The Asterisk
Shortly after his second inauguration, the President of the United states introduced his nation to a harried ritual in which the most powerful man in the world invites his motley troop of sycophantic ideologues new and old to spoon-feed him his opinions and political legacies. Sat behind the Resolute Desk, President Donald signed twenty-six variably-binding executive orders. One of these, titled “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness” made headlines for its grade school demand that the Gulf of Mexico be renamed the “Gulf of America”. But behind that pungent decree, the order also renamed the country’s tallest mountain.
Trump’s second attempt at, and more intentional drive toward, vanity-enriched authoritarianism has so far been liberally decorated by a pattern of attempting to skirt congressional and judicial checks and balances by using executive orders in an attempt to rule by decree. The contents of and commands in many of these orders have not held up to legal scrutiny.
This, however, is one area where the President does claim some amount of genuine authority. In the eyes of the federal government and the agencies directly subservient to it, the President can order that the name used to refer to a specific place be changed.
President Barack Obama made use of this authority in 2015 when he ordered the Department of the Interior to rename the mountain in the first place. Before his order, it had been known by its prior legal name, Mount McKinley, since 1917, nearly a century earlier.
Fans of President Trump’s decision might thus argue that this is a return to form and a restoration of the mountain’s true and genuine name, a name that honors American greatness.
But, again, that “original” name only found its way onto government maps in 1917. Before then, “Mount McKinley” had been the unofficial name of the mountain only to some, and the origins of the name itself track only as far back as 1896, when a local prospector, William Dickey, used the authority vested in him by no one to name the continent’s tallest summit after his favorite presidential candidate.
It was in 1896, then, that the name “Mount McKinley” was coined. On days without cloud cover, the Alaskan behemoth can be seen from well over a hundred miles away. This landform, the world’s third-most prominent peak, has been known and talked about for as long as people have been there to know and talk about it. And it’s had a name.
The Great Mountain
The mountain’s cultural ubiquity in a diverse precolonial Alaska means that a wide variety of indigenous people have a similarly-varied number of names for it. But most, if not all, are closely related to the Koyukon Athabascan “Denali”.
This is, broadly, the name that the native people who looked daily upon this peak for thousands of years attributed to it. It remains so deeply entrenched in the local canon that for years leading up to the Obama administration’s decision, Alaskan politicians both Democratic and Republican lobbied for a return to the indigenous title.
Throughout the McKinley century, a time before the idea of scrutinizing our naming choices was consigned to the dustbin hastily-labeled “wokeness”, the only real sources of opposition came from the United States congressional delegation from Ohio arguing in defense of their state’s representative on the world stage, President William McKinley.
But McKinley, being from Ohio, wasn’t from Alaska. He never visited Alaska, and generally wasn’t involved in any action that meaningfully impacted the state. His only real claim to fame re: the mountain is that a guy who worked nearby liked how he’d run his presidential campaign.
Any argument in favor of retaining that prospector’s chosen name returns us to an argument familiar in American historical discourse: like the geographical ancestor of yelling “shotgun” in visual range of a car, it’s often understood that the first person to name some feature, be it hill or town or plant, gets to keep that right.
But as with other rights in American history, this too is applied with a unique force when the right’s claimant is a white man. In this case, the proud assertion of an East Coast-born visitor overwrote in short time the collective speech of generations of Alaska natives.
Such is the case throughout this country, where native names fall at the feet, not merely of conquerors, but of taxmen, tourists, and casual visitors. In my adoptive home state of Minnesota and not too long ago, we faced a brief tumult when the city of Minneapolis changed the name of one of its lakes from the previously well-known Lake Calhoun to Bde Maka Ska. The change drew more controversy than it was worth from the nationwide Fox News-included-and-adjacent rage factories that IV drip-feed our elderly rat poison, but closer inspection makes the identity pivot a no-brainer: the lake had received its modern name after then-U.S. Secretary of War and future Vice President John Calhoun sent a detachment of surveyors to what was then the Unorganized Territory of the northwest United States. The surveyors named the lake after their leader who himself, like McKinley with Alaska, never actually made it out to the North Star State. For fun historical flair, he also owned dozens of human slaves and frequently made the argument that the practice of owning other humans was, despite mounting arguments to the contrary, actually a really good and cool thing to do.
For well over a century, Minnesotans and Americans at large took for granted that the largest lake in Minneapolis should be named after a far-off and long-dead slave owner whose most local claim to fame was that he once sent a team of guys to look at it.
And still, when the city, state, and federal government all assented to the name change between 2017 and 2018, there was no shortage of people who argued against it, appealing most often to tradition. You can’t just change a name like that.
Well, some people can’t.
What’s in a name?
The original inhabitants of Alaska knew this mountain by a variety of names, “Denali” being a particularly prominent one. A prospector coined the name “Mount McKinley” in 1896. But between those two non-Appalachian appellations, plenty of new names, most of them thought up by white men, made their way into speech and onto paper.
The British explorer George Vancouver called Denali’s range the “stupendous snow mountains” in 1794, decades before McKinley’s Ohio birth and a century before his choice to run for President. One Russian explorer used the name “Tenada”, or “great mountain” in another of Alaska’s native Athabascan languages. Another went with simpler Russian “Bulshaia Gora” (“Big One”).
In the late 1800s, following America’s purchase of its now-largest state from the Russian tsar in 1867, a prospector, Frank Densmore, ventured to its open frontier and spread the word about this massive mountain. Word spread among his peers, and soon prospectors across the state knew it by a new name: Mount Densmore. Two separate prospectors had forged new names for the territory’s most obvious landmark.
Mount McKinley wasn’t this mountain’s original name. Nor was it the first attributed to a white man or a white American. It’s not the most logical name, and it doesn’t have the coolest story. It just might be the luckiest.
To most Americans, this mountain doesn’t play a role in our day-to-day, month-to-month, or even year-to-year lives. It’s cool, most of us can agree, but it’s distant, and it was only all the more distant in 1901, the year President William McKinley was assassinated. So when people search for ways to pay tribute to the nation’s now-deceased former foremost statesman, it makes sense that word might spread that he’s got a mountain to bear his name.
So to the many Americans who had never seen and would never see it, this far-off mountain bore the obvious name of a figure of obvious importance, a natural arrangement.
But closer to home, Alaskan natives and Alaskans at large had long known it by a different name, a name they continued to use.
The plethora of names for a single place prove that the labels we give to locations are ours to decide. That Americans stick to the name “Germany” bears little weight on the minds of those locals who proudly and easily stick to “Deutschland”.
The appeal to allow locals the right to name their own landmarks writes itself. For a broader audience, I’d posit again that the succession of names applied to one mountain means we, collectively, maintain the right to choose what we call it. To many of us, “Mount McKinley” is the name we grew up with. And appeal to tradition is one of humanity’s most enduring arguments.
Other arguments cite the naming rights of natives or explorers. I’d like to highlight a different question: which name is best? The story of Mount McKinley is clear: a prospector wanted to use the continent’s largest mountain as a political yard sign by naming it after a President who is undeniably less famous than the mountain that bore his name.
“Denali” is not only a name hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. It’s not only a name attributable to the natives who lived for generations beneath its shadow rather than a passing explorer or some guy sniffing around for yellow rocks. It’s also, of the serious contenders, the coolest name we have available.
It’s the obvious choice.