Walahlee?  Walhalla?  What's the Source of the name 'Gualala'?...*
by R. H. Tooker

Gualala, the name both of the river and the town at the river's mouth, has long been a puzzler to newcomers to the Mendocino Coast.  The truck driver who once asked at Stewarts Point how far it was to Guatemala may be an extreme case, but he's not the only one who has been confused.  The most confused of all was the nameless official in the San Francisco office of the U.S. Post Office department, and his confusion has left a trail of misunderstanding after him that survives to this day.

The first known settlers at Gualala were Pomo Indians, and their language has been carefully studied in recent years by Professor Oswald of the University of California, Berkeley.  Mr. Oswald has made clear where the name comes from.  He has pointed out that the Pomo name for the town is Wahlalee, a short form of a phrase meaning:  "place where the water comes down," and in this case simply means "river-mouth," an appropriate name for the location.

Both the Russians and the Spaniards were aware of this Pomo name.  The references are very few, of course, but we know that the Russians referred to the Indians of the Gualala area as the Walala tribe, and we have an occasional reference in Spanish and Mexican records to Valale.  We also know very well that the first Yankees knew this name, since the Coast Survey wrote the name of the town and the river as Walalla in the 1850s and did not change this spelling on their charts for almost a half century.

Likewise, we know that the settlers who erected the first lumber mill in 1862 called the town and the river Walhalla, and wrote it that way, a pronunciation still in daily use by some of the old-timers on the Coast.  We will probably never know positively where this "h" came from, but it is most likely that this form of the name goes back to William Rufus, one of Sutter's employees, who received the grant of the German Ranch.

Rufus named the ranch after Herman, the German hero who defeated the Roman legions in the days of the Emperor Augustus.  Herman, in Spanish, would be written "German."  (If the ranch had been named after the nationality of the first owner, it would have been called the Rancho Aleman.)  If Rufus knew about Herman, he would certainly have known about Walhalla, the heaven of the Norse legends, and so, when he was told that the river and the settlement at its mouth were called Walahlee by the Indians, he would have thought at once of Walhalla, and used that name.

The situation, then, in 1862 was this:  the name was officially Walalla, and was pronounced either Walalla or Walhalla.

Then the local residents and the mill owners asked for a Post Office for Walalla.  Much to their amazement, when the official confirmation came from the Post Office department in San Francisco, they learned that the new office was to be named Gualala Post Office.  It appears that someone in the San Francisco office had decided that he knew more about the matter than the "ignorant" local settlers, and had proceeded to change the spelling to what he believed was the proper Spanish form.  (Naturally, he had no idea that the first Spanish settlers had written the name as "Valale.")

Actually, by the rules of Spanish spelling, his choice was a "correct" one.  The Spanish language, in the form in which it had developed from Latin had no sounds that began with the "w" sound.  However, a number of Arabic words began with the syllable "wa",  and when the Spaniards took over Moorish names for rivers and towns in southern Spain, they had to find a way to write this sound.  Their scribes hit upon the solution of writing "wa" as "gua", and thus we have, to this day, Guadalquivir, Guadalcanal and Guadalajara.  These names are always pronounced by native speakers of Spanish, to begin with the "wa" sound.

The Spanish settlers in the New World used this same method in writing down Indian words beginning with "wa", and thus we also have Guaymas, Guantanamo, Guyaquil (and Guatemala, too), all of which are pronounced in Latin American to begin with the "wa" sound.  To this day, Mexican dogs are "gua-guau",  which we would write Wah-wow.

And so, our bureaucrat in the post office decided to correct the spelling of Walalla to what he thought it ought to be, rather than leave it the way the "ignorant" Americans had written it.  Gualala it became.  Serious attempts were made to have the name changed back to Walalla, but the Post Office department refused to do this, saying that the name could not be confused with that of another post office, the only reason which would warrant a change.

To sum up:  The Pomos' called it Walahlee, and the first European settlers, of whatever origin, called it either Walalla or Walhalla.  Either on could be the correct American form of the name, but to maintain a consistent pronunciation in the face of the present-day newcomers, it is probably best to stick with Walalla, as being closest to the Pomo form of the name.

One thing is certain:  if any newcomer is misled by the looks of the name Gualala and tries to put a "hard g" sound at the head of the word, just because he sees that letter in print, he should always be politely but firmly and stubbornly corrected.