Short Stuff: How California Got Its Name

California is a pretty cool name. And the story about where it came from is even cooler.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and there's Jerry out there, and this is
short Stuff California. Here we come right back where we
started from. I love California, as you know. It's uh.
I lived in l A, but I'd love northern California.

(00:25):
I think Emily and I have designs on maybe even
retiring there one day. Maybe there are people I don't know.
I mean, somewhere in Wine Country would be just lovely. Man,
that would be so nice. Now. I saw the soap
one time called Santa Barbara, and it looks real nice there.
Santa Barbara is awesome. Um, yeah, I don't know. I mean,

(00:46):
it depends on what happens with with Ruby. You know,
we don't want to we've kind of pledged to follow
her around. Oh yeah, so I'm gonna tell her how
great San Francisco is. Take her there a lot. So
maybe she'll want to end up in San Francisco and
then we can be nearby in Sonoma or something. Yeah.
I'm sure she's going to love that. She's really going

(01:07):
to grow up to look forward to being really close
to her parents for her whole life. She's going to
end up a Republican in Michigan. Just you watch Mark
my words. Yeah, she does have a Detroit edge to
her nice So um, obviously, Chuck, we're talking about California
and where the whole thing got its name. Um, and

(01:28):
apparently no one fully knows what we're going to talk about.
Is a um An interpretation that's been around since the
nineteenth century, but it's pretty pretty widely considered as the
correct answer. But no one wrote down like, this is
what California is named after, and some earlier attempts to
explain it is that it was derived from the Arabic

(01:51):
word caliph, as in Caliphate there's a Greek word called
callos that means beautiful. And then some people said, no, no,
it's after caliente, which means hot, and furnace, which is
means furnace. So California is a hot furnace, and everybody's
just like, just go back to bed rather lovely, actually

(02:13):
restart this day, man. Um. So there's this guy in
I think the eighteen forties or eighteen fifties who he
was like an amateur historian. He wrote a paper saying, um,
this is where I think California comes from are he said,
this is pretty good, man. Yeah, I think this makes
a lot of sense. Uh. There was an author named

(02:36):
Garcia Rodriguez de Montalbo of Seville, Spanish writer who wrote
a novel called I'm uh man, I was doing so
good Amadis de Gala or Amadis of Gaul, and Amadis was,
I guess, sort of an action hero of the time.
And the book was really big, so much so that uh,

(02:58):
Montalbo wrote a sequel to the book featuring the son
of Amadis uh Las Serga's Day Esplandian or the Exploits
of Esplandian. And this is just sort of a setup
of these books and a very kind of neat little
factoid that lies within. Yeah. Like these two books right here,
we're like Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton all rolled together

(03:21):
like they reached in huge. I've heard it, like that
is it? They were huge? I've always said, but I
have no until just a minute ago, but I've heard it.
I've heard it as Christian. Let's say how about this.
Let's say Tom Clancy and um uh Laura Ingles Wilder

(03:42):
mashed together like that is the level of popularity that
these books had in the in the early sixteenth century,
I think um. And so we mentioned the first one
because the second one is where California possibly comes from,
or the name California comes from. Because in Las cergust
esplandian Um, the the a lot of the action is

(04:06):
the sacking of the town of Constantinople, held then by
the Turks by a bunch of different um countries and
nations and armies UM sacking the city together UM as allies.
And one of them is a group of basically Amazonian
women who bear a striking resemblance to the Amazons that

(04:28):
produced Diana Oka, a wonder woman. But in this case
these um these women were led these women warriors were
led by a queen Califia, so yeah, looks familiar. They
were very strong, They had pet griffins, and they fed
men to these griffins, so yeah, their male offspring got

(04:48):
fed to the griffins. Pretty cool story. I think it
was like the scum manifesto, that's right, which you can
find in the book The Stuff You should Note book.
That is so he described their homeland. Apparently the homeland
was called California, And if that's true, then that seems
pretty straightforward to me. Right, Yeah, it definitely does. But

(05:10):
the interesting thing is that that's not really the end
of the story. There's a lot more to it. And
this antiquarian basically said, here's here's basically proof, and I
think we'll we'll take a break and then talk about
that in a minute. How about that sounds good? M hm, So, Chuck,

(05:56):
we were saying that, Um, in the book Let's Cergus
Indian that they mentioned that Queen Califia is from California.
That's the name of this mystical land where, um, there
are all these beautiful cliffs. They only metal to be found,
there is gold. And so all of the all of
the warriors under Queen Califia UM war like golden armor

(06:18):
and um, while they were flying around on their griffins. Um,
it was just kind of like this mystical place basically
paradise on Earth. Right. And so when the Spanish showed
up around the time that these books were at the
peak of their popularity, UM, we can assume that some
of them would be familiar with this wildly popular work

(06:40):
and the um land of California that was described in Yeah,
and that they might have literally brought these books over. Um.
The Spanish believed there's an area south uh in southern California,
kind of um, like as far south as you can get,
called Baja California. And I think that's actually Mexico, right,

(07:02):
or is that part of California it is? Well, I
think there's Baja California and there's Baja Mexico, and I think, okay,
there's just like the border goes right through it. As
far as I know. I've never been down there. Um.
I always wanted to, but Emily and I were so
broke when we lived in l A that we didn't
do a ton of traveling throughout California. We did most
of that since we've moved, ironically, but um, Baja California

(07:25):
they thought was an island, just like the island where
Queen uh Califia or Califia lived in the novel, and
so they called, you know, these European colonizers called it California. Um.
They later learned that it was not an island. Actually
it's a peninsula and Baja means lower California. And then
the upper part was named as Alta California. UM. Not

(07:48):
to be confused with what we think of as northern, northern,
and southern California. It was literally like sort of what
we think of as Mexico and just California. Yeah, And
so initially when they came upon Baja, they thought Baja
was an island, not a peninsula. Didn't figure that out,
so they didn't call Baja Baja California. They just called
it California because in the book, California was an island

(08:10):
as well, right, But it wasn't until that expedition where
they're like, oh, there's this thing just keeps on going,
um that they came up with Baja California and all
to California, and then all to California just became California.
That's what everybody calls California now, right. But it gets
a little more interesting too, because the word California goes

(08:31):
back supposedly even further. They think this book was written
in ten but apparently the author of the book based
part of it on the Song of Rowland, which is
a French poem written in the eleventh century about Charlemagne
in the eighth century. And in this poem, Charlemagne list

(08:51):
a bunch of people that he expected to like combat
him and come after him and rebel against him, including
men of Africa. This is in votes men of Africa
and those of Califern or Califerni. Either way, c A
l I F E r n E. Califerni is with
the people in the ozarks called California today. Did you

(09:14):
have you've been thinking of that joke for the best day,
my friend, It literally rolled out of my brain. Kudos, kudos,
thank you, thank you. So you've got Charlemagne worried about Califernie,
and people said, well, what is Califerni um in this
Song of Roland? And it turns out that at the
time when the Song of Roland was popular, um, would

(09:35):
you say the eleventh century, eleventh and twelfth century? I
guess eleven centuries when it was written, okay, so um,
people were very, very familiar with the town that was
basically called Californy, like they were. He was referring to
the author of the Song of Roland was referring to
a real place into what's today um Algeria, but at

(09:55):
the time was considered the Barbary Coast, and there was
a there were basically fortified settlements that were called generically
Cola or calat and um. They often would be they
combine that word meaning like today you call it, like
you know, fort josh if I founded it fortified town.

(10:18):
This virtually what we're talking about here. And one of
these particular places, actually very magnificent, seemingly wealthy place was
founded by a warrior named Benny Hamad Bennie Hammad, not
Benny like Benny Hill, ben I Hamad, and he named um.
He was followed by a group called the Benny if
Friend and Um. Now we kind of start to very

(10:42):
get the root of where California came from. That's right,
But Kela, I think Cola was just sort of a
prefix for a lot of different places right at the time.
The fortified town. It's like what we would say instead
of fort they would they said Cola. Yeah, so Cola
if Rin, which could be sort of loosely looked at
as maybe California that actually crumbled in the twelfth century

(11:06):
after the Song of Roland, not too long after the
Song of Roland was written. And I guess they think
what I don't see as the connection. I mean, do
you think he lifted that all those years later for
his book? That seems a bit of a stretch. Yeah, No,
I don't know. I think so there this famous, this
North African city calla calla freen Um was very very famous,

(11:29):
like in Europe, Like the Europeans knew all about this.
It was almost like Um, like a city of gold almost.
It was extremely wealthy Um. So it's entirely possible that
it survived, you know, knowledge of this thing survived a
few hundred years or kind of morphed into Um. This
a generic term for like a paradise on Earth, so

(11:53):
like this guy might have just grabbed this term, possibly
without knowing its origin. But then what's interesting is that
got morphed into the state of California, and everybody forgot
that origin too, So it's basically a famous North African city.
Was cited in the song of Roland, which ended up
in the Las Sergas state as Blondean, which ended up

(12:15):
as the name for California. As far as we can tell,
I love it. I do too. I'm buying it big time.
I'll buy it twice on Sunday. Uh. And since I
said that everybody short, stuff is out. Stuff you should
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(12:38):
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