Larry FloerschAs I was driving through Colchester last week I noticed one of those elaborate carved wood signs at the end of a heavily wooded street. The sign had a painted image of a ringneck pheasant and in gold leaf the words “Pheasant Woods.”
Now I know what you’re thinking: “Very nice, Lare. So-o-o Vermont!”
Not so fast! This is Vermont. We’ve got what the old-timers call “paah-tridge,” better known as ruffed grouse, and wild turkeys. Those are birds of the forest. Ringneck pheasants are not birds of the forest, and although on rare occasions they may be seen in the Champlain Valley, ringneck pheasants are not native to Vermont, preferring the more wide-open farmland of the Dakotas and Nebraska, not the woods found here. So the person who dreamed up that name was wrong on two counts: we don’t have pheasants in Vermont, and pheasants don’t like woods.
That got me to thinking about all this high-profile name changing that’s been going on. I realize naming or renaming things is critical work on the part of our national leadership, coming in just behind playing golf and far more important than more mundane tasks such as ending military conflicts. But are our leaders getting those names right? You be the judge.
Take “Denali,” for example. The mountain had been known for thousands of years as “Denali” by the Koyukon, the Athabascan-speaking people native to that region of Alaska. The name is based on their word for “tall” or “high.”
When the Russians decided they owned the mountain, they simply translated the name from Koyukon into Russian: “Bolshaya Gora” or “Big Mountain.” But let’s face it. That’s not terribly descriptive. Most mountains are big and tall. So after the U.S. stole Alaska from Russia (at least according to Putin’s take on it), some gold prospector named Dickey, back in 1896, called it Mount McKinley, probably basing the name on a rough translation of the Koyukon words for “High Tariffs.”
The state of Alaska asked that the name be changed back to Denali in 1975, and in 2015 it was officially renamed. In 2025, however, a new administration, being firmly in support of high tariffs and hoping to secure votes in Ohio, changed it back to McKinley.
Of late there has been a push to rename the Gulf of Mexico, which has been called that for roughly 400 years. Some folks want to call it the Gulf of America.
“America,” of course, is the feminine form of the first name of the explorer known in Latin as Americus Vesputius, or Amerigo Vespucci in Italian. Vespucci was neither American nor Mexican and he died in 1512, so he has no dog in this fight. But should Italy get a vote?
Based on which nation has the most miles of Gulf coastline, the advantage falls to Mexico, with about 2046 miles, compared with 1632 miles for the United States.
But the current logic behind the change is that America has had the biggest impact in the region economically, militarily, and environmentally.
I’m not sure exactly how you affect a body of water economically or militarily — it is after all, just water. But if you look at it environmentally, it is certainly America that has had the biggest impact on the waters of the Gulf. The hypoxic “dead zone” caused by nutrient pollution from the Mississippi River covers on average about 4700 square miles of coastal shelf waters. And let’s not forget the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, so far the largest marine spill in history, releasing about 4.9 million barrels of crude into the Gulf. That’s what you could call a big beautiful spill, because it far exceeded the paltry 3.3 million barrels released in the second worst spill in the Gulf, the Ixtoc I disaster of 1979 in the Bay of Campeche. So just in terms of environmental disasters Mexico comes in second. Renaming it the Gulf of America therefore might be appropriate.
Then there is the renaming and subsequent renaming of military bases. For example, Fort Bragg in North Carolina was originally named after Confederate General Braxton Bragg, and Fort Benning in Georgia was named for Confederate General Henry Benning, both of whom were, technically, “losers.” In 2021 the U.S. Congress created a commission to consider the renaming of such bases because it was theorized those generals had been traitors to the United States and their actions had, as suggested by one military historian at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands United States soldiers. Bragg was changed to Fort Liberty and Benning was changed to Fort Moore after decorated Vietnam veteran Hal Moore and his wife, Julia, who was prominent in the support of military families.
In 2025, no doubt in an effort to save the cost of paint for the changes to all that signage and to have it both ways with folks who enjoy waving the “Stars and Bars” after reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, the names were changed back to Bragg, but this time after World War II hero Pfc. Roland Bragg of Maine, and Benning after Fred Benning, a corporal in World War I who received the Distinguished Service Cross. Unfortunately, that left Hal and Julia Moore without a place to call their own.
And all this leads up to a question about another possible change on the horizon. In this age of nuclear weapons, do we really want a Department of War, or should it be renamed the Department of the Last … War … Ever?
