Charting a Path to "Frisco" in 1849
A Gold Rush Ship Captain’s “Frisk-O!” Ditty Cues Up a “Linguistic Warrant”
MUCH has been written in the quest to pin down the origins of “Frisco” as a nickname and a term of endearment for San Francisco.
The folk etymologist Peter Tamony (1902–1985) was committed to the hypothesis that “Frisco” is not an abbreviation of “San Francisco” but, rather, has its own linguistic pedigree. In his brief but seminal essay “Sailors Called It ‘Frisco’” (Western Folklore, vol. 26, no. 3, July 1967) [at JSTOR via free registration], Tamony flags possible connections to
(a) El Fresco, the name he says Mexicans (including Mexican miners) gave to the city they saw as a “refreshing, cool” respite from the heat of the Sierra foothills, and even to
(b) the Old English frip-socn, meaning “refuge of peace” or “place of sanctuary” — leading Tamony to suggest that “Frisco may be age-old in the vocabulary of northern and English-speaking seamen, available for application to havens such as the Bay of San Francisco.”
Tamony liked (b) more than (a). But it’s hard to see either of these as the practical reason why “Frisco” emerged as a popular name for San Francisco in the Gold Rush years.
It wasn’t until after the mid 1840s that English-speaking settlers started arriving in significant numbers to the place called Yerba Buena and renamed “San Francisco” in January 1847. But “Frisco” was appearing in Sacramento newspaper accounts of San Francisco by early 1850. El Fresco would need to have been the standard Mexican usage in the late 1840s, and — during these same years — there would need to have been a lot of Mexican–English cross-pollination around El Fresco, in order to forge an anglicization / Americanization of El Fresco to “Frisco” in such a short period of time.
As to Tamony’s favored theory from Old English: What he is referring to is “frisco” as a kind of generic term for “safe harbor.” There doesn’t appear to be any evidence that English-speaking 49ers brought such a word with them — or that they applied it to San Francisco.
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ONE of the most commonly told origin stories for “Frisco” hinges on an impromptu ritual that attended the departure of the bark Eliza from Salem, Mass., for San Francisco on 23 December 1848.
With a crowd gathered to see the ship off, three passengers and crew members appeared on deck and sang a song that set fresh lyrics to the tune of Stephen Foster’s new hit, Oh! Susannah. Accounts differ as to who penned the lyrics: some credit one of the singers, John Nichols, while others say the verses were drafted by some of the trio’s friends.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the version of the story that one invariably hears today renders one of the verses thus:
I soon shall be in Frisco
And then I’ll look around
And when I see the gold lumps there
I’ll pick [th]em off the ground
But “Frisco” is not in the original. The earliest accounts of the Salem lyric — first published in Massachusetts newspapers under the title “The California Emigrant” and reprinted in papers across many other states over the next few months — have Eliza’s destination as “Francisco.”
Here’s the lyric as it appeared in the Boston Daily Bee on 26 December 1848 — three days after the Eliza’s departure:
Lyrics of “The California Emigrant,” Boston Daily Bee, 26 December 1848, p. 2. Source: Genealogy Bank
This reprint of the account that appeared in the Salem (Mass.) Gazette on the day of the Eliza’s departure includes the “Francisco” verse of the song that later would be known as Oh! California or I Come from Salem City.
“From Salem for California” (reprinted from the Salem (Mass.) Gazette of 23 December 1848), Alexandria (Va.) Gazette, 6 January 1849, p. 1. Source: Genealogy Bank
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PERHAPS it was the crew and passengers of the Eliza that hammered “Francisco” into “Frisco” while singing their signature song over the course of the months-long voyage from Massachusetts to California.
Memoirs of the period record that Oh! California was embraced by gold miners to the point that it became their unofficial anthem. Perhaps they were among those who liked the sound of “Frisco” — in the song, at least — better than “Francisco.”
One of the earliest published versions of the Oh! California verse using “Frisco” may be in an “Oration” that J.D.B. [Jacob Davis Babcock] Stillman (1819–1888) presented at Woodward’s Gardens, San Francisco, on 9 September 1874 — at the event celebrating of the 24th anniversary of the Society of California Pioneers.
But it stands to reason that “Frisco” was adopted into the song long before that. The Sacramento-based Placer Times newspaper was using “Frisco” by March 1850:
Item using “Frisco,” Placer Times (Sacramento, Calif.), 9 March 1850, p. 2. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection
Recently — and coming — finally! — to the title of this piece — I uncovered a different Oh! Susanna example that may provide a better etymological clue as to how “San Francisco” became “Frisco.”
In 1923, Octavius Thorndike Howe (1851–1931) published Argonauts of ‘49: History and Adventures of the Emigrant Companies from Massachusetts, 1849–1850 (Harvard University Press). Among the voyages Howe documents is that of the bark San Francisco, which departed Beverly, Mass., for San Francisco on 15 August 1849.
From painting of the bark San Francisco in the collection of Historic Beverly (Beverly Historical Society). Source: Using Essex History
Howe’s primary source for the San Francisco’s voyage is the journal of the ship’s captain, Beverly-born Isaac Wallis Baker (1818–c.1862). After arriving in San Francisco in January 1850, Baker returned to the East Coast in November 1850. Two years later, Baker made a second trip to California, arriving in San Francisco in October 1852.
Among Baker’s California pursuits during this slightly longer second stint — he returned to Massachusetts at the end of 1853 — he apprenticed himself to Sonora-based daguerrotypist Perez Mann Batchelder (1818–1873). An amusing self-portrait from this period shows Baker smiling on the left:
Self-portrait of Isaac Wallis Baker (left) with friend, ambrotype, c.1853. Collection of the Oakland Museum of California. Source: Cameraville
In the entry on Baker in their seminal “biographical dictionary” Pioneer Photographers of the Far West (2000), Peter Palmquist and Thomas Kailbourn write:
Incorrigibly playful by nature, (Baker) delighted in concocting practical jokes, drawing humorous vignettes, and composing doggerel.
The latter part of that take is borne out in Baker’s journal aboard the San Francisco — where he embroiders his account with verses that often are imagined as settings of Oh! Susanna.
Baker journals the ship’s arrival in San Francisco Bay on 11 January 1850. But sometime in early December 1849, apparently, he pens a “Recapitulation” when the San Francisco is off the Pacific coast of northern Mexico.
Excerpt from Captain Isaac Wallis Baker’s journal of the August 1849–January 1850 voyage of the bark San Francisco from Beverly, Mass., to San Francisco, in Octavius Thorndike Howe, Argonauts of ‘49, 1923, p. 97. Collection of the Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. Source: Internet Archive
The 5-verse “poem” that Baker weaves into this section begins:
Now as we lay off Monterey,
The boys began to frisk-O!
And some did swear, if wind was fair.
We’d soon be at Francisco.
Baker’s description of the ship as being “off Monterey” after rounding Cape Horn and stopping at Valparaiso, Chile, suggests he might not have been fully aware that Monterrey, Mexico, is closer to the Gulf than to the Pacific.
But look at that verse!
Did Isaac Baker share this with others aboard the San Francisco?
Did he sing it to them?
Did they sing it?
The power of suggestion can be strong — and the leap from “frisk-O” to “Frisco” is not even a hop and a skip!
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IN FACT, skipping and hopping and leaping is more to the point than one might imagine.
That riff that Captain Baker uses when he writes “The boys began to frisk-O” — what does it mean to “frisk,” in this context?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to “frisk” is “to move briskly and sportively; to dance, frolic, gambol, jig.”
This brings us, through a side door, to the claim — falsely attributed to Emperor Norton — that “Frisco” has “no linguistic or other warrant.” (And no, there’s no evidence that the Emperor had anything to say on the subject of “Frisco.”)
As it happens, the OED includes an “obsolete” word, “frisco,” with two possible meanings.
The first, dating to 1519 — and relating directly to “frisk” — is “a brisk movement in dancing; a caper.”
The second, dating to 1636, is “applied to a person as a term of endearment.”
More on the second…
The 17th-century English dramatist Richard Brome (c.1590–1652) wrote a play, The New Academy, or, The New Exchange, that premiered in 1636 and first was published in 1659. Shortly after the drama opens, the character of Strigood enters by greeting his friend Cash:
Excerpt from play, The New Academy, or, The New Exchange, originally published as part of Five New Playes, by Richard Brome, 1659. Source: Hathi Trust
Asks Strigood:
Where’s my Boykin? my Friskoe? my Delight? my Cash? by what better name can I call thee?
Perhaps “Frisco” as a name for “San Francisco” came together as a marriage of the two meanings of the word “frisco” that had currency in the 16th and 17th centuries — as (a) a word dance, a word “caper,” a word play (b) inspired by fondness for San Francisco and its promise and leading to a new, jaunty, fond name.
We know that many of the sailors, miners, writers, and journalists who arrived and worked in Gold Rush California were people of piss, vinegar, and wry attitude who had their ears tuned to the music of words that struck them as fun — and funny.
Surely, this is what led Isaac Baker to draw a connection between “frisk” — with its connotation of dancing, frolicking gaiety — and “Francisco.”
Maybe it also is what led Eloesser–Heynemann — a pioneer San Francisco clothing manufacturer founded in 1851, the year after Baker arrived in the city — to extend its line of Can’t Bust ‘Em work clothes in the 1920s with a new pair of heavy-duty pants that surely would have had Baker’s seal of approval: Frisko Jeens. Frisko with a “k”!
Detail from Eloesser–Heynemann ad for Frisko Jeens, Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press Democrat, 30 August 1928. p. 9. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection
With all due respect to the autodidactic scholarship of Peter Tamony, perhaps simple clever word play is how “Frisco” was born from “San Francisco.”
No need to make it more complicated than that.
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