As many of you are probably aware by now, President Trump signed an executive order on his first day of office to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”
Whether he has the authority to do this and whether the change would be recognized worldwide is not something I’ll delve into, given my desire to keep my blog apolitical.
However, when the incoming President first floated that idea before his inauguration, it generated a flurry of comments, including a suggestion from one pundit that New Mexico might have to be renamed “New America.”
Some of you readers may remember that I wrote a blog several months ago about the possibility that other names may have been suggested for our state. I also questioned whether the name of our state had in some way been responsible for our seemingly endless low rankings on various performance indexes when compared to other states in the union. I’ve always felt that was the case, but have no proof to support my conviction.
However, it true that the name “Montezuma” was once considered as a name for our state, which would make the phrase “Montezuma’s Revenge” an even more pejorative reference to the Land of Enchantment. I also mentioned that my father had once determined that the name “Lincoln” was considered to have been considered as the name for our state. (Think “Lincoln, Lincoln — a town so nice they named it twice.”) I’ve found no evidence of this, but I did discover that alternate names were once considered for several other states.
I offer these as examples:
The name Idaho was at one time considered as the name for Colorado.
Oklahoma might have been named “Sequoyah,” after an indigenous person who taught reading and writing to the Cherokee nation.
A naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, might have been the namesake for the state of Humboldt — now commonly known as Nevada.
Utah, named after an indigenous peoples in that state, might have been named “Deseret,” after a chapter in the Book of Mormon.
Several alternative names were considered for Maine — New Somerset, Yorkshire, Columbus and Lygonia.
New York almost became New Netherlands and the name Kanawha was considered for the current state of Kentucky.
At one point, a proposal was made to name a western portion of Virginia “Franklin,” after Benjamin Franklin. However, at some point, that western portion of Virginia (named after the “Virgin Queen” of England) became Tennessee.
And Kentucky could have become the horror capital of the nation with a once considered name of — wait for it — Transylvania.
In my online research, I found that at least 23 states’ names were of indigenous people’s origins (including New MEXICO which is of Aztec origin.) Eleven other states were named after individuals and New Mexico might have been the 12th if we had become Lincoln.
aero-cordero.com 