A Bootjack, A Bible, And Zachary Taylor: A Look At The History Behind Sacramento-Area Place Names

Whether it’s Weed, Bootjack or Lake Tahoe, many of Northern California’s road signs, maps and landmarks are graced with unique names. So where the heck do they come from?

There are stories behind all of these names, featuring everything from an unfortunate misspelling to a gold-coated king. We were curious to find out more about the history behind some of the fantastical names in our region.

Many spots in Northern California draw their names from the same three groups of influential early residents: Native American tribes, Hispanic settlers and Gold Rush miners.

A “bonanza of naming” took place in Northern California from 1840 to 1870 thanks to California’s new statehood, the Gold Rush and the arrival of the railroad, according to Sacramento State University history professor Brendan Lindsay.

For practical reasons, these events forced settlers to put names to the spots they called home — sometimes with interesting results, in the case of some of the area’s more eclectic names like Manteca and Igo.

Lindsay said that some of his favorite names are the ones that were meant to flatter people that settlers admired, like Rough and Ready’s ode to President Zachary Taylor.

“It’s always the human connection that fascinates me with place names,” he said.

Here are some of our favorite place name origin stories from around Northern California:

Auburn

Auburn’s name has poetic — and ironic — origins, according to April McDonald-Loomis, the president of the Placer County Historical Society. The small mining camp of Auburn, formerly known as Wood’s Dry Diggings and North Fork Dry Diggings, was named in August of 1849 after a line from the poem "The Deserted Village" by Oliver Goldsmith that reads, “Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain.”

The name may have been suggested partly as a joke, according to McDonald-Loomis, as the camp “really was anything but ‘lovely’” at the time. When the city was named, it was nothing more than a few tents and log structures, and the main part of camp (today’s Old Town Auburn) was heavily dug up by mining.

Bootjack

There are two stories behind Bootjack’s curious name, according to Chris Allen, host of the Motherlode of Mariposa History on Mariposa Community Radio and a volunteer at the Mariposa History Museum. The more mundane explanation is that Bootjack was located near a fork in the road that looked like the shape of a bootjack (a small tool used to help remove boots) on a map.

But the second story is more legendary, according to Allen. The story goes that a horse thief was hung in Bootjack during the Gold Rush. Someone came along after the hanging and wanted the thief’s boots for himself. He tried to take them off the thief’s body, but they were on so tight that he had to use a bootjack to get the boots off.

Copperopolis

Some names mean exactly what you expect they do. In the 1860s, 19 million pounds of copper were mined in Copperopolis, making it the second highest copper producer in the nation, according to the Visit Calaveras website. Copperopolis transformed overnight from rolling hills into a booming town at the start of the Civil War thanks to the need for copper for munitions and shell casings, according to the Calaveras Heritage Council. There were a few copper booms again after the Civil War, but the last mining production closed in 1945 at the end of World War II, according to the council.

El Dorado County

“El Dorado” may mean “the golden one” in Spanish, but the name wasn’t actually given by Spanish settlers, according to Lindsay. He said the county (and the community of El Dorado Hills) were actually named by Americans who knew the story of El Dorado, the king so rich that he coated himself in gold dust every day. In the spirit of the Gold Rush, settlers applied the name to a place and county here in California.

Igo

The city of Igo gets its name from the young son of one of the town’s early settlers. White residents of the town of Piety Hill, about one mile east of Igo, decided to relocate due to their upset about Chinese settlers moving into Piety Hill and establishing gardens, according to Shasta Historical Society Visitor and Historical Services Associate Jeremy Puggle. When the question of a name for the new town came up, Puggle said that settler George McPherson thought of his son Eugene, who would say “I go! I go!” each morning when his father left for work. So when the time came to establish a post office in 1873, Igo it was.

Ione

Ione and the valley it sits in are believed to be named after one of the heroines in Edward Bulwer Lytton’s “The Last Days of Pompeii,” according to the city’s website. But before that, the city was known by a few less mystical names by miners in the area, such as Bedbug and Freezeout, during the Gold Rush.

Lake Tahoe

Lake Tahoe’s name comes from the Washoe tribe’s original name for the lake, Da aw aga, which means “the edge of the lake," according to Herman Fillmore with the Washoe Tribe. Fillmore said that “Da aw” eventually transformed into “Tahoe” due to a chain of mispronunciations.

Lake Tahoe sits in the center of the Washoe Tribe’s homeland, and the tribe believes that the Washoe people have lived in the Lake Tahoe Basin since ancient times, according to Fillmore. He said that it’s important that the lake have a name that recognizes the tribe’s cultural claim to the area, but that there’s also a funny side to the Anglicized name.

“The thing that's kind of funny to us is that, you know, calling it Lake Tahoe or Lake Da aw is just like calling it Lake Lake, which is kind of hilarious when we when we talk about those things in our communities,” Fillmore said.

Manteca

If the name Manteca has ever struck you as an odd name for a city, that’s because it is actually a mistake. Manteca was originally called Cowell’s Station, after settler Joshua Cowell, according to the city’s chamber of commerce. When the Central Pacific Railroad came through the town in 1873, the railroad and farmers in the area decided to rename the town as there was already a Cowell’s Station further south near Tracy. They decided to call the town Monteca, but the first railroad tickets printed had the name misspelled as Manteca, which is Spanish for “lard.” The townspeople never corrected the error.

Ono

The Shasta Historical Society’s Puggle also brought us the story behind this small town’s name. Puggle is a bit of an expert on Ono: Not only did he write a book about the town’s history, but it was his great-great-great-grandfather, Rev. William Samuel Kidder, who named the town. Kidder, one of the early settlers of Shasta County, took Ono’s name from a bible verse, Nehemiah 6:2: “Come, let us meet together in one of the villages on the plain of Ono.”

Placer County / Placerville

Placer County’s name is not actually an ode to the Spanish word for “pleasure.” Instead, the county takes its name from the placer method of mining, according to the Sierra Nevada Geotourism site. Placer mining involves digging up dirt and other material and pulling gold and other minerals from the soil, either by panning or sifting the material.

This method of mining was so popular in Placer County and the areas nearby that the city of Placerville in El Dorado County got its name from the method. There were so many placer mining holes in Placerville that people could not walk safely from one side to the other without falling in one, according to Sacramento State's Lindsay.

Rough and Ready

Rough and Ready gets its name from the Rough and Ready Mining Company. The company was named after President Zachary Taylor, who was known as “Old Rough and Ready” during the Mexican American War, according to the Sierra Nevada Geotourism site.

Sacramento

Sacramento’s name is a reference to Roman Catholic Eucharist, according to Lindsay, and dates back to the Spanish period. The Spanish name refers to the sacrament of the Eucharist, and was first given to the river by the Spanish before being adopted by Americans as the name for the city as well.

Truckee

Truckee’s name comes from a Paiute Native American who helped thousands of emigrants travel west across the Humboldt Sink, according to the Truckee-Donner Historical Society. The name allegedly sounded like “Tro-kay” to the white emigrants, so they called the guide “Truckee.”

Vacaville

The name Vacaville actually has nothing to do with vacas. Well, it does have something to do with one Vaca in particular (capital V). Manuel Vaca arrived in California in the 1840s, and quickly sold his land to former Missouri Congressman William McDaniel, according to the city of Vacaville’s site. But Vaca had one condition to the sale — McDaniel had to set aside one square mile of the land to set up a township called “Vacaville.” The land was recorded in 1851, and Vacaville was officially incorporated 41 years later in 1892.

Weed

No, this name is not about what you think it’s about. The city of Weed was named after Abner Weed, the town’s founder, according to the city’s website. Weed bought the 280 acres that would become Weed, along with the Siskiyou Lumber and Mercantile Mill for $400 in 1897.

Yosemite National Park

Yosemite’s name comes from the word for grizzly bear in the southern Miwok tribe’s dialect, according to the National Park Service. The word, spelled Uzumati or Uzhumati, may mean grizzly bear, but there is no evidence of grizzly bears ever living in the Yosemite Valley. Learn more about Native Americans and Yosemite in this episode of CapRadio’s Yosemiteland podcast.

Note: We decided to do this story examining place names in our region after seeing this map and story produced by KQED. Thanks for the inspiration!

Special thanks to our social media followers who contributed name ideas to our reporting.