The name of the highest mountain in North America became a subject of dispute in 1975, when the Alaska Legislature asked the U.S. federal government to officially change its name from "Mount McKinley" to "Denali". The mountain had been unofficially named Mount McKinley in 1896 by a gold prospector, and officially by the federal government in 1917 to commemorate William McKinley, who was President of the United States from 1897 until his assassination in 1901.
The name Denali is based on the Koyukon name of the mountain, ('the high one'). The Koyukon are a people of Alaskan Athabaskans settling in the area north of the mountain.
Alaska in 1975 requested that the mountain be officially recognized as Denali, as it was still the common name used in the state. Attempts by the Alaskan state government to have Mount McKinley's name changed by the federal government were blocked by members of the congressional delegation from Ohio, the home state of the mountain's presidential namesake. In August 2015, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell announced that the name would officially be changed in all federal documents. While on an Alaskan visit in the first week of September 2015, President Barack Obama announced the renaming of the mountain.
Historic names
Numerous Indigenous peoples of the area had their own names for this prominent peak. The local Koyukon Athabaskan name for the mountain, used by the Indigenous Americans with access to the flanks of the mountain (living in the Yukon, Tanana and Kuskokwim basins), is or ( or ). To the South the Dena'ina people in the Susitna River valley used the name ('the big mountain'), anglicized as Doleika or Traleika, as in Traleika Glacier.
The historical first European sighting of Denali took place on May 6, 1794, when George Vancouver was surveying the Knik Arm of the Cook Inlet and mentioned "distant stupendous mountains" in his journal. However, he uncharacteristically left the mountain unnamed. The mountain is first named on a map by Ferdinand von Wrangel in 1839; the names Tschigmit and Tenada correspond to the locations of Mount Foraker and Denali, respectively. Von Wrangel had been chief administrator of the Russian settlements in North America from 1829 to 1835.
During the Russian ownership of Alaska, the common name for the mountain was (). The first English name applied to the peak was Densmore's Mountain or Densmore's Peak, for the gold prospector Frank Densmore, who in 1889 had fervently praised the mountain's majesty; however, the name persevered only locally and informally.
McKinley naming
The mountain was first designated "Mount McKinley" by a New Hampshire-born Seattleite named William Dickey, who led a gold prospectoring dig in the sands of the Susitna River in June 1896. An account written on his return to the contiguous United States appeared in The New York Sun on January 24, 1897, under the title Discoveries in Alaska (1896). Dickey wrote, "We named our great peak Mount McKinley, after William McKinley of Ohio, who had been nominated for the Presidency, and that fact was the first news we received on our way out of that wonderful wilderness." By most accounts, the naming was politically driven; Dickey had met many silver miners who zealously promoted Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan's ideal of a silver standard, inspiring him to retaliate by naming the mountain after a strong proponent of the gold standard.
In a United States Geological Survey (USGS) report in 1900, Josiah Edward Spurr refers to "the giant mountain variously known to Americans as Mount Allen, Mount McKinley, or Bulshaia, the latter being a corruption of the Russian adjective meaning big." The 1900 report otherwise calls it Mount McKinley, as does the 1911 USGS report The Mount McKinley Region, Alaska.
McKinley was assassinated early in his second term, shot by Leon Czolgosz on September 6, 1901, and dying of his wounds on September 14. This led to sentiment favoring commemoration of his memory, and the Federal government officially adopted the name Mount McKinley in 1917, when Congress passed and President Woodrow Wilson signed into law "An Act to establish the Mount McKinley National Park in the territory of Alaska" (Public Act No. 353).