By Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday he will rename Denali, Alaska natives’ name for North America’s tallest mountain, after William McKinley, the 25th U.S. president who was assassinated in 1901.
Democratic former President Barack Obama in 2015 officially renamed the mountain as Denali, siding with the state of Alaska and ending a decades-long naming battle. The peak had been officially called Mount McKinley since 1917.
“They took his name off Mount McKinley,” Trump said in a speech to supporters in Phoenix. “He was a great president,” Trump, a Republican, said, adding that his administration will “bring back the name of Mount McKinley because I think he deserves it.”
The mountain, which has an elevation of more than 20,000 feet (6,100 meters), was named Mount McKinley in 1896 after a gold prospector exploring the region heard that McKinley, a champion of the gold standard, had won the Republican nomination for president.
The U.S. Department of the Interior, in the 2015 order that was signed by Obama changing the name to Denali, noted that McKinley had never visited the mountain and had no “significant historical connection to the mountain or to Alaska.”
Denali, the local Athabascan name, meaning “the High One,” was officially designated as the peak’s name in 1975 by the state of Alaska, which then pressed the federal government to also adopt the name.
Since then, Alaska lawmakers had petitioned the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to change the name to Denali officially but it had been blocked for decades.
Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, pushed back on Trump’s pledge to rename the mountain.
“There is only one name worthy of North America’s tallest mountain: Denali – the Great One,” Murkowski wrote in a post on X.
McKinley, who served two terms as governor of Ohio before becoming president in 1897, led the country to victory in the Spanish-American War and raised protective tariffs to promote U.S. industry, according to the White House website on presidents.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; editing by Ross Colvin and Leslie Adler)
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