Letter

Abstract

 OHQ vol. 116, no. 3 LETTER To the Editor: As a longtime member of the Oregon Historical Society (OHS), I have read many scholarly accounts about how Oregon got its name. I wish to share a personal story on this subject with my fellow OHS members, before it escapes my 85-year-old memory. As a young naval officer in 1953,I was a guest at lunch withAdmiral Bobadilla,Spanish Navy, and his family in Barcelona,Spain.When I told the admiral that I was from Oregon,he became quite animated, got to his feet, and tried to tell me in Spanish that the name Oregon came from the Spanish expression for ‘natives with large ears.’ He may have actually grabbed my ear, but I’m not sure about that today. My Spanish at the time was non-existent, and the admiral had little English, but one of his daughters was conversant in English. I regret not asking the admiral how he came by this information. My guess is that the story had been passed down through his Bobadilla family. A Francisco de Bobadilla succeeded Columbus in the early 1500s as governor in Spain’s new territories in America, and I suspect that Bobadilla ancestors may have sailed with the early Spanish explorers on the West Coast of America. In checking Google translate, I find‘natives with large ears’ translates to nativos con orejas grandes. I have no language or linguistic skills to explore this further.Admiral Bobadilla may have put a Catalan“spin”on his pronunciation of the word Oregon. In an early edition of Oregon Geographic Names, Lewis A. McArthur reports discussing large ears with a Native American, and they concluded that Native Americans had the same ears as everybody else. With all due respect to both, I believe that they missed the point. I think that there were some Native tribes between northern California and Nootka Sound, who adorned their ears with heavy ornaments of bone, wood or stone, which would make for “large ears”? Perhaps some current researcher of journals and logbooks from the early Spanish explorers may find mention of a Bobadilla or natives wearing ornaments in their ears? Larry G. Valade Fredericksburg, Virginia Edwin Battistella discusses the origins of Oregon’s name — including this possible interpretation — in “Oregon, the name,” in The Oregon Encyclopedia. Readers can access this article by scanning the QR code to the left or by visiting the website: http://oregonencyclopedia. org/articles/oregon_the_name. ...