The Name Nobody Claimed

In the autumn of eighteen seventy, a railroad delegation traveled the length of the new Central Pacific spur through the San Joaquin Valley, picking names for the communities that had sprung up along the line. When they reached the settlement at the Tuolumne River crossing, they had a name ready. They intended to call it Ralston, after William Chapman Ralston, the San Francisco banker who had co-founded the Bank of California and who had arranged significant financing for the valley's railroad expansion.

Ralston declined.

The accounts of his refusal are consistent enough across period newspapers and local historical sources that the basic fact appears solid. He said, in effect, that he was not interested in the honor. There was some editorial mockery at the time. Several California papers ran pieces suggesting that Ralston's refusal was calculated modesty, and that a man who spent his evenings hosting the largest dinner parties in San Francisco was perhaps not quite as modest as he wished to appear.

The railroad men, whatever they privately thought, translated the word. Modesto: Spanish for modest. The name stuck to the town that no one with the standing to claim it would accept.

William Ralston himself died five years later, in eighteen seventy-five, the day after the Bank of California failed. He collapsed during his customary swim in the waters off North Beach in San Francisco. The bank had been lending against assets far thinner than its depositors knew. Whether he drowned or suffered a stroke before hitting the water was never conclusively established.

He left behind a city he had declined to name, and a bank that collapsed the week he died. The town named for his modesty, or for the railroad's wry editorial judgment, had by then already incorporated its post office, established its first newspaper, and begun the irrigation debates that would define the next half century. It outlasted him with very little ceremony.