By Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday he would rename Denali, the name given to North America’s highest mountain by Alaska Natives, in honor of William McKinley, the 25th American president assassinated in 1901.
In 2015, former Democratic President Barack Obama officially renamed the mountain Denali, siding with the state of Alaska and ending a decades-long naming battle. The summit has officially been 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,” Republican Trump said, adding that his administration would “bring back the Mount McKinley name because I think he deserves it.”
The mountain, which rises to more than 20,000 feet, was named Mount McKinley in 1896 after a gold prospector exploring the area learned 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 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 the Alaska.”
Denali, the local Athabascan name, meaning “the High,” was officially designated as the peak’s name in 1975 by the state of Alaska, which then urged the federal government to adopt the name as well.
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 American industry, according to the White House website on presidents.
