Pioneers and explorers who fanned out across the American West during the nineteenth century returned from their travels with reams of charts and notes describing the remote lands they had probed. Slowly, the blank spaces that had yawned across maps of the continent were filled in with names.

Too many names, as it turned out.

“They were all making maps and assigning names at will,” Roger L. Payne says. “And when they got back and compared notes, they were useless because people had given different names to the same features.”

Payne is a name man. Or, to put it more precisely, an applied toponomist. (Toponomy, he is quick to explain, is a subset of onomastics, the general study of names.) He works for a 110-year-old agency created specifically to unknot the name tangle.

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names was charged by President Benjamin Harrison to standardize the use of names across the sprawling American landscape. In a suburban government office building outside Washington, D.C., the board’s work continues to this day, as bureaucrats dispatch the important task of deciding which names go with which places.

The federal name game is much more complicated—and much more controversial—than you might suspect.

In its early years, the board spent much of its time bestowing names on major geographic features—prominent mountains, rivers, lakes and the like. As names for those features were formalized, attention turned to less-conspicuous features.

Currently, there are more than 2.5 million place-names in the board’s official database. More are being added every day. Since 1982, the board has commissioned local teams to pore over old maps, charts and other documents state by state, pulling out names for heretofore unrecognized places and then adding them to the official government database. Names for thousands of places—many of them on the 192 million acres that make up the national forest system—are being added every month.

In other words, more than a century after the frontier closed, government bureaucrats are still working to codify the continent, at least on paper.

But not everywhere. In 1985, the board adopted a policy for names on federal wilderness areas. The policy calls for leaving all unnamed physical features in wilderness areas nameless “unless an overriding need exists,” because “a fundamental characteristic of elemental wilderness is that features are nameless and the cultural overlay of civilization is absent.”

The policy is a recurring source of debate. Does it really make a difference whether a mountain in a federally designated wilderness area is named or unnamed? Yes, according to the board.

“I was one of the strongest supporters of that policy,” says Roberta Quigley, a U.S. Forest Service mapping specialist who recently completed a ten-year stint on the board. “You’re not supposed to be able to possess something in a wilderness area—that’s part of the thinking that goes into it.”

Most prominent features were already named when wilderness areas were given official status. Those names are legally in place. However, the board receives regular requests to rename wilderness features or to give names to unnamed features. Altogether, the board receives about 500 such requests every year—not just in wilderness areas, but across the nation. Some are attempts to put a new shine on a feature saddled with a less-than-flattering name. (Last year, the board heard a proposal to change the name of a channel in Kentucky from Slop Ditch to Wet Woods Creek. A property owner in Minnesota proposed changing Mud Lake to Golden Pond.)

A few requests are downright goofy. Those are soon dismissed by the board, a group of government servants who consider the preservation of the dignity of the American landscape to be one of their main duties. Consider the board’s reaction to four residents of Palmer, Alaska, who wanted to give the name Sumo Lake to a half-mile-long, nameless body of water near Anchorage. Why Sumo Lake? The board’s official docket of April 8, 1999, spells it all out: “The proponents report that they vacation near the lake every year and liken their activities at the lake, which include Œgorging on food and sleeping,’ to those of sumo wrestling training camps.”

The board was not amused: “The name would be meaningless to anyone other than the nominators.” And there was another problem: “It isn’t really descriptive as the lake does not resemble a sumo wrestler.”

Proposal denied, by unanimous vote.

In navigating these hazardous waters, the board relies on a five-chapter volume of principles, policies and procedures that govern the naming of physical features. One of these principles holds that whenever possible, the official names of features should reflect names that are in local use.

Another policy dictates that the board cannot consider names that are currently being debated by Congress. Ohio Representative Ralph Regula has used this policy to ensure that Alaska’s Mount McKinley remains Mount McKinley and not Denali, the name that the Alaska state legislature has approved. Regula, whose district includes the home county of President William McKinley, for whom the peak was named, has repeatedly introduced legislation requiring that the name remain Mount McKinley. It has never passed, but the mere act of introducing it keeps the board from acting.

Other stipulations would stretch the skills of even the most assiduous grammarian. The board has policies on the use of accent marks in place-names (it usually doesn’t like them), numbers (spell them out, please) and long names (the board “has expressed a preference against long and clumsily constructed domestic geographic names”). The board is especially testy about use of the possessive form in place-names, a practice that is generally forbidden. (There are four exceptions: Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, Ike’s Creek in New Jersey, John E’s Pond in Rhode Island and Carlos Elmer’s Joshua View, a scenic overlook in Arizona.)

Many of the requests that the board considers are from people who want to honor or commemorate someone by naming a feature after them. The board has policies about that, too. No natural feature can be named after a living person. Features can be named after people who have died, but only after five years have passed since the death. And “a person’s death on or at a feature such as in a mountaineering accident or plane crash” is typically not enough in itself to get a feature named after the deceased.

Still another policy holds that the board will not adopt any name that is considered offensive based on race, gender or religion. Over the past forty years, the board has played an important role in purging the nation’s maps of such names.

In the early 1960s, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall requested that the board eliminate all uses of a particularly hateful slur against African-Americans. (The “N-word”—there were dozens.) A decade later, the board was instructed to eliminate a slur against Japanese from place-names.

More recently, the board has considered a number of proposals to rid the word squaw from place names. Many consider the word a slur, believing it originated as a vulgarity used by Europeans to refer to female genitalia.

The effort to eliminate the use of the word in place-names gained momentum five years ago, when the Minnesota state legislature passed a law requiring that the nineteen place-names in the state that carried the word be changed. Last year, Montana followed suit, voting to eliminate the use of the word in more than seventy place-names.

In Idaho, Ruby LeClair, an employee with the Boise National Forest and a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribe, is helping organize an effort to rename five natural features on the national forest that include the word squaw.

“We need to change these names out of respect,” LeClair says. “But we can’t change them overnight. It’s going to take some time to convince people.”

Changing all place-names that include the word squaw will be a daunting task. There are nearly a thousand places carrying the name across the United States. Some, such as Squaw Valley, the California ski area, are quite prominent and would require significant expense to change.

Squaw isn’t the only offensive name that remains in use. Dozens of other names persist that are considered slurs against Italians, Chinese and other groups. Nearly 600 names in the board’s database contain the word Negro.

Currently, the board is considering a request to change the name of a spectacular canyon in Utah from its current name, Negro Bill Canyon, to Granstaff Canyon. The canyon is named for William Granstaff, a prospector and rancher who lived in the area in the nineteenth century.

Some historians criticize such efforts as attempts to erase history. A recent proposal to change the name of a Negro Creek in eastern Washington state drew opposition from the president of the Spokane Northwest Black Pioneers, who said it would erase from history any memory of the black settler for whom the stream was named. Such proposals often prompt protracted local debates.

But controversy goes with the territory when you hold a seat on the U.S. Board on Geographic Names.

“People feel strongly about names,” Payne says. “Our mission is very important. Having standard names is really the essence of proper and useful communication.”

To visit the government’s Geographic Names Information System, which includes a searchable database of all federally recognized names, go to http://mapping.usgs.gov/www/gnis/.