Mount
Shavano

The mountain honors Chief Shavano, who led the Tabeguache band of southern Utes from the 1850s through the 1870s and worked as a peacemaker between his people and Colorado's settlers. He signed the 1873 Brunot Treaty, which ceded the San Juan Mountains to the United States, and after an 1879 uprising elsewhere in Ute country, he helped rescue white captives rather than join it. The government exiled him to a Utah reservation in 1881, where he died in 1885.

The earliest map bearing the name Shavano dates to 1875, though the earlier Wheeler Survey had labeled the peak Usher Peak, for J. P. Usher, a judge and chief counsel for the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names rejected Usher's name in favor of Shavano in 1907. The peak's east face carries the Angel of Shavano, a snow formation shaped like a robed figure with outstretched wings that emerges each spring as the drifts melt.