Mount Selwyn is named for A.R.C. Selwyn, Director of the Geological Survey of Canada 1869-95. In 1875 he took an expedition up the Peace River to see if a mountain there could be as incredibly precipitous a cone as an English illustrator of W.F. Butler's The Wild North Land had made it. He found that the mountain was indeed an impressive one but not at all like the artist had shown it. At the suggestion of Professor John Macoun, the expedition's botanist, the mountain was named for Selwyn.