A round of recent executive orders manages to add insult to real injuries by proposing name changes that disrespect…everything.
The insult brought to mind the following from a lovely (and freely available; click on the title) book about Glacier National Park that I read not long after visiting. Because names matter, I’ve used the modern and factually correct ‘Native American’ in place of the old word Roberts used — I think she’d approve:
“Why is it that, with the most poetic nomenclature in the world — the Native American — one by one the historic names of peaks, lakes, and rivers of Glacier Park are being replaced by the names of obscure Government officials, professors in small universities, unimportant people who go out there to the West and memorialize themselves on Government maps? Each year sees some new absurdity. What names in the world are more beautiful than Going-to-the-Sun and Rising-Wolf? Here are Almost-a-Dog Mountain, Two-Medicine Lake, Red Eagle — a few that have survived.
“Every peak, every butte, every river and lake of this country has been named by the Native Americans. … What has happened? Look over the map of Glacier Park. The Native American names have been done away with. Majestic peaks, towering buttes are being given names like this: Haystack Butte, Trapper Peak, Huckleberry Mountain, the Guard House, the Garden Wall. One of the most wonderful things in the Rocky Mountains is this Garden Wall. I wish I knew what the Native Americans called it. Then there are Iceberg Lake, Florence Falls, Twin Lakes, Gunsight Mountain, Split Mountain, Surprise Pass, Peril Peak — that last was a dandy! Alliterative! — Church Butte, Statuary Mountain, Buttercup Park. Can you imagine the inspiration of the man who found some flowery meadow between granite crags and took away from it its Native American name and called it Buttercup Park?
“The Blackfeet are the aristocrats among Native Americans. They were the buffalo hunters, and this great region was once theirs. To the mountains and lakes of what is now Glacier Park, they attached their legends, which are their literature.
“The white man came, and not content with eliminating the Native Americans, he went further and wiped out their history. … Is there no way to stop this vandalism? There must be seven Goat Mountains. Here and there is a peak, like Reynolds Peak or Grinnell Mountain, and some others, properly named for men intimately associated with the region. But Reynolds’s Native American name was Death-on-the-Trail. When you have seen the mountain you can well believe that Death-on-the-Trail would fit it well.
“There is hardly a name in the telephone directory that is not fastened to some wonderful peak in this garden spot of ours. … Here, then, the Government has done a splendid thing and done it none too well. It has preserved for the people of the United States and for all the world a scenic spot so beautiful and so impressive that I have not even attempted to describe it. It is not possible. But it…has allowed its geographers to take away the original Native American names of this home of the Blackfeet and so destroy the last trace of a vanishing race.”
from Through Glacier Park: Seeing America First with Howard Eaton by Mary Roberts Rinehart (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1916), pp. 66-71
