How Opa-locka got its name

Opa-locka City Hall. The Moorish architecture has been typical of the city since its founding by aviator Glenn Curtiss in 1926. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Opa-locka is a small city in the Miami metropolitan area of south Florida.

Its unusal name is supposed to have an Indian or “Native American” origin. But there is no documentation for the name before about 1926. That’s when the aviator Glenn Curtiss founded the city, during the 1920s craze for Florida real estate.1

When Curtiss first scouted the site, he was told that its “Indian name” was “Opa-tisha-wocka-locka.” He shortened this to “Opa Locka,” which sounded vaguely “Arabic-Persian” to him. This was the era of wildly popular “Arab” movies such as The Sheik and The Thief of Bagdad. So Curtiss dressed up Opa-locka in fanciful Moorish style to match the mood of the time.

The original name of the site almost certainly comes from the Creek/Seminole language. Most likely, it was Vpelofv rakko (“up-pee-LO-fa THLA-ko”), meaning “big hummock.” A hummock (or hammock) is an area of raised land within a swamp.2

The Seminole Indians were nearly all forced out of Florida by the mid-1800s, and those who remained were confined to two reservations. The English speakers who replaced them probably pronounced the name of the future Opa-locka as something like “Opalofa-locko.”

But by the mid-1920s, when Curtiss found out about it, the name had been corrupted to “Opa-tisha-wocka-locka.”

Disclaimer

There is no way to be certain about the origin of “Opa-tisha-wocka-locka.” Because of the gap in time, and the apprent lack of evidence for any name before 1926, all we can do is speculate about the prior history.

All I’m offering is informed speculation. We can be sure that “Opa-tisha-wocka-locka” comes from Seminole, which is closely related to Creek. (Seminole and Creek differ only in pronunciation and vocabulary, like American English and British English.) And we know that the name already existed when Glenn Curtiss arrived on the scene. He didn’t invent the name from scratch or borrow it from some other part of the country.3

By the way, the authoritative Dictionary of Creek/Muskogee derives Opa-locka from the same source as the name of Opelika, Alabama, viz., opel’ rakko, “big swamp.” But this hypothesis overlooks the evidence of the long version of the name, “Opa-tisha-wocka-locka.”

Besides, local traditions are remarkably consistent about the meaning of the original name. They all describe a hummock, or elevated ground within a swamp, rather than the swamp itself. We can never be sure, but vpelov rakko seems much more likely than opel’ rakko to be the original Seminole name.

Corruption of the name

So how did we get from Seminole vpelofv-rakko to English “Opa-tisha-wocka-locka”?

Once the name Vpelofv-rakko was translated into English sounds, it lost its semantic meaning, becoming a sequence of nonsense syllables. One nonsense syllable is as good as another. So as the name was transmitted orally, it became further corrupted in a series of steps we can only guess at now.

First, the final “o” was probably turned into a shwa, giving us “Opalofa-locka.”

Next, the “lofa-locka” sequence may have caused confusion among some speakers. Was it “Opa-lofa-locka” or “Opa-locka-lofa”? Someone must have substituted an entirely different sound for one of the troublesome syllables, and we had “Opa-tisha-locka.”

Next, someone may have remembered the final “locka” as “wocka,” leading to more confusion. Which was correct, “Opa-tisha-wocka” or “Opa-tisha-locka”?

Someone resolved this by stringing together both versions: “Opa-tisha-wocka-locka.” That’s the version heard by Glenn Curtiss in the mid-1920s.4

Translations

Since the city was established, local writers have suggested ever more elaborate translations of “Opa-tisha-wocka-locka.” Besides the most plausible meaning, “big hummock,” one finds the following prosy variants:

• “big island in the swamp covered with many trees” 5
• “a dry place in the swamp with trees” 6
• “the high land north of the little river on which there is a camping place” 7

All of these appear to be elaborations on “big hummock,” a plain translation of vpelofv rakko.

So there you have it. To see how pedantic I am capable of becoming on this subject, click through to my work page on the derivation of “Opa-locka,” in my personal userspace at Wikipedia.

Notes

1 Glenn Curtiss was a celebrity in the early 20th century due to his exploits at designing and building motorcycles and airplanes. Curtiss founded an aircraft company and sold planes to the U.S. Navy. In the 1920s Curtiss jumped into the Florida land boom, founding or co-founding the cities of Hialeah, Opa-locka, and Miami Springs. Opa-locka, with its fanciful Moorish architecture, opened the same year as the 1926 film The New Klondike, which spoofed the Florida craze. A hurricane also roared ashore in south Florida that year, causing serious damage to Opa-locka. ↩
2 In IPA transcription: |əpi’lofə’ɬako| And for those who don’t already know: A swamp differs from a marsh in that a swamp has trees, but a marsh has grass. You might say a swamp is a forest with wet feet. ↩
3 Local historians all agree that the name antedates Curtiss’s interest in the place. Probably the first monograph about the city is Frank S. Fitzgerald-Bush, A dream of Araby: Glenn H. Curtiss and the founding of Opa-locka (Opa-locka, Fla.: South Florida Archaeological Museum, 1976). More recently, Opa-locka comes under discussion in Jan Nijman, Miami: mistress of the Americas (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 27. ↩
4 This is pure speculation, of course. For another sequence of corruptions, see my work page on this topic at Wikipedia. ↩
5 See, among others: Larry Luxner, “Opa-locka rising,” Saudi Aramco World (Sept./Oct. 1989): 2-7. ↩
6 See, among others: U.S. Rep. Kendrick B. Meek, “80th anniversary of the founding of the city of Opa-locka, Florida,” Congressional Record 152 (part 7) (May 2006), p. 8922. ↩
7 This one appeared in some Miami Herald ad supplements and, in nearly identical wording, in Nieuwsbrief van de FAK, a newsletter from a Belgian arts faculty. Not one of the unique elements — “little river,” “north,” or “camping place” — is linguistically plausible. K.U. Leuven Association: Associated Faculty of Arts and Architecture (FAK), “A tale to be retold – Chevy Ridin High – Defining Place, Naming Place,” Nieuwsbrief van de FAK (March 2011): 4–7 [PDF]. ↩

The star of empire

America wearing the star of empire. Detail from the painting “American Progress” (1872) by George Gast.

I’ve found some evidence of how the Anglo-Irish cleric George Berkeley’s verse, “Westward the course of empire takes its way,” became a “star of empire” on the cover of George Bancroft’s History of the United States. The connecting link seems to be John Quincy Adams, with an assist from Massachusetts poet Sarah Wentworth Morton.

George Berkeley (1685-1753) — the minister, mathematician, philosopher, Rhode Island planter, and namesake of Berkeley, California — was what we’d call a fan of Britain’s American colonies. So the last four lines of his “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America” were frequently quoted on this side of the Atlantic — especially the first:

Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The first four Acts already past,
A fifth shall close the Drama with the day;
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

Yearning for the next civil war

He was stuck with the duty and he would fight. And he had no doubt he would die and that would be a good thing.

He looked around the battlefield that had been his home, and carefully raised himself out of the recliner. It wouldn’t do to fall and break a hip now. Company was coming, and he had to be ready to greet them. He hoped it would be today.

— From Absolved, a novel by Mike Vanderboegh

Combat veterans bear deep scars of memory. At the same time, they often feel nostalgia for their time of service. This is fitting. Nostalgia always mixes love with pain.

What should we call a similar yearning for a war to come? For a future civil war between Americans?

Some of my neighbors think such a war is inevitable. They may attend tea party rallies, or they may not; if they do, they indignantly deny that they were lured there by media celebrities like Glenn Beck.

They’ll tell you they’ve known for a long time that America has lost its way, and the halls of power are controlled by a conspiracy against freedom. Those who don’t surrender their firearms, control of their property, and their rights to the mega-state will be hunted down, one by one. Neighbor will betray neighbor in a dark, cruel, deceitful America ruled by brutal thugs. We’re already more than halfway there.

This belief isn’t really susceptible to argument.

Howard Zinn and his opposite

In honor of Howard Zinn, whose death is in the news, I’d like to publish a review of a book he could never have written. The book is The Birth of the Modern by Paul Johnson, a conservative ideologue with a charming prose style. I reviewed the book for LibraryThing by contrasting it with Howard Zinn’s best-known work.

Let me contrast Paul Johnson with another popular historian, Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States ). Both are good, entertaining writers, but Zinn is honest about his radical bias, while Johnson assumes a “god’s-eye” view of history that presumes to report “what really happened” without the biases that mere mortals are prone to. Of course, the bias is there anyway. Zinn is radically democratic and suspicious of all elites, whereas Johnson writes of a world well managed by a few superb individuals; the rest of the people are an abstraction he calls the “demos.” Johnson deserves credit for writing well and engagingly about a remarkable range of topics, from politics and war to art and popular culture. But he deserves censure especially for his apologetics for European imperialism. Throughout this thick book, every European or American military adventure in Asia, Africa, or the Americas is reported with modifiers like “had to,” “like it or not,” and “reluctantly.” Thus we read that Britain went to war in China “for altruistic as well as commercial reasons,” as if China was in need of a foreign power to peddle opium to its people and lob shells at its port cities. There is no doubt that most European officers really believed in the “civilizing mission” of imperialism, but it seems ridiculous for a latter-day historian to agree with them in this sly way. I recommend taking this book with a grain of salt — remembering that the slaves who manufactured table salt during this period had a history as well.

Since I wrote that, Johnson has churned out a lot more Tory literature, been humiliated by a sex scandal, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush.

Paul Johnson, the sanctimonious rakehell, is not to be confused with Paul E. Johnson, a superb American historian.

[I wrote more about Zinn here, but the WordPress app for the iPhone gobbled it all up. Apparently some genius programmed the app so the Save button sometimes mean Cancel. I'll revisit this if time permits. And I will not try to write any more posts on a phone.]

Iraq and the American Revolution

Now British forces are ending combat operations in Iraq. I always thought it was remarkable to see U.S. troops in Iraq serving alongside British units, some of whose service histories must go back to the struggle against American revolutionaries in the 1770s and 1780s. The two armies have fought together several times since 1917, of course, but the current conflict in Iraq is, to me, the most reminiscent of that first one between British redcoats and American rebels.

At that time Britain was acknowledged to be wealthiest, most technologically advanced nation in what we now call the “West,” and its people enjoyed the highest known degree of liberty. British colonists in America agreed: From 1756 to 1763 patriotic Americans had fought side-by-side with British troops to defeat the despised French and Indians and expand the British Empire. When London sought to recover some of the costs of that war by raising taxes and tightening administrative control over the colonies, the reaction from the colonists — boycotts, demonstrations, petitions, and open defiance of the laws — seemed utterly excessive. The colonists also objected to King George’s measures to protect his American Indian subjects from encroachments by white settlers. They accused the king of trying to enslave them, while they themselves held Africans in bondage. What could be more absurd? Clearly Britain was justified in sending troops to control these American insurgents — who were aided by terrorist radicals from Spain, Prussia, Bavaria, Italy, Poland — and especially France.

There was no 9/11 attack to confuse the British public with. But there was the threat of the French, Britain’s habitual enemies just across the Channel. Once the American rebels allied themselves with the hated French, the morality of the war seemed plain to many in Britain. The disciplined British soldiers who shipped out to suppress the American rebellion were told that they were vindicating not just their national interest but the cause of liberty. Washington, the principal insurgent leader, was getting help from foreign jihadists who would overthrow the legitimate governments of Europe if they got their way. Soldiers must fight in America in order that Britons could sleep safely at home.

A brief history of waterboarding

American soldiers torture a Philippine captive as European despots look on with delight (Life magazine cover, 1902).

“Waterboarding” is the latest name for a form of water torture going back to the Middle Ages in Europe, but condemned as illegal and immoral since the 1700s. Banned from Europe, water torture persisted in other parts of the world, including some European colonies, until the mid-20th century.

In the United States, water torture first appears as a means to terrorize slaves. It persists into the 20th century as a routine punishment for African American convict laborers in the Deep South. Most notoriously, it was used by U.S. soldiers on Philippine captives during the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). After that war, the technique shows up sporadically in some domestic police departments as a way to force detainees to confess to a crime.1

The “water cure”: Here’s a description by 1st Lt. Grover Flint, 35th U.S. Infantry, of a typical field interrogation in the occupied Philippines:

A man is thrown down on his back and three or four men sit or stand on his arms and legs and hold him down, and either a gun barrel or a rifle barrel or a carbine barrel or a stick … is simply thrust into his jaws … as a gag. In the case of very old men I have seen their teeth fall out — I mean when it was done a little roughly. He is simply held down, and then water is poured onto his face, down his throat and nose …, and that is kept up until the man gives some sign of giving in or becomes unconscious.… A man suffers tremendously; there is no doubt about that. His suffering must be like that of a man who is drowning, but who can not drown.2

Soldiers and officers called this technique “the water cure,” after a type of alternative health care, popular in the 1800s, in which applying cold water to the body was considered therapeutic. By using this term to name an excruciating torture, the soldiers were making what ethicist Jonathan Glover calls a “cold joke” — a humorless witticism that distances the torturer from his own action by making nonsense of the victim’s suffering.

As far as I know, no one has yet uncovered the origin of the term “waterboarding.” But if it was coined by the men who practice it today, it probably also originates in a cold joke — possibly an attempt to call the torture an “extreme sport,” by analogy with snowboarding, sandboarding, dirtboarding, etc. [Update: Why we call it waterboarding]

Symposium on the Creek War

I’m doing a talk at Auburn University’s symposium “The Creek War and War of 1812 in the South,” May 22-23 in Auburn and at the Horseshoe Bend battlefield park. The website is at auburn.edu/creekwar

Some widely read historians will be taking part, including Gregory Dowd (A Spirited Resistance), John Grenier (The First Way of War), David and Jeanne Heidler (Old Hickory’s War), and Greg Waselkov (A Conquering Spirit). The Creek War is notable not only for including some of the deadliest battles ever fought between Indians and U.S. settlers. It also led to the conquest of the Creek Nation, which in turn opened the Deep South to settlement by slaveholding cotton planters. It also launched future president Andrew Jackson to national fame.

My contribution will be to talk about Burnt Corn, the fight that turned a Creek civil war into a war between Indians and Americans. The episode, which ended in a rout of the American militia by a smaller Indian force, was the subject of what we now call “spin,” from more than one quarter. I’ll be dealing with claims that the Creek Indians were tools of America’s British enemy.

One of the most curious facts about the battle is that it inspired Alabama’s first home-grown literary work, a mock-heroic poem about the commander of the militia at Burnt Corn called The Last Battle of Sir John Falstaff the 2nd, or, The Hero of the Burnt-Corn Fight. I think it’s a good example of the genre, a slashing satire full of self-reflexive humor and playful allusions, which deserves to be remembered for its own sake. I won’t go into this at the conference, but I believe the poem, by one Lewis Sewall, fell into oblivion because it jarred in so many ways with the canonical origin myth of the Deep South.

Contrast A.B. Meeks’ sentimental romance The Red Eagle, which embroiders the life of Scotch-Indian William Weatherford. It was reborn in handsome 20th-century editions used to afflict generations of Alabama schoolchildren. While I don’t imagine the kids are waiting breathlessly for another 19th-century poem to memorize, I do think it’s high time the rest of us had a new edition of Falstaff the 2nd. Today the poem only survives in a few damaged copies guarded by archivists. Philip D. Beidler at the University of Alabama has published more about this subject than anyone else.