El Reno, Oklahoma: Not a Reindeer, Just a Post Office Fix

In 1905, a U.S. Geological Survey book said El Reno, Oklahoma, was Spanish for “the reindeer.” Its promoters, army officers from nearby Fort Reno among them, had really wanted plain “Reno,” and they added the Spanish “El,” meaning “the,” when the Post Office turned that name down.

A reindeer in the federal record

Henry Gannett’s The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States was the U.S. Geological Survey’s guide to where American place names came from. Its first edition, in 1902, has the town as Elreno, one word, and calls it “A Spanish word, meaning ‘reindeer.’” The 1905 second edition doesn’t back off: “A Spanish name meaning ‘the reindeer.’”

If you know a little Spanish, you can see how it happened. El reno does mean “the reindeer.” But the only Spanish in this name is the “El.”

The general behind Fort Reno

Joseph B. Thoburn explains the fort in his 1916 A Standard History of Oklahoma. After the Indian war of 1874, the Army set up a post “just across the North Canadian River from the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency at Darlington.” It was named Fort Reno, “in honor of Gen. Jesse L. Reno, of the Federal Army, who was killed in action at the South Mountain, Maryland, in September, 1862, while in command of the Ninth Army Corps.”

El Reno was laid out about five miles east of that fort, and that’s where the name story picks up.

Two Renos and one railroad

When the land around the fort opened to settlers in 1889, the name got used twice. Reno City went up first. In June 1889 a second townsite was platted three miles south of it, and its promoters, “a number of army Officers stationed at Fort Reno” among them, picked the name Reno. That’s how Claude Hensley, an El Reno man, told it in the Chronicles of Oklahoma in 1933. The post office department balked, he wrote, saying there would be too much confusion with the post offices at Fort Reno and Reno City. Hensley passes along Dr. A. H. Jackson’s story that William C. McDonald suddenly stopped the team on a drive to the fort and came up with “El Reno,” explaining “that El in Spanish meant THE.”

Historian Berlin B. Chapman, writing in the same journal in 1956, says the town’s name was changed from “Reno” to “El Reno” “in order to satisfy the Post Office Department and to prevent the location from being confused with Fort Reno and Reno City.” A list of early post offices printed in the Chronicles in June 1928 shows both a Reno City and an El Reno, with El Reno’s first postmaster appointed on June 28, 1889.

Then the railroad picked a side. One of the life sketches in Thoburn’s history follows Jacob R. Musgrove, who settled at “old Reno City” in 1889: “The railroad avoided that town, and he moved and identified himself with the new railroad station at the present City of El Reno.” The town with the extra two letters got the trains.

One word or two

The one-word spelling didn’t last. The U.S. Geographic Board, the federal panel that settles official spellings, put it plainly in its 1921 report: “El Reno; City and Township, Canadian County, Okla. (Not Elreno.)” The entry carries the asterisk the board used for a decision it had revised. Today’s federal place-name database dates that decision to June 7, 1916.

The Survey’s own mapmakers had it right much earlier. On the 1892 Kingfisher sheet, the town is EL RENO, in two words. And if you look at the bottom of that same sheet, you’ll find the line “Henry Gannett, Chief Topographer.” The same name signs the reindeer book’s letter of transmittal, there as the Survey’s “Geographer.”

Sources & further reading

• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States, 2nd ed. (USGS Bulletin 258, 1905), p. 118. The entry “Elreno”: “A Spanish name meaning ‘the reindeer.’”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS Bulletin 197, 1902), p. 104. The first edition: “A Spanish word, meaning ‘reindeer.’”
• Joseph B. Thoburn, A Standard History of Oklahoma, vol. 2 (1916), pp. 510-511. The founding of Fort Reno after the 1874 war and the general it honors.
• Joseph B. Thoburn, A Standard History of Oklahoma, vol. 5 (1916), pp. 2091-2092. Jacob R. Musgrove’s move from Reno City to the railroad town of El Reno.
• Chronicles of Oklahoma, “Early Post Offices of Oklahoma” (June 1928). The Reno City and El Reno post offices of 1889.
• Fifth Report of the United States Geographic Board (1921). The official spelling: “El Reno … (Not Elreno.)”
• Claude Hensley, “How El Reno Acquired Its Name,” Chronicles of Oklahoma (1933). The promoters’ choice of Reno, the Post Office’s refusal and McDonald’s “El Reno.”
• Berlin B. Chapman, “The Founding of El Reno,” Chronicles of Oklahoma (1956), p. 84. Why the name was changed from Reno to El Reno.
• GNIS feature 1092512 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for El Reno and the date of the board’s decision.