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It's past time to remove White supremacy from our geography – Daily Montanan

['More From Author', 'December', 'Keith Edgerton']

Date: 2021-12-29 00:00:00

Jefferson Davis was–and still is–a key figure in American history. He was a West Point graduate in the early 19th century, distinguished service during the Mexican War, Secretary of War during Franklin Pierce’s presidency in the 1850s, U.S. Senator from Mississippi, the first, and only, president of the Confederate States of America.

But just being very important and notable does not mean places in Montana should bear his name. After all, he remains the primary face behind the ill-fated insurrection to shred the Union in the 1860s; to this day, he stands as a textbook definition of the term “seditionist.” After the Civil War he languished for two years in a federal prison, having been indicted for treason against the United States. Until his death in the 1880s, he remained an unapologetic white supremacist and helped perpetuate the lingering myth of the “lost cause”—that the South fought for a noble cause (states’ rights), a cause its all-white leaders felt enshrined by the Constitution itself, as the region’s increasingly beleaguered white residents sought to preserve their fundamental, God-given rights against a rising tyranny of a Northern majority.

The bedrock rested on the South’s fervent desire to maintain perpetual human bondage via American slavery, a system that ultimately provided American freedom for a select racial and economic group and the lingering racism it that system produced continues to confer privilege and divide society today. At one time, Davis and his brother owned and trafficked nearly 400 humans who worked and died on their profitable Mississippi plantation solely to benefit the brothers and their families.

After the war he never set foot in Montana.

How, then, did his name get affixed to several geographic points in the state, namely Jeff Davis Peak, Jeff Davis Creek, and Jeff Davis Gulch, all on the west side of the Divide, all on traditional Salish lands?

Many of the early mining camps in western Montana were populated by southerners and ex-Confederates fleeing the war-torn South. They brought their hero-worship and racist baggage with them and thus named landmarks for their leaders and fellow seditionists, marking their territory against the stream of northerners who were also trickling in. It would be tantamount, today, to naming a currently unnamed ridge (and there are still many) “Q Shaman Peak” for the pathetic bison-horned Jan. 6 rioter, Jacob Chansley. Or a “Proud Boys Canyon,” or a “Rittenhouse River.”

It is well past time to remove Davis’ name from our Montana maps.

And no, this isn’t “cancel culture” or critical race theory (the latest right-wing dog whistles); it’s about human decency, and righting, much too late, an historical affront. Indeed, we in Montana would do well to realize that the state, and before that, the territory, and before that, the land itself, is a product of conquest and dispossession of Native peoples who were here long before the Americans showed up and began the on-going process of renaming everything, a process in and of itself that reflects a form of cancel culture at its most acute. Because, really, what can be more cancelling than the centuries-long obliteration of Native names from the various landmarks that all of us recognize?

My suggestion: Let’s not only remove Jefferson Davis from the various places that bear his unsavory name in western Montana and replace them with the original Salish names that honor the true and collective history of our state. And let’s only consider that a starting point. We still have much work to do here to ensure the names on maps – especially on public lands – are in keeping with our history and make folks feel welcome. Taking a hard look at place names, and replacing the most egregious among them with indigenous names, offers us a good start — much more in keeping with history and tradition that we all claim, to varying degrees, to love and respect.

It won’t be a quick or easy process. A lifetime? Several?

Regardless, it is the right thing to do.

Keith Edgerton is a professor of history at Montana State University-Billings where he teaches courses focusing on Montana and American history.

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