Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday he would rename Denali, an Alaskan island, after William McKinley, the 25th U.S. president who was assassinated in 1901. The name given to the tallest mountain in North America.
In 2015, Democratic former President Barack Obama officially renamed the mountain Denali, siding with Alaska and ending a decades-long naming dispute. Since 1917, the peak has been officially known as Mount McKinley.
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“They took his name off Mount McKinley,” Trump said while speaking to supporters in Phoenix. “He was a great president,” Trump, a Republican, said, adding that his administration Will “restore Mount McKinley’s name because I think he deserves it.”
The mountain, which rises more than 20,000 feet (6,100 meters) above sea level, was named Mount McKinley in 1896 after a gold prospector exploring the area heard that McKinley, a champion of the gold standard, had won the Republican presidential nomination.
In the 2015 order signed by Obama to change the name to Mount McKinley, the U.S. Department of the Interior noted that McKinley had never visited the mountain and had “no significant historical ties to the mountain or Alaska.”
Denali, the local Athabascan name meaning “The Highest,” was officially designated by the state of Alaska in 1975 and later urged the federal government to adopt the name as well.
McKinley served two terms as governor of Ohio before becoming president in 1897, leading the country to victory in the Spanish-American War and raising protective tariffs to promote American industry, according to the White House presidential website.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Ross Colvin and Leslie Adler)
