Thanks to its Spanish heritage, California place names frequently celebrate the virtues of the saints—even when the general population isn't always as pious.
When Benjamin Franklin Taylor, former war correspondant and freelance writer, came to California in the 1870's, he couldn't help but notice an interesting contrast.
"The Golden Gate," frontispiece for Between the Gates, 1880. Larger.
California geography has the true old Mexican and Castilian stamp upon mountain, town, vale and river. . . . Thus you have San Quentin, with a prison on his shoulders, Santa Rosa, the city of the holy roses, where we saw a rose-tree twenty feet high, with a sturdy trunk, and starred like the Milky Way with a thousand full-blown flowers; San Jose, with a city in his lap. Then there are San Benito, San Rafael, San Diego, San Pedro, San Leandro, San Juan--not the Don,--San Mateo, San Andreas, and the rest. Sometimes they take to the water, as San Joaquin River and San Pablo Bay. Then Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Francisco. The principal part of the population of the Calendar seems to have been lured out-of-doors by the weather and never gone in again. Then if they are not saints they are angels, as Los Angeles, and if neither the one nor the other, then an Island in the Bay talks English and says "Angel," and a city and a river cry out in concert, "Sacramento!" Altogether, if a man meant to make a compact sentence unburdened with adverbs, he could say, California is a country where the places are all Saints and the people are all sinners.
Benjamin Franklin Taylor published Between the Gates, his chronicle of California travel, in 1878.
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