According to the National Park Service’s website, Yellowstone National Park announced on Thursday that Mount Doane is now named First Peoples Mountain. The announcement followed a 15-0 vote affirming the change by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN).
The agency said Thursday the change was taken to remove an “offensive name” from America’s first national park.
The peak 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.
Doane was born in Galesburg, Illinois, on May 20, 1840, and grew up in California. He graduated from the University of the Pacific at Santa Clara in 1861 and afterward enlisted in the “California Hundred,” a federal volunteer unit absorbed by the Second Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry. Doane attained the rank of sergeant by 1864 when he resigned to accept a commission as a lieutenant with the first regiment, Mississippi Marine Brigade.
After the Civil War, Doane was appointed mayor of Yazoo City Mississippi in 1867.
A year later, he applied for a commission with the army and was appointed second lieutenant in the Second U.S. Cavalry.
Doane lived a life of service to fight for and protect the people of his land, however, the National Park Service focused their entire review on one incident in early 1870 where Doane led an attack, in response to the alleged murder of a white fur trader, on a band of Piegan Blackfeet. The NPS went on to claim that “during what is now known as the Marias Massacre, at least 173 American Indians 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.”
There is no mention of why Doane retaliated against the Piegan Blackfeet in response to the murder of a white fur trader, but if Gustavus had a valid reason, it certainly wasn’t mentioned in the research that the National Park Service put out prior to the voting on the name change.
The NPS claimed that “Doane wrote fondly about this attack and bragged about it for the rest of his life,” but failed to discuss why Doane was so proud of what he did. There may be a legitimate reason they don’t want us to know.
Regardless of who was right or wrong in this instance, this is a typical woke move by the Liberal Democrats in an attempt to wipe out history by changing the name of a historical landmark because, all of a sudden after hundreds of years, they deem the name “offensive”.
Just because they change the name of the mountain doesn’t mean the historical events didn’t occur. There’s a very good reason the mountain was named after Doane in the first place, yet we hear no mention of the backstory as to why the people of Doane’s time deemed him influential enough to name an entire mountain after him.
The conversation is always one-sided, and we’re just supposed to go along with whatever story the Left promotes. We saw this throughout the George Floyd and BLM riots when the radical left tore down statues and started changing the names of schools across the United States.
I would expect this sort of behavior in communist china, but not here in the United States. The trend of changing names is becoming all too frequent.
Yellowstone National Park reached out to all 27 associated Tribes over the last several months and received no opposition or concerns regarding the change.
The name change will be reflected in The Domestic Names Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) in the coming days.
The park said it may consider additional changes to other “derogatory or inappropriate names in the future.”
