“At a bold tower of rock, which had been nicknamed the Extinguisher, the Robson glacier widens out and bends nearly at a right angle toward the main peak,” wrote Arthur Philomen Coleman [1852–1939] on his pioneering visit to the area in 1908. The other members of his party were his brother Lucius Coleman and George R. B. Kinney [1872–1961].

The name appears on the 1912 topographical map of the Mount Robson region that Arthur Oliver Wheeler [1860–1945] prepared for his report on the 1911 Alpine Club of Canada–Smithsonian Robson Expedition.

Smithsonian Institution director Charles Doolittle Walcott [1850–1927] called it the most valuable spot in the Rockies to geologists. “One of the names proposed by Dr. Coleman for a prominent monadnock that is surrounded by ice, east of Mount Robson, is ‘The Extinguisher’ and Mr. Wheeler has adopted the name on his map. I presume Dr. Coleman had in mind the conical extinguisher used in putting out candles in the olden times. It so happens that that particular mass of rock carries a very important bed of Cambro-Ordovician fossils, and will be referred to many times in the future in literature. It may be that I shall suggest a shorter and more euphonious name for it,” Walcott wrote to the Surveyor-General in 1912. His suggestion, “Billings Butte”, was not adopted.

“On the cirque immediately below Mount Resplendent stands a quaint tower of rock some 500 feet above the ice, named the Extinguisher from its likeness to the conical cap once used to put out the candle,” wrote Elizabeth Parker [1856–1944], a member of the Alpine Club of Canada’s 1913 camp at Robson Pass.