From Harney Peak to Black Elk Peak
The highest ground between the Rockies and the Atlantic coast rises in the heart of the Black Hills, a granite summit reached by a steep trail that ends at an old stone lookout tower. For most of the twentieth century, maps and hikers knew it as Harney Peak. Since 2016 its official name has been Black Elk Peak, and the change carried more weight than a simple relabeling.
The mountain itself is unremarkable in height by western standards, a little above seven thousand feet, but it commands the central Hills. From the tower at its top the granite spires of the interior fall away in every direction, and on a clear day the view reaches far out onto the plains. The summit has long been a destination for hikers setting out from Sylvan Lake and Custer State Park, and it anchors the high country of the southern Hills.
The name it carried
The peak had been named for William S. Harney, a United States Army general of the nineteenth century. Harney’s military career on the plains included an 1855 attack on a Lakota village at Ash Hollow, in present-day Nebraska, in which many Lakota, including women and children, were killed. To the Lakota he was remembered for that violence, and attaching his name to a mountain at the center of their sacred Black Hills compounded an old injury. The land had been taken from them in the first place, as recounted in the history of the act of 1877, and the highest point in that land bore the name of a general who had made war on their people.
The peak also held a place in Lakota tradition independent of any general. The Oglala holy man Black Elk, born in the 1860s, described a powerful vision experienced in his youth, one he connected to the high center of the Hills. His account, recorded in the book that made him widely known, gave the mountain a spiritual significance for readers far beyond the Lakota world. For Lakota people the connection ran deeper still, rooted in the standing of the Hills as sacred ground.
The renaming
Efforts to change the name built over many years, pressed by Native advocates and others who found the Harney name offensive. In 2016 the United States Board on Geographic Names, the federal body that rules on such questions, approved the change to Black Elk Peak. The decision substituted the name of a Lakota holy man for that of an army general, on a summit that lay at the heart of Lakota country.
The change was not universally welcomed. Some residents objected to altering a name that had been on the maps for generations, and the debate touched familiar arguments about history, memory, and who gets to decide what a place is called. The state of South Dakota had earlier resisted such proposals, and the federal decision came over local objection in some quarters. Supporters answered that the original name had honored a man associated with an attack on Native civilians, and that the new name corrected a long-standing wrong while honoring a figure of genuine significance to the region.
A summit and its meaning
The practical experience of the mountain did not change. The same trail climbs to the same stone tower, built by Civilian Conservation Corps crews in the 1930s as a fire lookout and now a much-photographed destination. Hikers still make the steady ascent through the pines and granite, and the view from the top remains one of the finest in the Hills.
What changed was the name on the sign and the maps, and with it a small piece of how the country chooses to remember the Black Hills. A summit once tied to a general’s campaigns now carries the name of a Lakota holy man whose vision was bound up with that very high country. For a place so central to the history and the disputes over the Hills, the renaming of its highest point was a quiet but pointed acknowledgment of whose land it had been.