Named for a Bohemian Spa: The Karlsbad Connection

In eighteen ninety-nine, a cattle town on the Pecos River in southeastern New Mexico voted to rename itself after a world-famous health resort in Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic. The European spa was called Karlsbad, a name derived from Karl, the German rendering of Charles the Fourth, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia who was said to have discovered its mineral springs in the fourteenth century.

The connection to a medieval Bohemian emperor was thin. The New Mexico connection to the European spa was the local mineral springs. Charles Eddy, the cattleman who had founded the town that bore his name, discovered that the springs around his settlement had chemical properties similar to those of the Bohemian resort. The mineral content was comparable. The therapeutic claims being made for the European waters could, in principle, be made for the New Mexico waters as well.

Eddy believed the name would attract health tourists and investors who associated Karlsbad with rest, recovery, and fashionable European elegance. In an era when mineral spring resorts were popular across the American West, and when the Bohemian spa was a byword for luxury, the comparison was a marketing tool as much as anything else.

The town voted to accept the anglicized name. Eddy became Carlsbad. The mineral springs did attract some visitors. The caverns twenty miles to the southwest would eventually prove a far more powerful draw than any mineral spring. Carlsbad was named for a spring but became famous for a cave.