eat in the spring.

[4] A legend, dating back to the mid-1800s and the first Hudson's Bay Company employees to arrive in the area, claims the mountain conceals a lost treasure, hidden by Spanish sailors in the late 16th century.

[5] There are various versions of the legend, but the most common ones involve a group of sailors carrying a chest up the hillside, then digging a hole and lowering the treasure inside.

As the story goes, one of the sailors then plunges his sword into one of the men with them, apparently an African slave, and his body was then thrown in on top of the treasure; the idea being, Native Americans would not disturb a man's grave, so keeping the treasure under a dead man would prevent the Native Americans—who, in most versions of the story were watching the activity closely from nearby—from digging it up.

[13][14][15] Another theory for the inscribed stones was proposed by M. Wayne Jensen Jr., Director of the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum who thought it possible that they were from a cartographic survey of Francis Drake's 1579 New Albion claim.