Clingmans Dome will once again be called Kuwohi, its original Cherokee name

At roughly mile marker 200 from the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail and directly on the border between Tennessee and North Carolina sits a 6,643 foot peak that’s both the highest at any point on the Trail and the highest point in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It’s also the highest point in Tennessee and second-highest point in North Carolina (behind Mount Mitchell), as the peak itself straddles the border between the two states.

The Smokies are part of the ancient Appalachian Mountains, whose origins date back to over a billion years ago. As relevant timelines here go, the mountains came first by an incredible margin.

The second point of importance on the timeline relevant to this particular article is that the Cherokee people began inhabiting the area around this particular mountain at some point several thousand years before Europeans first began venturing into North America. When Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto came marauding through the American Southeast in 1540, they were among the first people he encountered.

So, when geographer Arnold Guyot dubbed the mountain ‘Clingmans Dome’ in 1859 after one of his peers, it probably would’ve behooved the folks in charge of the area to question whether the people who had lived there for thousands of years before the European immigrants got there had already named it. They either chose not to pursue that truth, or opted to simply ignore it.

Thomas L. Clingman, the man for whom ‘Clingmans Dome’ was dubbed in 1859, was at the time a United States Senator from North Carolina. That’s a title he’d later have removed from his name when he was expelled by the Senate in absentia as he pursued insurgency as a general in the army fighting for the Confederacy during the US Civil War.

Clingman both survived the war and managed to see his name remain the most known title of this prominent peak for the rest of his life. He died in 1897, and for over 125 years after his death most everyone who ever bothered to wonder what that high point was called just went along with it being ‘Clingmans Dome’ without asking too many questions.

Unsurprisingly, the mountain had a name long before Guyot, himself a native of Switzerland, ever had reason to think he should be the person in charge of giving it his own favorite name. Thanks to the efforts of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee and the approval of the U.S. Board of Geographic Names on September 18th, it will no longer be called ‘Clingmans Dome.’

It will be officially be called what it had been called for thousands of years before that by the Cherokee – Kuwohi, which translates to ‘the mulberry place,’ according to the Knoxville News-Sentinel. The mountain was long sacred to the Cherokee, most of whom were eventually sent west on the Trail of Tears in the 1830s after their land was seized via the Indian Removal Act, one of the worst atrocities in this country’s history.

The Eastern Band, whose homeland lies adjacent to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, are descended from a small group of the original Cherokee tribe that remained in the Appalachians following the Indian Removal Act under the agreement that they would ‘give up their tribal citizenship’ and become US citizens.

My own personal hope is that many of the 650,000 visitors to the mountain each year see that it is named Kuwohi and begin to ask where that name originated. And, I hope that the story of the people who gave it that name begins to be more widely told than that of a slave owning general of a lost cause who abandoned his elected post to support such bullshittery.

Welcome back, Kuwohi. I’m so sorry it took us this long.