California Place Names: The Origin and Etymology of Current Geographical Names, and: 1500 California Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning (review)

This is a book that, since its first appearance in 1949, has served as a model for all American place-name dictionaries. Editor William Bright, in his preface, points out that the first three editions of this work and, hopefully, the fourth, have given California "the most detailed and accurate of any state's place names dictionaries." With one exception that I will come to later in this review, I can agree wholeheartedly.

You will notice I do not call it "definitive," a description sometimes wished for by compilers of place name dictionaries and some of their reviewers. I am singularly impressed by statements made by both Gudde and Bright in their introductions that the book, in all its editions, can never be considered "definitive" in the sense of being all-inclusive, up-to-date, and absolutely the last word on the subject. It would be to the credit of scholars, reviewers, and readers to realize this. Gudde and Bright certainly did. However, its accuracy, as current research will allow, can be taken for granted since Bright and Gudde (until his death in 1969), are scholars of the highest order.

To be sure, this text is not the last word on California place-names; to include all the known names of all the known places in a 450-year-old state, along with sufficient information about the names and the places they identify, would make for a whopper of a book. Further, over time and with continual research, places and their names once unknown often become revealed. Besides, the names given to places often change with time, and new information about them is always being found, resulting in revision or the correction of errors.

Then there is the matter of what makes a name. Usually, the names that appear in a dictionary of this kind are the official names, recognized by governmental agencies that appear on current maps. Many similar texts seldom include earlier names, nicknames, or proposed names. If California is anything like Kentucky in this respect, just about any place that has been around for more than single generation has had more than the one official name it currently bears. The lion's share of names in most dictionaries come from maps. And most maps-especially published ones, and more particularly, those issued by federal and state agencies, do not identify all the names of the areas they cover. Often, this is because maps don't have the space. Again, if California is like Kentucky, fewer than a fourth of the known names have ever been recorded on the United States Geographical Survey topographic maps and the state highway maps from which known names are usually derived. The Gudde books are exceptional among place name dictionaries in that the names included are not just taken from those published maps. Really painstaking research is in evidence, often from obscure sources, and this text includes names that do not appear on contemporary maps, nor in the GNIS listings or the OMNI Gazetteer.

So, I am delighted that Gudde, in the introductions to his book's first three editions, and Bright, in the fourth, have made these issues clear. But they point out, as they must, that this book does present, alphabetically, all the names in current use that are of any significance or interest; however, the authors include sufficient information about the names and the places they identify, and what is reported in this book can be the basis for more intensive analyses by future historians, geographers, and students of names.

Furthermore, the kinds...