Humboldt River

Peter Skene Ogden came down out of the north in November of 1828 and hit a river nobody in his company had heard of. So he called it the Unknown River. He followed it for several hundred miles, blazed a trail along the bank, and drew the first known map of the country. Along the way one of his trappers died and was buried beside the water, so Ogden renamed it Paul's River after him. Then he changed it again to Mary's River, for the Native American wife of another trapper. That drifted into St. Mary's River. By the next year Ogden had soured on the place entirely and suggested Swampy River suited it best. A later fur party called it Barren River. Washington Irving's book called it Ogden's River, and that was the name most early travelers used. The one that finally stuck came in 1845, when John C. Frémont mapped the region and named it for a German naturalist who never saw it: Alexander von Humboldt.