The skyline of the Rockies is an upside-down Mount Rushmore. South Dakota sports a lineup of four heroic presidents. In Colorado, our vistas are dominated by mountains honoring misbehaving white guys who trampled onto Ute, Arapahoe, and Cheyenne territory. “This is ours now!” they declared. “We don’t care that you’ve lived here for twenty thousand years!”
These invasive Europeans claimed territory by naming–or renaming–the mountains after awful people. For instance, there was St. George Gore, of Gore Range fame. His nickname, “Bloody Gore,” is both repulsive and redundant.
Gore mounted a hunting expedition that, over the course of two years in the 1800s, slaughtered thousands of bison, elk, deer, antelope, and hundreds of bears and other critters. And there’s no way he could have eaten all that. Evidently, that’s how you earn the naming rights for the most beautiful ridgeline in Colorado.
Another way the white invaders marked their territory was by applying racist or derogatory names to beautiful places. In November 2021, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, declared the term “squaw” off limits, as a sexual and racist slur. She set off a scramble to rename 650 U.S. mountains, passes, streams, lakes, bumps, and holes in the ground that were tagged with the “s” word. Twenty-eight name changes were required in Colorado alone.
All of this was on my mind a couple weeks ago, when I made a reservation to drive up the Mount Evans auto road. You know, the route named after the Colorado territorial governor who set the Sand Creek Massacre into motion. That’s when Union soldiers attacked and killed hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho people.They had assembled in a protected area, as instructed by the governor. In 2007, the ground there–40 miles east of Pueblo—was hallowed as the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site.
John Evans was driven from office a year after the massacre, but until recently, he lived on in infamy on Colorado’s 14th highest peak.
The date of our auto-road reservation was a lousy day to drive up Mount Evans. The temperature fell to 35 degrees as we approached 14,000 feet, and a storm was brewing. So we parked at Summit Lake, pulled out our lunches, and listened to graupel pinging off the roof of our car.
It would be the last time we would see the top of Mount Evans, in fact. Four days later, the U.S. Board of Geographic Names announced that, henceforth, the peak would be known as Mount Blue Sky—to honor Arapaho and Cheyenne traditions surrounding the mountain. But “Blue Sky” did not match our weather that day. Maybe it was the mountain’s last attempt to shake off the memory of John Evans.
I climbed Mount Evans–as it was then known–in 2021. On my way up, I ran into bands of mountain goats and bighorn sheep. They were grazing in a high-mountain meadow, under the watchful eye of a wildlife biologist. She told me: “The mountain goats were an introduced species. They’re causing problems for the native bighorns, because they share the same habitat.”
But as far as we know, the invasive mountain goats haven’t organized to kill off their native rivals. In fact, things looked fairly peaceful that day, which may be a lesson to us all: Share the turf, don’t bloody it.
In eastern Colorado, there’s still an unincorporated township called Chivington. It’s named after that army colonel John Chivington, who led the Sand Creek Massacre. Any ideas for what we should call it, instead?
Anything would be better than Chivington. Except maybe Evans.
