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Four deep in a Rover cannon/Riding dirty through a Saugus canyon-Tyler, the Creator, "Whoa"
Santa Clarita, we're doing it wrong.
That grand 25-mile road that begins near Lake Elizabeth and terminates at the future site of Dapper Dan's Car Wash, through a national forest and past three 7-Elevens, that rolls past the Rock of Saugus and screams "we ain't done yet!"
The artery that begets arteries; onlookers gasp at its mere four lanes as it assures us, "I got this."
We park upon its bike lanes with abandon, because nothing will stop us from seeing the Color Me Badd-by-way-of-Hootie and the Blowfish cover band.
Bouquet Canyon Road.
But where are the bouquets in Bouquet Canyon?
The better question is: where is the ship?
Bouquet Canyon is an accidental name, a misspelling or a mistranslation – an error that's staring down its 150th birthday.
The story goes like this: a French sailor by the name of François Chari jumped ship off the California coast, back when Alta California was part of Mexico. He winds up working as a cattle herder in what we now call the Santa Clarita Valley.
For all his tales of the sea, he earned the nickname "El Buque" (Spanish for "The Ship"). He became a Mexican citizen and the very French-sounding François became the sufficiently Spanish-sounding Francisco Chari. Through a land grant from the Mexican government, he established his ranch, "Rancho del Buque" in the 1840s and soon enough the canyon was known as Buque as well.
A lot of the legend comes from oral histories, but it's likely that the first cartographers who mapped the canyon and the road going through it just wrote down what they heard, and the heard "Buque" (BOO-kay) as "Bouquet" (boo-KAY or bow-KAY). Or maybe they thought buque=bouquet (linguists call this a false friend).
The frontier-era misspelling/mistranslation continues with us until today, and it will remain until it's renamed something more fitting, like Petzold Road, Ice Cream Highway or simply, "Tribute."
While "ramo" is the Spanish word for "bouquet," as in flowers, the Spanish word for a wine's bouquet (aromas) is an accent mark away from Francisco's ranch: buqué. Since the Spanish, like the English, got the word from the French, we pronounce it much the same way.
I'm reminded of the area that was once the Tataviam's "Kashtuk", which was Hispanicized to Castac/Castec/Casteca, only to be Anglicized to Castaic – except old timers insist it doesn't rhyme with "prosaic" or "archaic" or any other English -aic word. Instead, they say it rhymes with, you guessed it: "mistake."
For further reading: you owe it to yourself to get lost in the countless stories and pictures at scvhistory.com, where you can learn just about everything about just about everywhere in the SCV. Thanks to the site's currator, Leon Worden, for spurning this discussion in the first place.
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