DESCENDANTS OF THE POMO who survived the 1850 Bloody Island Massacre still live around Clear Lake. Many can’t drive into town without passing a name that, to them, honors one of the men whose cruelty drew the soldiers down on their families.
The town is Kelseyville. The man was Andrew Kelsey. And after years of petitions, a costly ballot measure and a split vote of the county’s own supervisors, the decision has moved out of local hands — to a state committee that takes it up later this month, and a federal board that will have the last word.
The California Advisory Committee on Geographic Names is scheduled to meet June 26. The little-known committee is expected to take up the proposal to rename the town of about 3,400 people “Konocti,” after the mountain that rises over Clear Lake. It is the first time the committee can weigh in, and its recommendation then goes to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names for a final decision. That federal panel sets official names for federal maps and publications.
History behind the name
The history at the center of the case is not in serious dispute. Andrew Kelsey and his partner, Charles Stone, ran a cattle operation on the lakeshore in the late 1840s. Accounts collected ever since describe them as having enslaved hundreds of Pomo and Wappo people, then confined, starved, beat, raped and killed them. In late 1849, a group of Pomo killed Kelsey and Stone. The U.S. Army’s answer came on May 15, 1850, at a Clear Lake island the Pomo called Bo-no-po-ti, where soldiers under Nathaniel Lyon attacked a gathering that was largely women, children and elders. Estimates of the dead range from about 60 in Lyon’s own report to 200 in newspaper accounts of the time. Some later counts run far higher. The attack became known as the Bloody Island Massacre.
The area went by “Uncle Sam” — soldiers’ name for nearby Mount Konocti — until the Uncle Sam post office was renamed Kelseyville in 1882. The name honors the Kelsey family, including Andrew, and it also tracks Kelsey Creek nearby. Supporters of the name change to Konocti say the town is living under the name of an enslaver and killer. Opponents say the record is murkier — that the name grew out of the creek and the wider family’s long use in the area, not a deliberate tribute to Andrew Kelsey.
“Americans have to stop loving all its killers — stop honoring its killers by naming universities, cities, towns, institutions and streets after them,” Betsalen Brown, a member of the Elem Pomo, told supervisors when they took up the question in 2024.
All seven of Lake County’s federally recognized tribes — Big Valley, Habematolel, Robinson Rancheria, Elem, Scotts Valley, Koi Nation and Middletown Rancheria — support the change, which was brought to the federal board by the local volunteer group Citizens for Healing. The proposed name, Konocti, comes from the Elem people, described as the area’s oldest tribe.
“The name will change before they put me back in the earth. I’ll guarantee that,” said Jose “Moke” Simon III, chairman of Middletown Rancheria, at the supervisors’ meeting where the board took its position.
The politics of renaming
Tribal leaders have stayed calm about the long fight but blunt about its politics. Flaman McCloud Jr., chairman of the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians, told supervisors the lack of clarity on whose vote counts had left him cold.
“Back in July they wanted you to put it to a vote of the county. And now that it’s coming back here, it’s ‘respect the vote of the county, not your decision,’” McCloud said. “It’s very confusing for me.”
He said he did not begrudge the result — “I respect and appreciate how the vote went; that’s how the people spoke” — and said his people would endure either way. “Whether the name changes or it stays, we’re gonna keep thriving. From those times till now, we’re still here.”
At the ballot box, the change was not close. In November 2024, county voters rejected an advisory measure asking whether supervisors should back the rename, 70.6 percent to 29.4 percent. The supervisors recommended it anyway a month later, voting 3-2 in December to back the change. Opponents called it a slap at the voters. Supporters called it a matter of conscience — the kind of question, they argued, a majority shouldn’t get to settle.
The opposition, organized as Save Kelseyville, leans on cost and continuity rather than a defense of Andrew Kelsey. Its leaders — committee chair Rachel White and Kelseyville Lumber owner Mark Borghesani among them — argue residents, businesses, the school district and the fire district would bear the expense of changing signs, licenses and letterhead; that a new “Konocti” would be confused with the existing Konocti Unified School District in nearby Clearlake; and that renaming erases history rather than reckoning with it. A “Save Kelseyville” petition gathered nearly 1,800 signatures. The town’s name is also a farm brand — Kelseyville bills itself as the “pear capital of the world” and throws an annual Pear Festival.
The opposition now includes the supervisor who represents the town. Helen Owen holds the District 1 seat once held by Simon, the Middletown Rancheria chairman who pledged to see the name changed. She takes the other side. “I’m opposed to it,” Owen said. “I think it’d be unfortunate and extremely costly.” She also questions whether the name can be tied for certain to Andrew Kelsey: “The research I’ve done stated that there was Kelsey Creek, called Kelsey Creek by trappers before Mr. Kelsey had moved in. There were other Kelsey families that lived there. So I don’t think there’s anything definitive as to who it was named after.”
Above all, Owen comes back to the vote. “The fact that it went before the people and the people voted — over 70 percent wanted to keep it,” she said. “If you have your intention and you don’t plan on listening to the people, then why ask them? It’s a shame to have asked them and then said, ‘We’re not listening to you.’” She said she tried to bring the matter back before the board after she was seated and was told she couldn’t. And in a county she calls one of the poorest in California, she sees the dispute as a costly distraction from fire risk, failing roads and a weak economy: “Economics needs to be at the forefront. It’s not a positive distraction.”
A quieter form of opposition comes from the people whose job is selling the town to outsiders. T. Brian Fisher owns Suites on Main, a small hotel in downtown Kelseyville, and runs Visit Lake County, the county’s tourism-marketing arm. He calls Andrew Kelsey one of the town’s “abhorrent founders” and does not defend him. His objection is to the replacement name. Konocti, he notes, is already everywhere — the local school district is Konocti Unified, it is the mountain that rises behind the lake, and the name is on businesses all around Clear Lake. “Kelseyville is one of the only names that’s actually unique to the county,” Fisher said. “Lake County is notorious for taking names from somewhere else.”
Fisher sees the rename as a cost with no payoff — new signs, licenses and letterhead for a struggling town that, he argues, does not honor its namesake in the first place. “We do not celebrate. We don’t have Kelsey Days,” he said. “We don’t pay tribute to that person.”
Whether the federal board would actually overrule a 70-30 local advisory vote is uncertain. The mass renamings of 2022 and 2023 stripped a single word “squaw,” a slur against Native women, from hundreds of federal place names, by order of the Interior Department. “Kelseyville” carries no such automatic trigger. Citizens for Healing argues instead that the name is offensive on its own terms, the kind of case the board weighs one at a time. The closest precedent cuts in the petitioners’ favor: in 2023 the board renamed Fresno County’s Squaw Valley to Yokuts Valley despite local opposition.
That Squaw Valley is a foothill farm town of about 3,500, not the better-known ski resort near Lake Tahoe. The resort dropped the same word in 2021, but on its own, a voluntary rebrand to Palisades Tahoe, with no federal board involved.
Working against them is a shift in Washington. In January 2025, the Trump administration ordered agencies to review their appointments to the naming board under an order titled “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness.” That year, the Interior Department also shut down the advisory committee set up to review offensive place names. Whether a board shaped by that policy will call a town tied to a killer of Native people “offensive” is far from certain.
Even a yes vote would not change much overnight. Federal approval covers official maps and publications. By itself, it would not change the post office’s mailing address, the road signs or the name of either school district. Those are separate decisions by separate authorities.
For the families who started this, the point was never the signage. Lucy Moore was a small child when she survived Bloody Island by hiding in the water and breathing through a tule reed; she lived to about 110. Her great-grandson, Clayton Duncan, helps lead a sunrise ceremony of forgiveness at the site each year. California formally apologized for the genocide of Native people in 2019.
The state committee makes its recommendation June 26. The federal board has the last word. Until then, the maps still say Kelseyville.