John C. Fremont led roughly 60 men in the 1846 killing of several hundred Wintu people along the Sacramento River near what is now Redding, and 180 years later California wants his name off a state park.
California State Parks issued a notice Wednesday opening a 30-day public comment period on renaming Fremont Peak State Park in San Benito County as tooyohtak State Park, restoring the traditional Mutsun placename. It is pronounced too-YOH-tahk and means place of the bees.
The proposal follows a formal request from the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band in October 2019 that cited Fremont’s documented violence against Native Americans, including the Sacramento River Massacre. It moves forward under the state’s Reexamining Our Past initiative, which reviews park names, monuments and interpretation tied to the dispossession of California’s tribes.
The 162-acre park sits atop a 3,173-foot summit in the Gabilan Range above San Juan Bautista, with views of Monterey Bay, and houses a public observatory. The peak itself would keep the Fremont name for now, since geographic features are named federally. Fremont, later a U.S. senator and the namesake of the Bay Area city, raised an American flag on the summit in 1846 during a standoff with Mexican authorities…