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Wikipedia Article - Naming wrote:The Koyukon Athabaskans who inhabit the area around the mountain refer to the peak as Dinale or Denali. The name is based on a Koyukon word for "high" or "tall".[21] During the Russian ownership of Alaska, the common name for the mountain was Bolshaya Gora (Russian: Большая Гора, bolshaya = Russian for big; gora = Russian for mountain), which is the Russian translation of Denali.[22] It was briefly called Densmore's Mountain in the late 1880s and early 1890s[23] after Frank Densmore, an Alaskan prospector who was the first European to reach the base of the mountain.[24]

In 1896, a gold prospector named it McKinley as political support for then-presidential candidate William McKinley, who became president the following year. The United States formally recognized the name Mount McKinley after President Wilson signed the Mount McKinley National Park Act of February 26, 1917.[25] The Alaska Board of Geographic Names changed the name of the mountain to Denali, which is how it is called locally.[6] However, a 1975 request by the Alaska state legislature to the United States Board on Geographic Names to do the same was blocked by Ohio congressman Ralph Regula, whose district included McKinley's hometown of Canton.[26]

Efforts to rename the mountain did not end there, however. On August 30, 2015, just ahead of a presidential visit to Alaska, the Barack Obama administration announced that the name Denali would be restored in line with the Alaska Geographic Board's designation.[27][28] Sally Jewell, the Secretary of the Department of the Interior, said the change had been "a long time coming".[29] The renaming of the mountain received praise from Alaska's senior senator, Lisa Murkowski, who had previously introduced legislation to accomplish the name change, but it drew criticism from several members of Ohio's congressional delegation, some of whom suggested Obama's actions improperly circumvented Congress.[30]