Buena Vista: A Good View, Pronounced Their Own Way

You are in Buena Vista, Colorado, and before anything else, you should know how to say it. The name is Spanish for good view, and the view here earns it. The Collegiate Peaks stand in a wall to the west, five summits over fourteen thousand feet high, with the Arkansas River running fast and cold through the middle of town.

But do not say bwena vista. Locals say byoona vista, and they have said it that way on purpose since the beginning. The town started in the eighteen sixties as a scatter of ranches called Cottonwood, then Mahonville.

When the Leadville silver boom exploded in eighteen seventy nine and this valley became the staging ground for freight, hay, and railroad crews headed north, the settlers decided their town needed a proper name. A German immigrant named Sadie Alsina Dearheimer, who ran a local bakery, proposed Buena Vista, and it won a citizen vote over both Cottonwood and Mahonville. By most local accounts Dearheimer knew perfectly well how the Spanish was pronounced.

She insisted on the anglicized version anyway, saying the first syllable should sound like the beginning of the word beautiful. The pronunciation stuck, and today it works as a kind of local shibboleth. Say it the Spanish way and everyone knows you just arrived.

The post office opened under the new name in September of eighteen seventy nine, the town incorporated later that year, and in eighteen eighty eight Buena Vista won the county seat away from the town of Granite up the valley. Three railroads eventually ran through this little town. The mines faded, the railroads pulled out, and Buena Vista settled into ranching, a state reformatory, and eventually the river itself, which now drives one of the busiest whitewater economies in the country.

The good view never went anywhere. Neither did the pronunciation. There is even a street in town named Alsina, for the baker who named the town and told everyone exactly how to say it.