monday's mulling: denali

Last Thursday, Neil from Yorkshire Pudding wrote about the highest mountains on each continent. Denali, formerly known as Mt. McKinley, is the tallest mountain in North America and is located in Alaska.

Many years ago, my aunt, uncle, and cousins drove to Alaska from Illinois to visit my aunt's sister. They packed up the family station wagon and made the trek to the 49th state. Thinking about it, I believe they went in the late 1960s and at that time, Alaska would have been a state for no more than 10 years. Anyway, we got a postcard from them showing Mt. McKinley. How cool was that?

I remember in 6th grade Social Studies over the school year we studied all the continents, the countries and their capitals, major rivers and landforms, including the tallest mountain on each continent. Mom let me take the Mt. McKinley postcard to show to my class.

Mount McKinley got its name from a late 19th century prospector, William Dickey, who went to Alaska and the Yukon Territory in search of gold. He saw the mountain and was captivated by its geography and size. William McKinley (from Ohio) was the recent Republican presidential nominee and Dickey named the mountain Mount McKinley in an article he published in the "New York Sun." The name stuck and became official in 1917.

For generations, Native people lived in and around the mountain. Different tribes had a variety of names for it, but they all largely meant the same thing: “the great one” or “the high one.” In 1975, the state of Alaska officially requested that the mountain be recognized as Denali. The name honors and preserves the mountain’s Native American history. For many years, the members of the Congressional delegation from Ohio blocked this change action because William McKinley was from Ohio. In 2015, nearly a century later, the Obama administration officially renamed the peak Denali, a name that had originated from Alaska's Athabascan people. 

In 2024, President-elect Trump stated that he would change Denali's name back to McKinley. On the first day of his presidency, Trump signed an executive order directing that action be taken and on January 23, 2025, the Department of the Interior changed the mountain's name back to Mount McKinley. Denali is a native name, one that holds a place in Alaska's history, and is more appropriate than being named after a midwestern president who never visited the territory and was president 62 years before Alaska became the 49th state.