WHY-OMING?

Wyoming Residents Up in Arms Over ‘Swastika Lake’ Name Change

The name was changed to Knight Lake last year, but residents have lingering concerns.

Despite Swastika Lake in Wyoming’s Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest being rechristened “Knight Lake” in January 2024, some residents still have concerns over whether a name change was the right decision. While a majority of people agreed that the name was inappropriate given common understanding of swastikas as being a symbol of Nazi Germany, some dissenters argued that swastikas predate the Nazis by thousands of years, and that changing the name “undermined opportunities to teach about the deeper history of the symbol and how the Nazis hijacked it,” Cowboy State Daily reports. Albany County Commission Chairwoman Terri Jones, who voted against the hotly debated name change, stands by her decision, telling the outlet, “I think there should be a sign up there, telling what the word ‘Swastika’ actually means.” While the origins of the lake’s original name are unknown, Knight Lake was named in honor of renowned Wyoming geologist and paleontologist Samuel Howell Knight.