A Name Change For Jeff Davis Peak?

LINK TO CAPRADIO ARTICLE / STREAM HERE

It's hard to find anything to post about in Hiking Metal Maniac that is relevant to the contentious and important current events going on right now, but here's one thing! Jeff Davis Peak, in Alpine County is a striking, steep sided rock formation, which I have been admiring since I was a child. Unfortunately, it turned out to be named after Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, most likely by sympathetic gold miners who arrived in the area from the South. Since I started writing HMM, I've been thinking a lot about peak names, how they got them, and ones that are problematic, what should they be changed to? I think the default in any situation should be to revert to the Native American name, if it is still known.

A few years ago I looked up internet news to see if there was any effort to change the name of Jeff Davis Peak, and I saw the wheels were already in motion to change it to the Washoe name Da-ek Dow Go-et (A Saddle Between Two Points). Now that the removal of Confederate monuments and places named after slave owners is at the forefront of news, CapRadio released this little update on what's going on with Jeff Davis Peak. And let's face it, in a state with many, many mountains named after dead white guys, slave owners, colonizers, genociders... could you pick a worse one than Jeff Davis? The President of the white supremacist Confederate States; he doesn't even have any historical connection to Alpine County or California. He vehemently opposed the idea of California entering the union, because it would have been a new non-slave state! The fact that it takes MUCH LONGER to change the names of problematic mountains than to tear down problematic statues is discussed in the radio show.

While researching this post, I also learned that another Jeff Davis Peak, in Nevada, is also very close to being renamed to it's Washoe name: Doso Doyabi. Let's keep this going!