The Stories Behind the Names

After Whites came to Humboldt County, they exercised neither wisdom nor restraint in naming places. Thus, you had Mad River, which referred not to turbulent water but to a quarrel between members of the Gregg Party, who were seeking Humboldt Bay. And what about the bay itself, named to honor a brilliant and wide-ranging naturalist whose travels never took him within thousands of miles of his namesake body of water?

The Gregg Party later tried to provide a more relevant name when they crossed another river, ate some of its products and called it the Eel. But they had consumed lampreys, which indeed look a little like eels but are definitely a separate species.

Another case of species confusion is Horse Mountain, a landmark on the ridge south of Berry Summit. Some packers camped nearby, were attacked by Indians and had their pack mules captured. When soldiers later found the animals, they failed to look closely at them and promptly misnamed the spot.

White settlers were just hopeless at naming places. A town on the lower South Fork Eel River was called Weott, a phonetically accurate rendering of the tribe’s name, but located about 15 miles away from Wiyot territory. When a community was started on evocatively named Goose Lake Prairie, the locals cast aside the geese and the prairie and called it Hydesville, honoring local landowner John Hyde.

Eastward was Carlotta, named for a sweet little girl whose accomplishment was being the daughter of the man who had purchased the townsite.

Isaac Minor, who later had a theater named for him, built a store a few miles north of the Mad River, and the location was briefly called Minorsville. Then President McKinley had the misfortune of being assassinated and the tiny town became McKinleyville. Fort Seward was named for a military installation on the Eel that lasted less than a year. Shoddy construction and a massive flood soon erased any trace of it, but the name endured.

In 1851, John and Mandana Kneeland ranched in the mountains east of Humboldt Bay. The area became known as Kneeland. Despite this obvious nomenclatural connection, some locals insisted that the name derived from the harvesting of sections of local trees that were used as ships’ “knees” in the construction of the hulls of wooden vessels.

Let’s conclude with my favorite Humboldt County name story — Loleta. It is scandalous, but not for any perceived connection with Nabokov’s novel. A White woman, believing she had friends among members of the Wiyot tribe, approached an elderly Wiyot man regarding an appropriate name in his language for a community unappealingly known as Swauger’s Station. He looked at her with narrowed eyes and gutturally growled what sounded like “Loleta.” The woman gleefully hastened back to the town’s naming committee, the name was accepted and is still in use today.

Only much later did a linguist indicate that the word, in its politest rendition, means “Let’s go to bed!”

Jerry Rohde collects Humboldt history, comical and otherwise.