anonovo2025 Why Is Trump So Obsessed With McKinley?
In 1896, a gold prospector named William Dickey led a journey through what he called the “wonderful wilderness” of Alaska, where he glimpsed an enormous mountain that compelled his “unbounded admiration.” When he emerged from the Alaskan interior, the first news he heard was that William McKinley, the former governor of Ohio, had received the Republican nomination for president.
And so, in the kind of random act that so often accompanies the colonial naming of geographic “discoveries,” Dickey and his comrades decided to bestow the name McKinley upon the huge peak. It caught on enough that Congress made the name official in 1917 when it created Mount McKinley National Park.
But the mountain — the tallest in North America, scraping the sky at 20,310 feet — had already held another name for centuries. In Koyukon, a language of the Athabaskan people for whom the mountain plays a central role in their creation story, it is known as “the high one” or “the great one”: Denali. In 2015 President Barack Obama officially restored that name, noting that McKinley had “never set foot in Alaska” and that “Denali is a site of significant cultural importance to many Alaska Natives.”
What to call the mountain had been a matter of debate even before Congress officially named it 108 years ago. The British-born mountaineer Hudson Stuck, an Alaska transplant who was a leader of the 1913 expedition that first summited the peak, called for “the restoration to the greatest mountain in North America of its immemorial native name” in his 1914 book, “The Ascent of Denali.” He pointed out “a certain ruthless arrogance” that “contemptuously ignores the native names of conspicuous natural objects” that are “almost always appropriate and significant, and overlays them with names that are,66br casino commonly, neither the one nor the other.”
Now President Trump has done exactly that. In one of the first acts on his return to the White House, he issued an executive order restoring McKinley as the mountain’s official name. (The national park that surrounds it will remain Denali National Park and Preserve; changing it would most likely require Congress to amend the law that gave the park that name in 1980.) The McKinley name change was recently entered into the government’s Geographic Names Information System, which lists the official names and locations of geographic features in the United States.
Which raises a question: Do we really need another mountain named McKinley? In addition to what used to be called Denali, there are at least a dozen other mountains or ridges in the country named McKinley, including in Arkansas, California, Colorado, Montana, New York, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee and Washington, according to the Geographic Names Information System.
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