Colorado's Mount Evans Renamed Mount Blue Sky, Erasing a Sand Creek Massacre-Linked Name

On Friday, September 15, 2023, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names voted overwhelmingly to rename a 14,264-foot peak southwest of Denver. Mount Evans is now Mount Blue Sky. The change came at the request of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, with the approval of Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, and it forms part of a national effort to address the history of oppression and violence against Native Americans.

The new name comes from the tribes' own traditions. The Arapaho were known as the Blue Sky People, and the Cheyenne hold an annual renewal-of-life ceremony called Blue Sky.

The old name honored John Evans, Colorado's second territorial governor, who also served as ex officio superintendent of Indian affairs. Evans resigned after Col. John Chivington led an 1864 cavalry massacre at Sand Creek, in what is now southeastern Colorado. More than 200 Arapaho and Cheyenne people were killed, most of them women, children and the elderly. According to research compiled for the national naming board, the name Mount Evans was first applied to the peak in the 1870s and first appeared on U.S. Geological Survey topographic maps in 1903.

In a Feb. 28 letter to Trent Palmer, the federal board's executive secretary, Polis wrote that Evans' culpability for the massacre, tacit or explicit, was without question. He described Chivington celebrating in Denver and parading bodies through the streets, while Evans praised and decorated Chivington and his men for their valor in subduing the savages. Polis, a Democrat, had revived the state's 15-member geographic naming panel in July 2020 to make recommendations for his review before they went to the federal board for final approval.

Polis also said the state was not erasing Evans' complicated history. Evans helped found the University of Denver and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He played a role in bringing the railroad to Denver, opposed slavery and had a close relationship with Abraham Lincoln. Studies published in 2014 by Northwestern and the University of Denver recognized those contributions, but concluded that although Evans was not directly involved in the massacre, he bore some responsibility. The DU study said he abrogated his duties as superintendent, fanned the flames of war when he could have dampened them, cultivated an unusually interdependent relationship with the military, and rejected clear opportunities for peaceful negotiation with the Native peoples under his jurisdiction.

Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes Gov. Reggie Wassana called the vote a huge step, not only for his own people but also for the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Southern Ute Tribe, Northern Arapaho Tribe, Northern Cheyenne Tribe and other allies who worked to begin the healing process. The board considered several other geographic names from around the country on Friday, none as prominent as Mount Evans.

It is not the first such change in Colorado. In 2021, the federal panel approved renaming another peak, 30 miles west of Denver, as Mestaa'ehehe Mountain, pronounced "mess-taw-HAY." It honors a Cheyenne woman, also known as Owl Woman, who worked as an influential translator between Native Americans and white traders and soldiers in what is now southern Colorado. The mountain had previously carried a misogynist and racist term for Native American women. The board also acted in the 1960s and 1970s to eliminate derogatory terms related to Black and Japanese people. The latest moves come amid a broader reckoning on race relations and under Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet member.

Tribal leaders are now turning to the adjacent Mount Evans Wilderness Area, which they want renamed Mount Blue Sky Wilderness. That change would require action by Congress.