This mountain was originally named Sentinel Mountain by Arthur Coleman as he descended Whiterabbit Creek in 1892. He later wrote, "When we came down from Whiterabbit Creek. . . straight ahead, jutting boldly out into the belt of prairie, stood a beautiful mountain, 9000 feet high, bent into a fold like an 'S', two miles long and a mile broad, tipped on its side. It can be seen from all the valleys looking into the plains, and we named it Sentinel Mountain. The shoulder of Elliott Peak, 1.6 km to the northwest, is now named Sentinel Mountain. Elliott Barnes had a horse ranch in the Saskatchewan Valley which he named Kadonna Tinda (Stoney for Windy Plains). In 1906, when he was only eight years old, Elliott Barnes jr. climbed the mountain above the ranch and it was named in his honour the following year. Elliott jr. climbed the peak again in 1967 at age 69 years as a Cenntennial project accompanied by several of his children and grand children. An accomplished photographer, Elliott Barnes Sr. only spent the summers ranching on this now submerged part of the Kootenay Plains. Silas Abraham, after whose family the Lake is named, looked after the operation during the times that Elliott was away. But winter conditions in the mountains, it turned out, did not suit the purebred Clydesdale horses he was raising there and after three years he moved his operation to a ranch near Calgary. It was in his cabin below Elliott Peak, one fall evening in 1907, that Samson Beaver drew the map which Mary Schaffer followed to Maligne Lake the following summer. Sentinel Mountain may have been climbed in 1858 by James Hector. In his journals, Hector said that he climbed up a ridge that led to the top of an adjoining peak. He wrote, "The highest point that I reached was about 4300 feet above our camp at the Kootenai Plain."