Key West, Florida: Bone Island or Just a Key to the West?

Key West, Florida, may owe its name to a Spanish word for bones, or just to its spot at the west end of the keys. A 1912 history says no record settles it.

Two explanations and no paperwork

That history is Jefferson B. Browne’s Key West: The Old and the New, and Browne didn’t hedge about the gap: “There is no authentic record of the origin of the name Key West, of which two explanations are given.”

The first is the plain one. Key West is “the most westerly of the chain of islands or keys extending from the mainland,” Browne writes, “hence Key West.” The second is that the name is “a corruption of the Spanish words Cayo Hueso pronounced ‘Ki-yo Way-so,’ meaning bone island.” If you say Cayo Hueso fast, you can hear how English speakers might have landed on Key West.

The oldest record is in Spanish

The paper trail in Browne’s book starts in Spanish. He says the earliest record of the island is a Spanish land grant of “the island of Cayo Hueso,” made on August 26, 1815, by Juan de Estrada, then governor of Florida, to Juan Pablo Salas. Salas sold it to John W. Simonton of Mobile for $2,000 on January 19, 1822.

So the oldest document in Browne’s book uses the Spanish name. When and where “Key West” first showed up in English, he doesn’t say. But when he describes the names that came later, he calls Key West the “English substitute” for Cayo Hueso. The “westernmost key” idea, by contrast, comes with no source at all in his book.

The story behind the bones

Why would anyone call it bone island? Browne quotes William A. Whitehead, one of the early settlers, who surveyed and mapped the town in 1829. Browne adds that Whitehead’s historical notes went mainly into a communication he sent to St. Augustine early in 1836. Whitehead favored the Cayo Hueso explanation, and he passed along a story he’d heard secondhand.

The oldest settler in the area, a man who had lived near Charlotte Harbor since about 1775, used to say that long before, the island Indians and the mainland Indians had fallen into a feud. The mainland people drove the islanders “from island to island, until they reached Key West,” where a last battle nearly wiped them out. “This sanguinary battle strewed this island with bones,” Whitehead wrote, “hence the name of the island, Cayo Hueso, which the English, with the same facility which enabled them to transform the name of the wine Xeres Seco into ‘Sherry Sack,’ corrupted into Key West.”

You’ll notice how many steps that story passes through: a tradition, told by an old settler, retold by Whitehead, quoted by Browne. Whitehead does mention a mound, opened some time before he wrote, where “human bones of a large size were discovered.” That shows people found bones on the keys. It doesn’t prove the battle.

The Navy’s names didn’t stick

The United States tried to rename the place almost as soon as it arrived. On March 25, 1822, Lieutenant M. C. Perry of the schooner Shark raised the American flag and, Browne says, named it Thompson’s Island, after Navy Secretary Smith Thompson, and the harbor Port Rodgers. Commodore Porter later dated his letters from “Allenton.” None of them caught on. In Browne’s words, “Cayo Hueso and its English substitute, ‘Key West,’ seemed to suit the fancy of the people more than the new names.”

Sources & further reading

• Jefferson B. Browne, Key West: The Old and the New (1912), chapter I, pp. 7–9. The “no authentic record” line and the two explanations, the 1815 grant of Cayo Hueso, Simonton’s 1822 purchase, Whitehead’s account of the battle and the bones, and Perry’s and Porter’s short-lived names. Appendix D (p. 200) tells who Whitehead was and when he wrote.
• GNIS feature 294048 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Key West, in Monroe County. It has no note on the name.