Don't you just hate it when you go on a trip and you leave something behind? It happened to California's earliest European visitors.

When Gaspar de Portola led his expedition through Southern California in 1769, the soldiers camped along a river now known as Trabuco Creek. Phil Brigandi, who wrote "Orange County Place Names A-Z," says the creek was the site of a foolish incident that's memorialized to this day.

"One of the soldiers, one of the Spanish soldiers, lost his gun, his blunderbuss, which in Spanish is a 'trabuco.' And obviously, a soldier losing his weapon, particularly when you're out on the raw frontier, that's a major happening."

So the creek was named blunderbuss, or Trabuco Creek. The soldier's mistake became immortalized all over southern Orange County. There's a Trabuco Canyon, a Trabuco Road in Mission Viejo, even a Trabuco Mesa. That Spanish soldier is probably relieved that they finally changed the name of the town on the mesa to Rancho Santa Margarita.

(Airdate: 8/2/2008)