The controversy over the name is long enough to have its own Wikipedia page. The dispute is nicely summarized in an 1985 article by linguist James Kari. The name McKinley was proposed by William Dickey in 1896. Wikipedia reports this as a political move designed to garner favor with then-candidate McKinley. Whatever the motivation, Kari points out that Dickey was quite mistaken when he wrote: "The Indians of Cook Inlet have always called this the Bulshaia (great) mountain." Actually, that was the Russian's name for the mountain (and incidentally the likely source of the common misconception that the Native name translates as 'the great one').
The controversy grew in the early 20th century as Alfred Brooks, chief geologist for Alaska with the USGS, repeatedly claimed that Native's had no names for the mountain. This seems odd, as one would think that a geologist of such stature would have had access to 19th century maps of Alaska and been able to interpret them. A clearly Athabaskan name for the mountain is listed on Wrangell's 1839 map (see below). Here the name is written Tenada, clearly an attempt to write the Deg Xinag Athabaskan Dengadha. (The ng here is pronounced as in English sing, and the dh as in English the.) This would have been the Athabaskan variety spoken at Stony River, where the name was recorded. In spite of the fact that this recording is well-documented in the expedition journals, Brooks managed to conclude that Tenada was the name for the upper Stony River. This seems bizarre, since the Stony River is already labeled on map as Tchalchuk, its Yup'ik name, and Tenada clearly labels the mountain. Was Brooks merely incompetent, or was there some ulterior motive involved? We may never know.
In any case, Tenada (or Dengadha) is not quite the same as Denali. That name derives from the Koyukon version of the name, spelled Denaalee in the modern Koyukon writing system. The names Denali and Tenada are thus clearly related in the same way that English hound and German hund are related. What the Wrangell map and Tenada shows us is that Athabaskan names for the mountain were clearly recognized and recorded by early explorers. The decision to ignore the Native name was a conscious one.
Efforts to change the name of the mountain to Denali came to the fore in the 1970's, after the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. In 1975 the Alaska Board of Geographic Names recommended the change, as did Alaska's legislature and governor. But the move was blocked at the federal level by Ohio congressman Ralph Regula, whose district was McKinley's turf. Opposition to the name change became a life-long campaign for Regula, who regularly introduced legislation to block the name Denali until his retirement from congress in 2009. The modern prevalence of the name Denali probably derives from its adoption as the name of the national park in 1980, a compromise which did not require approval by the US Board of Geographic Names.
With Murkowski's new legislation, Pandora's box is once again opened. Presumably Ohio's congressional delegation will continue Regula's long campaign of opposition, and most likely McKinley's namesake will survive this latest challenge. Not because there is something special about McKinley (sorry, Ohio). And not because there is anything wrong with Denali. The name will survive because of the American obsession with using place names as honorifics. Curiously, in spite of her current support for Denali, Sen. Murkowski is not insusceptible to honorifics. In 2010 she supported naming South Hunter peak, just south of Denali/McKinley, in honor of the the late Sen. Ted Stevens. So now Mt. Stevens is the official name for a part of the massif known in Dena'ina Athabaskan as Begguya (literally 'it's little one', i.e., Denali's child). Perhaps some day Ohio will campaign in favor of a return to the name Begguya.
