Boonville: A Town So Remote It Has Its Own Language

How remote is this valley? Legends say a colony of antlered bears make it their home. So far I haven't seen one in the wild. but I keep looking.

“And that’s when my Uncle Leo shot the man who killed my grandpa,” Linda concluded.
 
And I thought, “Wow, now that’s what I call a story!”
 
My own kinsfolk have a remarkable flair for melodrama, and I was raised on rip-roaring family tales, many of which may even be true. A few of the more plausible and respectable anecdotes have found their way into this blog, but most can’t be made public until the statute of limitations runs out and/or the main protagonists have passed over to the Great Beyond. My point is: it’s not often I find someone with family stories that blow mine out of the water. My hat was off to Linda. Big time.
 
“It’s a story known throughout the valley,” Linda added, and there are 100 years of newspaper accounts to back her up. The valley in question is Anderson Valley, a sparsely populated rural area of Mendocino County about 100 miles north of San Francisco. Linda was staffing the Anderson Valley Historical Museum on Saturday when Rich and I stopped by, and it didn’t take much coaxing to get her to reminisce about the old days, when this really was the Wild West.

Sheep rancher Kate Mailliard. Photo: Anderson Valley Historical Museum

“My grandfather was murdered in 1922," said Linda. "For generations my family, the Crispins, had held a right of way through the Haines land; it was the only way we could get down off the mountain to the main road. John Haines objected, and he and my grandfather fought over it for years.” The cantankerous Haines installed log gates so heavy they required two people and considerable time to open. Ike Crispin received legal advice that he had the right to replace the gates with something more standard and manageable, and he started doing so, assisted by his wife and her brother.
 
“Haines rode up on his horse with a rifle and shot my grandpa,” Linda told me. “The bullet went right through his watch pocket. He was waving his rifle around, and my aunt Hazel, who was just a tiny little woman, jumped up and grabbed it.” Hazel and Haines struggled over the weapon until he knocked her to the ground. “And that’s when my Uncle Leo shot the man who killed my grandpa.”
 
Two men lay dead but no arrests were made. Everyone had seen this coming for years. The coroner (a Crispin) was never called. The sheriff agreed Leo Batt had acted to defend himself and his sister from the enraged Haines. Case closed.
 
But not forgotten. “Haines-crispin” came to mean a blood feud or shootout in the peculiar local “language” of Boontling, the linguistic curiosity that had drawn me to Anderson Valley in the first place.

A beer mat from Anderson Valley Brewing Company written in Boontling.

Back in the nineteenth century, the thousand people living in this isolated valley amused themselves by developing a slang that enriched their everyday talk and baffled outsiders. Here’s a conversation NPR recorded in 2015, between Wes Smoot and David Knight.
 
Smoot: "You've been boshin'?"
Knight: "Just a slib."
Smoot: "You get a granny hatchet?"
Knight: "Nope. ... Mostly just gormin' and horse shoes."
 
Translation: Have you been deer hunting? Yes, but only a little. Bagged one yet? Nope … mostly I’ve just been eating barbecue and playing horse shoes.
​
Smoot told NPR, "Strangers come in on the weekends, you know, metropolitan people, and they'd sit down. And we'd sit there and talk about them, things that would normally get your face slapped pretty bad. And they were just grinning at you, and they had no idea what we was talking about, you know. And that, to me, is a lot of fun."

Linda (right) and her daughter Melanie are fifth and sixth generation Anderson Valley residents and descendants of Ike Crispin.

I asked Linda if she spoke Boontling. “No, my mother was a schoolteacher and she thought it was a bunch of hogwash. My husband spoke it; he was a year ahead of me in school, and they taught a class in it back then.”

​Technically, Boontling isn’t a language, just 1600 slang words woven into English. The name is derived from Boonville, the southernmost town in the valley, named for W.W. Boone, second cousin to Daniel Boone. Just about everyone in Anderson Valley was fluent in Boontling from 1890 to the 1920s. They say locals who joined the service during WWI could barely understand English. Boontling's popularity began to wane, then in the 1960s, scholars and the media got wind of it, attracting international and local interest. Today, only a handful of greybs (greybeards, old men) still harp a slib of the ling (speak a little of the language).
​
I love the Boontling story and was charmed to discover that the legacy lives on, if largely in the museum, a raft of books, news clips, and the Anderson Valley Brewing Company. Brewmaster Fal Allenis gives his beer Boontling monikers such as Hop Ottin’. (Ot means hard-working; it’s derived from otto, a reference the mighty Scandinavian loggers of yore.) Here’s Fal harpin' tidrick (having a chat) with a customer in Boontling.
​

​Living in two languages myself, I’ve discovered how revealing words can be about a culture. For instance, the Spanish term la madrugada means the small hours of the morning, generally from midnight to dawn. One day I asked my Spanish teacher why I often saw older men in cafés knocking back a glass of anise liqueur at 9:00 am, and she said, “When a man has to get up in the madrugada to work, he must reanimate himself.” Apparently in the stay-up-all-night, late-rising city of Seville, madrugada extends until after 9:00. Possibly until 11:00. Or noon.
​
Words can also conceal our thoughts from the rest of the world. Like Wes Smoot, Rich and I used to enjoy linguistic invisibility in Seville. But now that  practically everyone around us is studying English to cope with the influx of tourists, we have to watch ourselves in public places. No more holding intensely personal conversations or making snarky remarks about others assuming no one will understand us.

In Seville, breakfast is typically served in a fully stocked bar, just in case you need to reanimate yourself with a morning liqueur.

As the residents of Anderson Valley realized in the nineteenth century, all languages are constantly in flux. Many Boontling words came from people’s names, such as zeese, from Zachariah Clifton’s initials. ZC was the coffee brewer on hunting expeditions, creating coffee “strong enough to float an egg,” especially on the last day, when he’d use up his entire remaining supply. Yowser! And that’s no wess (exaggeration, named for a chronic fibber).
​

Only in Anderson Valley...

There are 7,117 official languages on the planet, and 18 of them are down to a single speaker. On a somewhat more hopeful note, English dictionaries add hundreds of new words every year. Recent additions include cakeage (charging customers for bringing a cake into a restaurant), rage farming (making inflammatory political remarks), petfluencer (posting images of your animal companion to gain social media followers), and meatspace (the physical world, as opposed to cyberspace). (Yes, we need a term for that now.)
​
The West may not be quite as wild as it once was, but our language gets more vivid every day. If you’ve discovered any intriguing or oddball words —new, old, Boontling, or otherwise — it would be bahl (great) if you'd share them in the comments below.
​

Boonville also has wineries, and as a service to my readers, I checked out the Navarro Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc. Delightful!

On the Road Again; No Post Next Week
​I'm heading off to a family reunion in the mountains, in a cabin that's off the grid, without wifi, TV, or other devices. (Yes, don't worry, there's running water and a generator for basic electricity.) So I won't be posting next week, but I plan to be back after that with all sorts of new, fun stuff.



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