Colorado peak linked to 1864 atrocity has been renamed Mount Blue Sky

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/16/us/mount-blue-sky-renamed-evans-cheyenne-arapaho/index.html

by chmaynard • 3 years ago

22 34 3 years ago

cft• 3 years ago

Same thing was done by the Bolsheviks and French revolutionaries (regardless of the merit). French even renamed the calendar months, but then reverted on everything. Russians didn't revert. Let's see where this goes here.

freitzkriesler22• 3 years ago

Eventually the Overton window shifts backwards. We've seen it with beer, movies, and other things. You push and push so much and then act surprised when there's a massive backlash — again regardless of merit?

hooverd3• 3 years ago

Eh, I don't see what's so woke about renaming a mountain to something other than after one-note governor.

giraffe_lady3• 3 years ago

The backlashes aren't surprising they are predicted, in fact predictable. They're still bad, and the change is still good even if racists get mad about it. They'll get mad about something else, appeasing revanchists isn't the basis for any kind of useful policy.

bryanlarsen• 3 years ago

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

croisillon• 3 years ago

ever heard of the metric system?

justinator3• 3 years ago

I think this is more like calling something Mt. Kristallnacht and thinking that in poor taste, then renaming it something like, Mt. Viktor Frankl, honestly. We're not removing the fact that history happened, but we're stopping the celebration of terrible deeds.

perihelions• 3 years ago

- "Mount Blue Sky is the highest peak in the Mount Evans Wilderness..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Blue_Sky

Is this an oversight?

angry_moose• 3 years ago

Probably due to a jurisdictional mess.

The article says the mountain was renamed by the US Board of Geographic Names (and possibly the Department of the Interior).

Wilderness Areas seem to be managed by some combination of the National Park Service, US Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife, and Bureau of Land Management; and might require congress to get involved to rename it (Congress creates them, unclear whether they have to be involved to rename them).

There's a whole mess of oddball things like this in Minnesota, which has been reverting a lot of things back to indigenous names. The weird conflicts are slowly getting sorted out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Wilderness_Preservati...

Edit: Yeah, I think its Congress. It required a bill to rename the Olympic Wilderness to the Daniel J. Evans Wilderness in 2016 (different "Evans").

https://www.spokesman.com/blogs/outdoors/2016/dec/07/olympic...

throw0101c• 3 years ago

"Governing body: U.S. Forest Service"

But:

The Mount Evans Wilderness is a U.S. Wilderness Area in Arapaho National Forest and Pike National Forest about 30 miles (48 km) west of Denver, Colorado. The wilderness area is named after Mount Evans.[2][3][a]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Evans_Wilderness

[a] In September 2023, Mount Evans was renamed to Mount Blue Sky.[4]

Freak_NL• 3 years ago

Also the road leading up to the summit, state highway 5, the Mount Evans Highway.

mcphage2• 3 years ago

This seems like some pretty clear good news.

davio2• 3 years ago

Mount Blue Sky is one of the few 14ers you can drive up. It's not commercially owned like Pikes Peak. It's a cool trip if you're in the Denver area - remember to get reservations!

buzzdenver4• 3 years ago

... next year, since it is closed for 2023

davio2• 3 years ago

We got heavy snow on the 4th of July one year. Had to push some cars to get them unstuck. I think people wound up spending the night in their cars.

justinator3• 3 years ago

Pikes Peaks isn't commercially owned - the highway is run by the city, so it's more like a city pool than anything.

The Arapahoe name is, "Heey-otoyoo" meaning, "the Long Mountain" and "Tavakiev" in Numic meaning, "the Sun Mountain", which may be a more fitting name than "Pikes" who himself didn't summit and called the mountain, "unclimbable", even though the mountain certainly had seen people on it before he even know of its existence.

justinator3• 3 years ago

Hikers of the mountain are not unified in their support for the renaming:

https://www.14ers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=63361

"Why do we care so much about the opinions of people we conquered over a hundred years ago?"

buzzdenver4• 3 years ago

I'd really like if 14ers.com had a thumbs up/down option for comments. A similar forum, letsrun.com, has an order of magnitude higher number of vile comments like this, but after the recent introduction of voting you see that something like this would has at least 90% thumbs downs and restore your faith in humanity a little bit.

hooverd3• 3 years ago

Apparently, if you rename a mountain to something other than after a guy who massacred Native Americans after lying to them they'd be safe, you're a "woketard" and a "total fruit". Enlightening stuff.

DrThunder2• 3 years ago

Ahh yes but the "indigenous" never killed eachother, raped, murdered etc. right?

You realize holding a group of people up as idols that can do no wrong is just as de-humanizing and bigoted as calling them savages right?

The idea that you should continuously look into the past and constantly change the names of things like it's actually going to make the past atrocity go away is pretty laughable.

Workaccount2• 3 years ago

Never heard of this incident before, so dived in and did some quick history-over-morning-coffee.

Apparently a large group of Indians - men, women, children, were told they could safely settle in a designated area in the vicinity (~30 miles) of Fort Lyon. Then one day this guy Colonel John Chivington, rolled up with his cavalry regiment.

Despite seeing the flags of "no hostility" and being approached by a known American liaison who had been living in the Indian camp (he basically told the liaison to fuck off), Chivington ordered his men to open fire on the Indians.

They killed somewhere between 150 and 750 Indians. Two-thirds of which turned out to be women and children. It was pretty much just cold blooded murder, done on what was promised to be safe land.

There was intense public outrage over the massacre, which led to congressional inquiry. Ultimately they found Chivington had acted "wrongly", but as far I as can tell, he was never charged with anything. He did resign from the military shortly afterwards though. It is also noted that he could never pursue his political aspirations, because the public had such a dim view of him.

tivert2• 3 years ago

Also, the namesake of this mountain was forced to resign over the incident:

Evans was forced to resign the governorship in 1865 for his role in instigating the Sand Creek massacre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Evans_(Colorado_governor))

I'm kinda of surprised the mountain was named for him, given that. It looks like he only took office in 1862, but it looks like his daughter was married to a later governor, so maybe that had something to do with it.

Though I'm still generally opposed to changing long-established names, because of the annoyance and confusion it causes (and will forever cause). Very, very few people even know or care about the person anything was named after.

kibwen• 3 years ago

I'm kinda of surprised the mountain was named for him, given that.

Consider that the largest military base in the United States was named in honor of a general of the CSA. On the other hand, he was generally regarded as an incompetent leader hated by his own men, and that "the losses suffered by Bragg's forces are cited as highly consequential to the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy", so maybe it makes sense why the Union would want to memorialize him...

DrThunder2• 3 years ago

Good luck... whatever your opinion on this is I can guarantee you that most people will not be using the new name.

buzzdenver4• 3 years ago

Do you still call is Mt Rosalie, since that was its original name? 20 years from now it'll be an obscure trivia question. Just like most people already call the neighborhood that used to be Stapleton, named after a KKK member, as Central Park. And it was renamed a couple of years ago, and Central Park is a dumb name...

mcphage2• 3 years ago

People who have been using the old name for years? Yeah, probably—but then I still call sports stadiums by the names I first learned them as, as well as gas stations. Heck, a few years back I had to deliberately force myself to stop using the term "open apple key".

But people who learn it for the first time will learn the new name, and official maps (etc) will all use the new name, and that's probably good enough.

tivert2• 3 years ago

The Sears Tower will always be the Sears Tower to me, no matter who the current owner is and who paid them for naming "rights."

But people who learn it for the first time will learn the new name, and official maps (etc) will all use the new name, and that's probably good enough.

Not necessarily. If the community isn't invested in the name change, the old name can remain current and persist through natural transmission.

In fact, the old name could become established as a way to separate the locals from tourists who learned a name from some outsider source like an official map.

Another factor is how good the new name is. "Mount Blue Sky" is actually pretty good, as far as these imposed renamings go. A lot of the time they're totally impractical mouthfuls (e.g. https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/federal-government-re...) that put contemporary English's orthographic sloppiness on full display.

doodlebugging• 3 years ago

It's good that they have agreed to rename this popular peak to recognize the Cheyenne and Arapaho people who lived in that region. As usual, a little history lesson may help people understand what happened and why it was so contemptible to name this peak for someone who instigated such a heinous massacre of peaceful people.

First I will post a first-hand account of the massacre from a letter written by a courageous officer who held his men back and did not participate in the slaughter, Captain Silas Soule [0].

As noted in the post above, Capt. Soule was murdered a few months after giving testimony against Col Chivington and others involved in the massacre. His murderer(s) though known, were never punished.

One name you see mentioned in his letter is George Bent. George was the mixed race (Cheyenne mother/Anglo father) son of William Bent who along with his brother Charles and a French-Canadian trapper Ceran St. Vrain established Bent's Fort on the Santa Fe trail. [1] These men established a trading empire where anyone could procure supplies to outfit their expeditions whether they were Anglo, Mexican, or Native American. It was a frontier hub and the Bents were well-known all over the region. A little of George Bent's life is related in this link [2]. You can visit Bent's Fort today if you are in the area and it is worth the effort.

Black Kettle, [3] the Southern Cheyenne chief who thought that he had negotiated a plan for his people to live in peace, escaped this massacre at Sand Creek only to die in the massacre of Southern Cheyenne people in Oklahoma at the Battle of the Washita River, or the Washita Massacre [4], conducted by Lt. Col. George A. Custer's 7th US Cavalry in 1868.

This massacre of Black Kettle and his people followed by Custer's 1874 violation of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie which established the protected area of the Black Hills in perpetuity where no whites could settle. These acts against the tribes kept Custer in native eyes as a sworn enemy and in 1876 when he was cornered with his men of the 7th Cavalry at the Greasy Grass [5] (known by Anglos as Little Bighorn [6]) in Montana, allowed the assembled tribes (Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, Arapaho) to take their revenge as they left no survivors from his troop. This was a fitting end for a narcissist who saw slaughtering Native Americans as an easy path to personal fame and fortune.

One of the most disgusting things about the Sand Creek Massacre is mentioned in Soule's letter, the fact that the soldiers under Chivington spent the afternoon of the day of the massacre and the following day mutilating the bodies of those they had massacred and they wore those body parts proudly on their hats and belts as souvenirs when they paraded triumphantly through the streets on their return. This account gives a little more detail taken from survivor and witness accounts of the massacre and the aftermath. [7] The three-part series of which it is the second part fills in a lot of details about this event and is worth reading for context.

Man's inhumanity to other men should not be commemorated by naming peaks after those who inspire or commit mass murder. Changing the name of this peak does not undo any of the terrible history but, in the same way that we do not name terrestrial features or streets after school shooters or other mass murderers, it may help put Evans and those inspired to violence by him back into the most fetid, rancid part of history's dustbin by erasing his name.

The location of the Sand Creek Massacre was finally found and can be visited today [8]. It is near the town of Eads, Colorado, a area where years ago I briefly worked with a wheat-whacking crew. Since the original site was lost to history, it took a significant collaborative effort between the National Park Service and tribal historians to locate the site so that boundaries could be defined for it. This was completed between 1998-2000 and the National Historic Site designated in 2007.[9]

[0] https://www.nps.gov/sand/learn/historyculture/the-life-of-si...

[1] https://www.nps.gov/beol/learn/historyculture/index.htm

[2] https://history.denverlibrary.org/colorado-biographies/georg...

[3] https://history.denverlibrary.org/colorado-biographies/black...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Washita_River]

[5] https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2020/06/the-battle-of-greasy-grass...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn

[7] https://www.denverlibrary.org/blog/cultural-inclusivity-rese...

[8] https://www.nps.gov/sand/index.htm

[9] https://www.nps.gov/articles/searching-for-sand-creek.htm

Colorado peak linked to 1864 atrocity has been renamed Mount Blue Sky

Related Stories