When tectonic plates smash into each other, they push the Earth’s crust higher and higher, forming mountains. The Rocky Mountains formed 80 million to 55 million years ago during the Laramide orogeny , in which a number of plates began sliding underneath the North American plate The angle of subduction was shallow, resulting in a broad belt of mountains running down western North America.
By the Anglo-American Convention of 1818 , which established the 49th parallel north as the international boundary west from Lake of the Woods to the “Stony Mountains”; 25 the UK and the USA agreed to what has since been described as “joint occupancy” of lands further west to the Pacific Ocean Resolution of the territorial and treaty issues, the Oregon dispute , was deferred until a later time.
5 Similarly, in the wake of Mackenzie’s 1793 expedition, fur trading posts were established west of the Northern Rockies in a region of the northern Interior Plateau of British Columbia which came to be known as New Caledonia , beginning with Fort McLeod (today’s community of McLeod Lake) and Fort Fraser , but ultimately focused on Stuart Lake Post (today’s Fort St. James ).
In the case of mountains, when the word precedes the unique term, mount is used: Mount Olympus , Mount Everest , Mount Tai ; when the word follows the unique term, mountain is used: Crowfoot Mountain , Blue Mountain , Rugged Mountain Generally speaking, such names will be adjectives or attributive nouns, but many foreign placenames formed with adjectives—as China’s Huashan —are translated as though they were proper names: Mount Hua instead of Hua Mountain or Flourishing Mountain.
The more famous of these include Americans William Henry Ashley , Jim Bridger , Kit Carson , John Colter , Thomas Fitzpatrick , Andrew Henry , and Jedediah Smith On July 24, 1832, Benjamin Bonneville led the first wagon train across the Rocky Mountains by using South Pass in the present State of Wyoming.