Sam Brannan and the Town He Accidentally Named
Near St. Helena, California
The man who announced the California Gold Rush was also the man who built Calistoga. That was Sam Brannan, and his career was a masterclass in being in the right place at the right time, followed by a spectacular demonstration of how badly that can end.
In May eighteen forty-eight, Brannan ran through the streets of San Francisco holding a bottle of gold dust and shouting 'Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!' He did this having already cornered the local supply of picks, pans, and shovels. He understood the news he was delivering better than anyone, and he positioned himself to profit from it before anyone else could react. He became, briefly, one of the wealthiest men in California.
By the eighteen sixties he had turned his attention north, purchasing around two thousand acres in the upper Napa Valley and developing a resort he intended to call the Saratoga of California, after the famous New York spa. The hot springs, the geothermal mud baths, and the geyser at the upper end of the valley drew wealthy San Franciscans looking for exactly the kind of fashionable mineral cure that Saratoga had been providing Easterners for decades.
How the town got its name is one of those stories that has been repeated so many times it has acquired the texture of fact, though its original source is uncertain. The account, as it has come down through Napa County historical circles, holds that during a drunken toast at a development celebration, Brannan accidentally transposed the syllables of his planned name and proclaimed this would be the Calistoga of Sarafornia. The garbled phrase stuck. This story may be true. It may be an embellishment. What is not disputed is that the town is called Calistoga, that Sam Brannan named it, and that the name is not what he intended.
He lost most of his fortune in an acrimonious divorce in eighteen seventy. He died nearly penniless in eighteen eighty-nine. Calistoga has been a thermal resort destination for a hundred and sixty years and shows no signs of stopping.
