Enough about Denali...

... let's talk about Mt. McKinley.

No true Alaskan calls it Mt. McKinley -- out here, it's Denali ("The High One" in the Athabascan language). So why is it named after McKinley, anyway? Did he climb it? Drive a golf ball off the summit? Have his remains interred at its foot?

No, McKinley never even visited Alaska. It was named after him to piss some people off.

A prospector named William Dickey, a Republican, was exploring the area in 1896 with some Democratic traveling companions. A big issue at the time was the proposed abolition of the gold monetary standard (Republicans were pro-gold-standard, Democrats against), and Dickey apparently liked to discuss it at length with his Democratic pals. Poor Billy must have felt awfully lonely out there, the only true supporter of beautiful, beautiful gold, constantly forced to listen to a bunch of haters. I mean, they all obviously loved gold, since they were out in the middle of nowhere looking for it, but my man Dickey was the only one there who really understood gold and wanted to rub it all over his face and have his currency based on its worth and stuff.

So how to get back at the haters? Well, during his travels, Dickey "discovered" Denali, and upon his return to civilization, he published his "discovery" with the announcement that he'd decided to name it Mt. McKinley. After the Republican, gold-standard-lovin' presidential candidate of the day. Because he wanted to annoy the people he'd been traveling with. I guess that's one way to win an argument.

Plenty of people who have an opinion on the matter believe that the mountain's official name should be Denali -- so why don't we just change it?

Bureaucracy, of course!

If you want to change the name of a national park/monument/whatever, you have to take it up with the U.S. Geographic Names Board. But the Names Board won't consider a name change if the issue is already being considered in Congress. It turns out that a certain Ralph Regula, a representative from Ohio who happens to have McKinley's former seat in the House, is really attached to the current name; he introduces a bill every year that declares the mountain's official name to be Mt. McKinley. And so the mountain will be called Denali over Ralph Regula's dead body.