Winnemucca, Nevada: How French Ford Got a Paiute Chief's Name

Winnemucca, Nevada, was a Humboldt River crossing called French Ford before a settler renamed it for a famous Paiute chief. The chief’s name had almost landed on Virginia City a few years earlier, and the old histories never settle which Winnemucca they meant.

A crossing called French Ford

The spot was a place to get across the Humboldt. Myron Angel’s 1881 History of Nevada says it “was known in 1861 as the French Bridge, or Ford, from its being a noted crossing place,” and names the owners as Joseph Ginacca and J. A. Algaur. Sam Davis’s 1913 history puts the start earlier, saying it was set up as a small trading station on the overland route to the California gold fields “in the year 1850,” and “was known as the ‘French Ford.’” Neither book explains the “French.”

The man who renamed it

Angel is the one who tells you who changed it: “The town received its name from C. B. O. Bannon, nephew of the Secretary of the Interior under Lincoln, who wished to perpetuate the name of a famous Indian Chief.” A 1904 history edited by Thomas Wren calls him “S. B. O’Bannon” and dates the naming to 1863, so even the initials don’t match from book to book. Henry Gannett’s 1905 federal list of place names backs up the basic point: the town, along with a peak and a lake in Nevada, was “named for a chief of the Piute Indians.”

Which Winnemucca?

The catch is that there was more than one. Angel’s book has two portraits, one captioned “Po-i-to, or Old Winnemucca” and the other “Na-ma-ga, or Young Winnemucca,” and in its text it says Numaga was not related to Poito and that the two “were always unfriendly.” Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, writing about her own people in 1883, introduces “my father Winnemucca” to an Army officer and mentions “my cousin, who is called young Winnemucca.” Whether her cousin is the same man as Angel’s Numaga isn’t clear from these books, and none of the town’s naming accounts says which chief O’Bannon had in mind.

The one-moccasin story

You may run into a tidy explanation of the name itself. Wren’s 1904 history says, “Many people wonder whence came the name Winnemucca, for it is not strictly Indian.” It goes on: two white men passing through met a young chief wearing one moccasin, “in Indian ‘Mucca,’” and “in part English and part Indian the trappers called him ‘Onennemucca,’ or one moccasin.”

That’s a story, not a translation. Wren gives no witness for it, and we didn’t find a linguist or a Paiute-language source that backs up the meaning. So this article doesn’t say what Winnemucca means.

The first try, in 1859

O’Bannon wasn’t the first to reach for the name. In November 1859, according to William Wright’s History of the Big Bonanza, somebody proposed changing the name of the new Comstock camp “from Virginia Town to Wun-u-muc-a, in honor of the chief of the Py-utes.” It didn’t take, and the camp became Virginia City. A few years later, the name found a home on the Humboldt instead.

Sources & further reading

• Myron Angel (ed.), History of Nevada (Thompson & West, 1881). French Bridge or Ford in 1861 and O’Bannon’s naming (p. 399); Numaga and Poito “always unfriendly” (p. 151); the portraits of “Po-i-to, or Old Winnemucca” and “Na-ma-ga, or Young Winnemucca.”
• Sam P. Davis (ed.), The History of Nevada, vol. 2 (1913), p. 912. The trading station of 1850 known as French Ford.
• Thomas Wren (ed.), A History of the State of Nevada (1904), p. 308. “S. B. O’Bannon,” the date 1863, and the one-moccasin story.
• Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes (1883). “My cousin, who is called young Winnemucca” (p. 64); “this is my father Winnemucca” (p. 192).
• William Wright, History of the Big Bonanza (1877), p. 59. The 1859 proposal to rename Virginia Town “Wun-u-muc-a.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). Winnemucca, the town, peak, and lake, “named for a chief of the Piute Indians.”
• GNIS feature 844996 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Winnemucca, Humboldt County.