Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 16.djvu/65



SPANISH RELICS IN AMERICA 57

It is said that when General Lew Wallace returned from Mexico he placed in his car of freight his little son's burro, and the clerk in the railroad office in Indianapolis not being familiar with the Spanish word telegraphed that the freight car had arrived "short one bureau, long one donkey," to which General Wallace telegraphed in reply "change places with the donkey."

The Sawtooth Mountains of the West are known by the Spanish equivalent Sierras, while canyon and llano are now familiar words to us all. The storms of the southwest have given us our words cyclone and in the southeast tornado, while other dangers are recalled by desperado and stampede.

The rushes in the western lakes are still called tules, and the miners of the early days learned from the Spaniards the terms Eldorado and bonanza. In more modern times the tamale is winning an ever-increasing popularity.

When the early miners flocked to California they carried with them comparatively few small coins, but they found that the Spanish real which they called a "bit" was the equivalent of twelve and a half cents, so the terms so characteristic of the West, "two-bits," "six-bits," originated.

It seems strange that these terms should have any connec- tion with our dollar mark, $, and yet the American dollar adopted for our decimal system was originally the Spanish eight real piece, although few school boys who have read in Robinson Crusoe of the old "pieces of eight" have recognized our coveted coin under that designation.

In ancient times the Dutch traders who visited the Spanish settlements in America used a silver coin known as the Thaller, which was exactly equivalent to eight Spanish reals. The name was shortened from "Joachittisthaler" the silver having been mined in the vale or valley of Joachim in Bohemia, but the Dutch tongue pronounced the word Thaller as "Dollar."

The old method of designating the eight real piece, or dollar, seems to have been to make the figure eight and then to draw a cancellation line through it, as in many other well known ab- breviations, for example cent, barrel, etc.