Last month, the Department of the Interior asked for nominations for a new Advisory Committee on Reconciliation in Place Names. The goal is to replace derogatory names on millions of acres administered by the DOI, including national parks, Bureau of Land Management lands and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reserves.
This is a complicated task fraught with historical nuance, racism and pioneer exuberance. There will be expensive changes in brochures, maps and highway signs. There will also be opposition. Some community members in small towns will not want to give up a century-old moniker.
Names matter. Place names reflect past experiences with a diverse Western landscape, but also a sense of belonging. Yet for some Americans, place names represent derision and exclusion. The National Park Service formed the committee at the behest of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who wants the derogatory term “squaw” removed from all federal lands, though she has no jurisdiction over U.S. Forest Service lands, which come under the secretary of agriculture.
“Too many of our nation’s lands and water continue to perpetuate a legacy of oppression,” she said. “This important advisory committee will be integral to our efforts to identify places with derogatory terms whose expiration dates are long overdue.”
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Across the West, similar campaigns have occurred on a piecemeal basis. It is a timely process. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names considers name changes and then requires a five-year wait. In Alaska, it took years before Mount McKinley, the highest peak on the North American continent, reverted to its Native name, Denali, or “the high one.” The name McKinley was bestowed a century ago by white Alaskan pioneers to honor the 25th president, William McKinley, assassinated in 1901. Now, the mountain’s name and the name of Denali National Park are the same.
Arizona politicians moved to replace the name Squaw Peak near Phoenix with Piestewa Peak to honor a Hopi and Hispano soldier who died in Iraq in 2003. Recently, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis revived the Colorado Geographic Naming Advisory Board to recommend changing names in our Centennial State, including Squaw Mountain to Mesta’hehe Mountain, and to scrutinize other place names.
Under review is the Gore Range of Mountains named in the 19th century for Englishman Lord St. George Gore, who shot his way across the West slaughtering antelope, deer, bison and elk by the hundreds. He was hardly an innocent, “leave no trace” eco-tourist. The name Mount Evans may be deleted because Colorado territorial governor John Evans was complicit in the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre that killed dozens of peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho who were attacked at dawn in a winter camp that had been set aside for them by the U.S. Army.
The name Kit Carson Peak may be replaced because the quiet, diminutive trapper and guide Kit Carson helped round up Navajos and forced them on The Long Walk to an outdoor prison in New Mexico called Bosque Redondo. A closer historical look at Carson’s actions reveal that he disobeyed military orders. He could have been court-martialed. At one point, he was told by a general to kill all adult male Navajos, but Carson refused to give that order to his soldiers. Instead, they waged a war of destruction burning peach orchards, corn fields and hogans in the Navajo stronghold of Canyon de Chelley forcing surrender of freezing, destitute clansmen while other headmen took their families and fled west toward Bears Ears and Navajo Mountain.
Negro Draw and Negro Mesa in Colorado may have new names, but Negro Bill Canyon near Moab, Utah, was supposedly christened by locals to honor an early Black cowboy and settler. What to do with a well-meaning honorific? As the present confronts the past, none of this is easy. Was Chinaman Flat an epithet or an acknowledgment of where the Chinese lived on the edges of a mining camp? Can you right history’s wrongs by changing place names? No, but you can choose what to remember.
Is Murdered Mexican Flat a pejorative? What do we do with place names that crystallize an historical event, such as in Routt County on the White River National Forest where Murdered Mexican Flat is a mnemonic device that forces us to recall an Hispano sheepherder lucky at cards? The herder gambled his wages and won, but on the way back to his sheep camp his luck ran out. The cowboys he played poker with surreptitiously followed him in the dark and killed him. The herder’s name is forgotten. Marking the place of his death with a small cross on a U.S. Forest Service map and giving it a place name is all the remembrance that he has.
When Native Americans requested Custer Battlefield National Monument in Montana be renamed, a frontier fight extended to the halls of Congress with Custer fans appearing in long hair, twirled mustaches and adorned in buckskin. They loved their loser, but no military site is named after a general, so it is now Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in accordance with all other Civil War and American battle sites that are named for the place they occurred.
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To this new committee, Secretary Haaland will appoint one representative of a Native Hawaiian organization; one person from a tribal organization; four members of a Native American tribe; four citizens with expertise in civil rights or race relations; four scholars knowledgeable in cultural studies, history, geography or anthropology; and three members of the general public. They’ll have plenty of work to do.
Take for instance beloved Yosemite National Park, one of the Park Service’s crown jewels. In the early days of the California Gold Rush, pioneer vigilantes calling themselves the Mariposa Battalion drove out Miwok residents who had named the valley Ahwahnechee. The word Yosemite refers to the menacing militia. It means “those who kill” or “killers.”
And what about Devils Tower in Wyoming, the first national monument designated by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906? Over two dozen Great Plains tribes prefer their own names, which translate as Bear Lodge or Mato Teepee in Lakota. The Kiowa story of the volcanic plug is described by N. Scott Momaday in his classic book “The Way to Rainy Mountain.”
He explains that girls were pursued by a boy who became a bear. To help them, the creator told the girls to stand on a stump which started to rise. The bear kept attacking, clawing the stump and deeply etching the long vertical lines of stone, which are some of the best crack climbing in North America. The stump rose higher and higher. Finally, the creator saved the girls by flinging them into the sky where they became the constellation the Greeks named the Pleiades. A mistranslation from 1875 by Col. Richard Irving Dodge’s interpreter gave the igneous rock the name “Bad God’s Tower,” hence the recorded geographic name of Devils Tower.
Reviewing names of the mountains, mesas, canyons and deserts of America’s public lands will present a formidable geographic challenge. Revisiting American history challenges all of us, but our nation and our culture are not static. We look back so that we can move forward.
Andrew Gulliford is an award-winning author and editor and professor of history at Fort Lewis College. Reach him at gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.
