Mt. Evans looms over the Denver skyline, just west of the city. The mountain boasts a popular scenic drive and a surrounding wilderness area filled with trails. It’s one of the most accessible climbs for those hoping to summit one of the state’s fourteeners, the nickname for Colorado’s 50-some mountains towering above 14,000 feet. 

Because of these draws, the peak is one of the most easily recognized. Most people love the view of the snow-capped mountain from downtown Denver, but it has always bothered Karen Naiman.

"Anytime you go outside, you see it,” she told Sierra. "It’s been a source of consternation.”

Naiman grew up in Denver, and her father, a lawyer, had an office on a block in Denver historically known as the “Evans Block,” which, like the mountain, drew its name from John Evans, Colorado’s second governor. For much of her life, Naiman gave little thought to the name, but several decades ago she stumbled upon a dark footnote in John Evans's history—the Sand Creek Massacre.

It was in November 1864 when the Third Colorado Cavalry advanced on a peaceful encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho Native Americans in southeastern Colorado at dawn. Most of the men were out hunting. As the cavalry approached, the camp’s leader waved an American flag with a white flag beneath it, to indicate that they were peaceful. Still, the cavalry advanced and slaughtered at least 130 people, mostly women and children. 

Then-governor Evans wasn’t present at the Sand Creek Massacre, nor did he order the attack, but it still led to his eventual resignation. More than a century later, a collaborative investigation between historians at the University of Denver and Northwestern University—both of which Evans helped found—concluded that while the governor didn’t directly order the massacre, he created the conditions that led to it.  

Despite his widely recognized role in the Sand Creek Massacre, Evans's name made its way onto monuments, buildings, and streets throughout Colorado and his home state of Illinois. As awareness of the history of Sand Creek has spread in recent years, Evans's name was removed from some of these memorials. Building names were changed and plaques were taken down, but the mountain remains an unmovable element of the landscape. 

Naiman filed a proposal with the Board of Geographic Names in March 2019, recommending the mountain be renamed Mt. Soule after Captain Silas Soule, a soldier who refused to participate in the Sand Creek Massacre and later testified against the leadership that ordered it. Naiman’s proposal is the second one filed with the BGN. A Denver school teacher filed the first in 2018, recommending the mountain be renamed Mt. Cheyenne-Arapaho.

Amid ongoing racial justice protests, the efforts to rename the mountain have garnered renewed attention. In July, Colorado governor Jared Polis announced a statewide committee to review new name proposals. Mt. Evans sits atop the list of 16 natural features with requests for new names. 

The long, complex process to rename the mountain has revealed the complicated history of how natural features are named and sparked conversations about who gets to write the country’s natural history.

The Renaming Process

Since it was founded 130 years ago, the US Geological Survey's Board of Geographic Names has gathered, curated, and ultimately decided the names of any natural feature that finds its way onto an official US map. To get a name changed or to name a new place, it has to go through the BGN.

“In the early days, it was really just trying to make sure every federal agency had the same name for the same place because obviously there was no database,” says Jennifer Runyon, a senior researcher with the BGN. “Now we are getting more into sensitivity of what names represent.”

According to Runyon, efforts to change names considered offensive or racist have been mounting for decades. This summer, during the protests, inquiries regarding name changes surged at the BGN, but few people actually followed through with the arduous process of submitting a proposal.

The BGN does not take name changes lightly. There must be a compelling reason for the change, and the new name has to convey some type of historical meaning.

"Even though it may have an offensive word in today's world ... there's a story there,” Runyon says. “You need to find something that will retain that history. Don’t just change everything to ‘bear’ or ‘oak’ or ‘elk.’ Do your homework.”

The Past and Future of Mt. Evans

The "homework" for Mt. Evans has proven complicated. 

The mountain originally had another name, dating back to 1863, when landscape artist Albert Bierstadt visited the mountain as part of a surveying expedition. After making the difficult climb up the then-roadless mountain, Bierstadt and his companions found breathtaking views of Colorado’s landscape. In that moment, Bierstadt suggested naming the mountain Mt. Rosalie after a friend’s wife, with whom he was having an affair. He later created a famous landscape painting of the mountain: A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie.

This history of how Mt. Rosalie was named and later became Mt. Evans wasn’t widely known until 2017, when author Jeri Norgren was at a meeting of the Denver Fortnightly Club, a women’s literary organization, of which she’s a member. The club’s president was reading aloud minutes from an old meeting from 1895, in which the members passed a motion to create a petition to rename Mt. Rosalie to Mt. Evans.

The discovery led Norgren to research the history of the name of Mt. Evans and those of Colorado’s other fourteeners. The history is detailed in the book Norgren released in September, Colorado’s Highest: The History of Naming the 14,000-Foot Peaks. While researching the book, Norgren found that how Colorado’s peaks were named told the story not only of the people and things they were named for, but also of the time period during which they were named.

"It's a different way to tell the history of Colorado and of the country,” she says. “Whatever was happening in the country at the time was reflected in the names."

Norgren wants to preserve this naming history and recommended to the BGN that if Mt. Evans’s name is changed, that it revert to Mt. Rosalie. But while Norgren and some others are concerned about sacrificing the history behind Mt. Evans’s current and past names, historians say that the process of name changing isn’t all that unusual. 

"We're constantly naming and renaming. It may seem strange now just because some of the names that we're used to here have been stable for so long,” says Susan Schulten, a Civil War history professor at the University of Denver. 

But before Mt. Evans can get a new moniker, the BGN still needs to consult all the groups of people with a stake in its new name. This includes the local government, the state geographic names committee and, importantly, the tribes that historically inhabited the area and those that were affected by the Sand Creek Massacre.

So far, only one tribal government has responded to requests to review the name—the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes suggested Mt. Blue Sky. According to the Denver American Indian Commission, which was consulted by the BGN and supports renaming the mountain, all tribes with a connection with the mountain should be consulted in order to determine whether there were any other historic names that may predate the official ones.  

“There are Indigenous names for all of these places. It’s interesting that folks would come here and think that the original name was the name of the cartographer that mapped the place or something,” says Kim Varilek, one of the commissioners. “That’s somewhat arbitrary, and it would be important to know what the original names were, and until that process happens, it would be very arbitrary again to just sort of pick a name."

The consultation process means that it will likely be at least another year before Mt. Evans could be rechristened. According to Runyon, the long consultation period is meant to ensure that the new name won’t befall the same fate as the old one—that whatever the new name is will account for everyone’s perspectives on both the past and the present.

"John Evans meant something very different to other communities,” Schulten says. “The same symbols can mean totally different things to different people."