Two Historic Paintings: Denali and McKinley.
What's in a name? A lot, apparently.
Here's a rare two-fer in this series: two historic paintings that are linked by a name, by politics, and by a fluke of history.
The header image of this article is a painting of North America's highest peak, Denali, located in Alaska. The mountain was known by various names bestowed by the indigenous peoples who lived in the area for thousands of years. During their loose and incomplete control of Alaska in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Russians called the mountain Большая Гора, or "Big Mountain." Then in 1897, three decades after the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, a gold prospector named William Dickey claimed, in a memoir of his recent trip to Alaska which was publicized in a New York newspaper, that he "named" the mountain Mt. McKinley, though he had no authority to do so. The stunt was apparently politically-motivated. The backing of official U.S. currency by precious metals was a huge political issue in the Presidential election of 1896, for which McKinley had received the Republican nomination. Dickey was prospecting, for gold no less, in Alaska during the campaign, and "naming" the mountain McKinley was apparently a political statement against other prospectors who were looking for silver; McKinley's Democratic opponent, William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, wanted "bi-metallism."
Controversy over the name of this mountain fulminated through much of the 20th century and into this one. The most recent dispute over it began in 1975, when official efforts in Washington, D.C. got afoot to rename the mountain Denali. These were generally opposed by politicians from Ohio, the home state of the now long-deceased President William McKinley. That controversy reached its end 40 years later when Sally Jewell, Barack Obama's Secretary of the Interior, officially (re-)designated the mountain Denali. Conservatives, especially those from Ohio, cried foul, for what reasons I confess I'm at a loss to understand. Denali remains the name of the mountain today and is unlikely to change at this point.
