Who was Gustavus Doane? 'Woke' Yellowstone officials rename Mount Doane after backlash from Sioux tribes
Yellowstone, the first national park in the US, has taken a call to change the name of Mount Doane, one of its largest mountains. Henceforth, it will be known as First Peoples Mountain. This decision was announced on June 9, 2022, to honor the indigenous people after research revealed Gustavus Doane, after whom the mountain was named, helped lead a brutal massacre against the tribes.
Making it official on their website via a press release, the National Park Service said the process followed a 15-0 vote affirming the change by the US Board on Geographic Names, the federal body responsible for maintaining uniform geographic name usage throughout the federal government. It further stated, "Based on recommendations from the Rocky Mountain Tribal Council, subsequent votes within the Wyoming Board of Geographic names, and with support of the National Park Service, the name was forwarded to the BGN for a vote in June 2022. The name change will be reflected in The Domestic Names Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) in the coming days."
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William Snell, the executive director of the Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council, told NPR that, "It is a victory, yes. Is history being rewritten and retold truthfully? I hope so." The Great Plains Tribal Chairman's Association, an organization of tribal chairmen of 16 Sioux tribes from the Dakotas and Nebraska, had demanded that Mount Doane should be renamed in 2018, according to the Daily Mail.
Who was Gustavus Doane?
According to National Park Service, the pyramid-shaped 10,649-foot peak in eastern Yellowstone National Park was previously named after Gustavus Doane, a key member of the Washburn-Langford-Doane expedition in 1870, prior to Yellowstone becoming America’s first national park.
The National Park Service wrote that the research has shown that earlier that the same year (1870), Doane led an attack in response to the alleged murder of a white fur trader on a band of Piegan Blackfeet. During what is now known as the Marias Massacre, at least 173 American Natives were killed, including many women, elderly tribal members, and children suffering from smallpox. Doane wrote fondly about this attack and bragged about it for the rest of his life.
Where is Yellowstone?
Situated in Wyoming, Yellowstone also spreads into parts of Montana and Idaho. According to Yellowstone's website, the park spreads across 3,500 square miles of wilderness and includes several mountains. To date, the park has over 40 peaks and at least 70 named mountains over 10,000 feet.
The oldest mountains in the park are found on the west side of the Gallatin Range, a result of the Sevier Orogeny—a mountain-building phase that began 140-150 million years ago. “It started west of Yellowstone proper and was produced by thin skin tectonics or faulting,” park geologist Jefferson Hungerford explains as stated on the site.