On the evening of his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order changing the name of Denali to Mount McKinley. In doing so, Trump reignited a geographic dispute so substantial that it has its own Wikipedia entry.
According to that Wikipedia article, the dispute began in 1975. In reality, the controversy began more than a century ago—and it is intimately connected with the creation of Denali National Park.
Disputing the name of a new national park
In 1916, Charles Sheldon made a request to Thomas Riggs of the Alaska Engineering Commission. Both men were deep in the work to establish a national park around the tallest peak in the United States. Rather a park to protect the mountain itself, the national park was intended to preserve the surrounding wildlife and their wilderness habitat surrounding the park. Droves of elk, deer, moose, and dall sheep were being slaughtered by an influx of miners being brought to Alaska’s interior by the new Alaskan Railway.
Sheldon wrote to Riggs saying that he believed the preserve should be called “Mt. Denali National Park, so that the true old Indian [sic] name of Mt Denali (meaning ‘the Great One’) will thus be preserved.” Riggs disagreed with Sheldon, weakly stating his reasoning: “I don’t like the name of Denali. It is not descriptive.”
Since Euro-Americans began exploring Alaska in the mid-19th century, the highest peak on the continent had a series of monikers. Nine different Native Alaskan groups had unique names, though all are related to the same general idea. The best known, Denali, means “the tall one” or “the great one.” Russian explorers named it “Bulshaia Gora” which has a similar meaning to Denali.
In the late 1800s, gold prospectors began exploring the interior of Alaska, naming the landscape as the went. The name “Mount McKinley” originated from one such prospector, William Dickey. In a 1897 New York Sun article, Dickey said “we named our great peak Mount McKinley, after William McKinley, who had been nominated for the presidency, and that fact was the first news we received on our way out of that wonderful wilderness.”
Though president William McKinley had no connection to Alaska—he never visited or enacted any policy around Alaska—the name stuck. After McKinley’s 1901 assassination, many felt that naming the peak after him was an excellent way to commemorate the president. In 1916, Charles Sheldon was caught in the complicated politics of park-making. The creation of a game preserve was imminently important, and he chose not to risk killing the project over the name.
In 1917, Mount McKinley National Park was established. The founding legislation for the national park was the first time the mountain was officially known by that name.
The name Denali—and the dispute—lives on
Decades after the creation of Alaska’s first national park, the name dispute continued. Despite being officially titled Mount McKinley, the name Denali hadn’t left the local Alaskan vernacular. In 1975, the state of Alaska requested that the federal government change the name back to “the high one.”
Like the name Denali, the shadow of William McKinley also lived on. Congressman Ralph Regula, who represented McKinley’s hometown of Canton, Ohio, opposed the name change. Regula solicited the support of every member of Congress from Ohio, as well as Gerald Ford’s Interior Secretary, Rogers Morton. Through bureaucratic machinations, Regula was able to block the name change until his retirement in 2009.
Despite being blocked, there was momentum behind the Denali movement. In 1980, as a part of the passage of Jimmy Carter’s Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, the name of the national park was changed. Mount McKinley National Park was enveloped in the new Denali National Park and Preserve.
In 2015, at the request of Alaska’s congressional delegation, Barack Obama’s Interior Secretary Sally Jewell redesignated the mountain Denali. Politicians from Ohio criticized the move, including Ralph Regula who called Obama a “dictator” for taking the action.
At the time, presidential candidate Donald Trump also criticized the change. He pledged to reverse the name change back in 2015. His January 20, 2025 executive order has given the Secretary of the Interior 30 days to make the switch.
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