President-elect Trump pledged this week to undo former President Obama’s 2015 decision to change the name of North America’s tallest peak to its Koyukon Athabascan name “Denali,” meaning “High One” or “Great One.”
Speaking to conservatives at a Phoenix conference, Trump made the pledge and noted President William McKinley was also a Republican who believed in tariffs. He first promised to undo Obama’s action in August 2015 and called it an “insult to Ohio,” where McKinley was born and raised.
During his Phoenix remarks, he also pledged to undo Democrats’ rebranding of southern military bases named for Confederates – like Fort Liberty in Fayetteville, North Carolina, which was formerly named after Gen. Braxton Bragg.
The 20,320-foot mountain was first dubbed Mount McKinley in 1896 by gold prospector William Dickey, after learning the Ohioan had won the GOP presidential nomination – and as a swipe at silver prospectors he met who preferred Democrat William Jennings Bryan and his plan for a silver standard for the dollar.
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Six months into his second term, McKinley was visiting Buffalo, New York, when anarchist laborer Leon Czolgosz assassinated him in a gladhanding line. Czolgosz believed the root of economic inequality stood with the government and was reportedly inspired by the 1900 assassination of Italian King Umberto I.
However, many Alaskans have appeared to prefer the historic name Denali:
GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski told KTUU that Trump’s plan to bring back “Mt. McKinley” is an “awful idea.”
“We already went through this with President Trump back and at the very, very beginning of his first term,” she said Monday.
Murkowski said both she and Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, – who originally hails from McKinley’s Ohio – support the name Denali.
“[Denali] is a name that has been around for thousands of years… North America’s tallest mountain – shouldn’t it have a name like ‘The Great One’?” Murkowski added.
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In 2015, Sullivan told the Anchorage Daily News that “Denali belongs to Alaska and its citizens” and that the naming rights are held by Alaskan Natives.
In a statement to KTUU this week, Sullivan said many Alaskans prefer the “name that the very tough, very strong, very patriotic Athabascan people gave” the peak.
Meanwhile, then-Rep. Ralph Regula, R-Ohio, spent decades in Congress preventing any name change from McKinley to Denali – as the namesake president hailed from his Canton district.
Regula, who died in 2017, lambasted Obama over the name change, saying he “thinks he is a dictator.”
Appearing to cite his own work presenting procedural roadblocks and language added to Interior-related bills, Regula said Obama could not change such a law “by a flick of his pen.”
“You want to change the Ohio River?” he quipped.
However, some Ohio officials have also been deferential to the will of Alaskans.
Current Lt. Gov. Jon Husted told the Dayton Daily News in 2015 that if Denali is what Alaskans want, then he in turn understood, as he wouldn’t want Alaskans dictating Ohio name changes.
“So, I guess we shouldn’t tell people in Alaska should do in their own state. But I’m a big fan of Canton and McKinley and I’m glad that he’s getting talked about some more,” he said at the time.
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