"Something original... like.... Wasco!"

This is a bit off topic, but I was laying here today and the thought occurred to me. I am interested in Shafter Basketball because the team is named after me. Maybe there is another great man somewhere who gave his name to Wasco, a fellow military man, perhaps. We could email about hoops, horses, talk some smack, you know, help pass the time in this long offseason of the soul. So I cranked up the old Internet and went straight to Wikipedia to see what I could find. Military man? No, but nearly perhaps. It turns out that before 1900, Wasco was Deweyville and before that, just Dewey. Wikipedia doesn't say who Dewey was, but it might have been my old buddy from the Spanish-American War, Admiral George Dewey. Good guy, that Dewey. Too bad they changed the name.

Anyway, here's the funny part. It seems that a fellow named William Bonham moved to Deweyville, California from Wasco, Oregon. Bonham managed to convince the town that there were already too many Deweyvilles and that they would do well to come up with a name as "distinctive as this glorious land." Now, so far as I can tell, there is only one Deweyville in existence that predates the Deweyville Bonham knew - a thirty year old settlement of John Cook Dewey and three families in Northern Utah . So Bonham had his work cut out for him in convincing Deweyvillians that the name was used up, but he ultimately did, suggesting that they take on a name altogether new and untainted by outside influence... The name of the place he was from.