The Valley of the S-word
The ski resort on the California side of Lake Tahoe had a problem.
Not lack of snow, although that is indeed a worry in this era of Western drought and wildfires.
Not lack of customers, either. The resort opened in 1949 and became famous as the center of the 1960 Winter Olympic Games. It was, clearly, a great place to ski.
The resort’s problem was its name: Squaw Valley Ski Resort.
There were in fact two problems. One problem had been hanging around since a 2011 merger with a smaller resort. Instead of coming up with a fresh new name, the owners had simply stapled the two names together into an ungainly four-word string: Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows.
But the bigger problem was the first word in the resort’s name, the five-letter word beginning with S.
For decades, that S-word hadn’t been a problem, or if it had been a problem, no one in charge was much inclined to do anything about it.
They could always claim a historical defense. It had been “Squaw Valley” since 1849, when some men from Back East, as Californians call anything beyond Nevada, stumbled upon a place occupied only by women and children of the local Washoe tribe. (They were camped there for the summer, waiting for the adult males to return from hunting expeditions.) Squaw wasn’t a Washoe…
