One salmon spawned on President Obama when he visited Alaska this week to talk about climate change and also reach out to the Alaskans.
The federal government made it official in 1917 when then-President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill, approved by Congress, to officially call the mountain Mount McKinley as well as name the park it’s in after him.
A prospector named the mountain for McKinley in 1896, shortly after the Niles native won the Republican nomination for president. “This great native Ohioan and American hero deserves nothing less”. The names of Massachusetts and Minnesota come from the language of the Massachusetts-area Algonquian Indians and the Dakota Sioux name for sky-tinted water, respectively.
If there’s anything positive to come out of this controversy, it’s that it has encouraged greater understanding of the legacy of William McKinley, an oft-forgotten but much deserving national hero.
Late-arriving Americans historically ignored those objections and named hundreds of places after squaws. “Keep up your traditions even as you go out into the big world, and learn and bring back the knowledge that’s going to help to build this community”, he said, adding, “We’re very very proud of all of you”.
The change is a part of an ongoing USGS program to replace elevations in Alaska and elsewhere, the Related Press reported.
That might be too long a name to fit on maps.
Not that our mountain names are necessarily all that inventive. “In (the) case of Denali, that’s how everyone up there, the locals, Native or not, refer to the local features”. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said in an interview.
But Obama’s Alaska trip wasn’t just for grins and fish stories.
The English name given to the island reminds people of what Hagenstein calls the ecological insult.
“I’m still mad about the name, because of how it got passed”.
More change may be on the way. But it may not succeed in the face of opposition by the state board.
“We the people would like to rename Ohio’s highest peak ‘Mount Sarah Palin, ‘” the petition reads, in an effort to “honor Alaska’s most famous governor”. Outside of Kotzebue, one in five in the Alaska Arctic doesn’t have a proper kitchen, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
To the editor: It’s amusing to see how some lawmakers from Ohio, many of whom regularly tout states’ rights when it comes to healthcare and education, harshly criticized the White House for renaming a mountain in another state at the request of that other state’s lawmakers.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, while not on the congressional letter, told Fox this week that he doesn’t know “why after 100 years why we are changing the name of a mountain”.
The climb to gather the data from Denali began June 15 and involved one climber from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and three climbers from the private survey company CompassData Inc., USGS spokesman Mark Newell said.