What’s the tallest mountain in the U.S. and North America? It’s one mountain in Alaska, rising over 20,000 feet above sea level.
Since 2015, its official U.S. government name has been Denali. But President-elect Donald Trump wants to change it back to its official name, given in 1917: Mount McKinley.
“William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States, was because of the vast sums of money that he brought into our country, the person really who got us the money that President Theodore Roosevelt used to build the Panama Canal and a lot of other things,” Trump told an audience in Phoenix on Sunday, December 22nd.
“McKinley was a very good, maybe a great president,” Trump added. “They took his name off Mount McKinley, right? That’s what they do to people.”
William McKinley was the 25th president of the United States, serving from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. President-elect Trump admires McKinley notably for his use of tariffs, a top priority for the president-elect.
The mountain received the Mount McKinley name for the first time in 1896. A gold prospector spotted the mountain and named it in support of the future president, who was a candidate in that year’s general election.
It took more than two decades for the U.S. government to officially adopt the Mount McKinley name. Still, the name Denali goes back a lot longer.
For centuries, people who lived in the area called it Denali. They base it either on the word in the local Koyukon people’s language meaning “high” or “tall” or a phrase meaning “the great one.”
The Alaska Board of Geographic Names changed the mountain’s name to Denali in 1975. In the same year, a congressman from McKinley’s home state of Ohio blocked an effort to change it at the federal level.
When it made the change in 2015, the Interior Department did not raise any issues with McKinley’s politics or viewpoints. Instead, they note that “President McKinley never visited, nor did he have any significant historical connection to, the mountain or to Alaska.”
While President-elect Trump has described removing the Mount McKinley name as an insult to Ohio, his Republican colleagues from Alaska oppose the efforts to remove the Denali name and say they have for years.
“Awful, awful idea,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told local news station KTUU in an interview released on Tuesday, December 24th. “We already went through this with President Trump back in the very, very beginning of his first term, when Senator [Dan] Sullivan and I went to his office and we were talking about a whole range of things, and he raised that issue then,” Murkowski said.
“Both [Sen. Sullivan] and I leaned into it and said, ‘no, bad idea,’ Murkowski added. “This is not only something Alaskans heartily endorse and support. It is a name that is, has been around for thousands of years.”
