There are lots and lots of important things going on in the world. We have a pandemic that is either winding down or about to kick into another surge. We have our nation’s longest war about to come to an end (and, as an aside, I find the hypocrisy of the GOP continuously amazing, given that Biden is being attacked by Republicans for announcing a final withdrawal in September, when the same Republicans were just fine with Trump’s plan to pull out in May, but I digress…). Oh, and we also don’t know yet whom the Broncos will get as their next QB. 

And there are lots and lots of news stories that may seem relatively unimportant, given the scale of other issues. One of these seemingly minor issues popped up in a recent Colorado Politics story about the effort to rename Colorado’s Mount Evans. Now, having spent the last 25 years or so dressing up in wig and tights and performing a one-man show as Alexander Hamilton around the nation (cough…hamiltonlives.com…cough) and having spent quite a bit of time with my nose in books about our nation’s founding, let me state clearly that history is, well, complicated.

In recent years, a long-overdue reckoning has begun to occur, with people thinking far more deeply about whom we honor by naming things after. In many ways, the U.S. is behind the times in this thought process. You won’t find any monuments in, say, Germany, named after Nazis, which I admit is a pretty easy call. And I am a strong supporter of the effort to remove Confederate statues, monuments, flags, street names, and such from our nation’s landscape. Such items are admittedly part of our history and should be preserved (along with the full story of what they meant) in museums, but not on the public thoroughfare.

Some will claim that such efforts are attempts to re-write history, and I assert just the opposite: retiring symbols of hate to the dustbins of history is to record our historical record correctly and properly. The Founding period is especially tricky, as we had quite a few people yelping about liberty while also keeping fellow humans enslaved. Our history should, nay must, record the complete record of the good and the bad, the proper and the vile.

Except for mountains.

As I’m sure you have noticed, my fellow Coloradans, we have lots of really cool mountains. And one is currently named Mount Evans. If you are like most folks, I suspect you know that name only as far as it was applied to the peak itself. But the guy the mountain is named after is, well, not such a great guy after all. John Evans was Colorado’s second territorial governor, which might be honorable work. But Evans was also one of the main instigators of one of the most — if not the most — despicable and wicked events in Colorado’s history: The Sand Creek Massacre. The murder of roughly 500 Cheyenne and Arapahoe people is a truly dark stain on our history. Evans eventually was forced to resign, in part because he refused to criticize or even acknowledge what had happened. The name “Evans” should be forever confined to our history books and not to our magnificent and dazzling mountains. As you read the CP story, you will see the ongoing debate about what name should be applied to the mountain. There are several suggestions, including Mount Cheyenne-Arapahoe, Mount Blue Sky, Mount Soule, Mount Rosalie and others. I don’t profess to have any informed opinion on what the final name should be, other than removing the tag “Evans,” but I look forward to seeing what the various folks involved come up with.

Such renamings are not without precedent. The tallest U.S. peak, way up in Alaska, carried the name “Mount McKinley” after a gold prospector — who admired then-President-Elect-McKinley — used the politician’s name in a newspaper article in the 1897 New York Sun, of all places. The people who had actually lived in the mountain’s shadow for centuries had always called it “Denali,” which is the Athabascan word for “the high one.” The first effort to rename the peak happened as far back as 1916, but it wasn’t until 2015 that the name of a president who never even visited Alaska was removed and a far more proper name was installed, and today, our nation’s highest peak is fittingly, Denali.

At the end of the day, the mountains of Colorado don’t really care what we call them. They are, and I hope this isn’t too technical, big rocks sticking up. But for us humans, what we call things does, in fact, matter, because it shows what we honor and what we reject. And while there are legitimate and difficult discussions that need to be held regarding much of our troubled history, I would hope that we can all agree that naming a mountain after a guy who helped spark mass murder is, well, dumb.

My old friend, the singer John Denver, used to talk about the power and grandeur of our Rocky Mountain high. I hope that we can correct the historical error of naming one of these wonderous peaks after a horrible person. Because, perhaps, we can all “walk in quiet solitude the forest and the streams, seeking grace in every step we take. Our sight can turn inside ourselves to try and understand, the serenity of a clear blue mountain lake.” 

Far out.