Los Angeles & Southern California - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [11]
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The distance between California’s missions equals a day’s journey by horseback.
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The first Spanish colonizing expedition, called the ‘Sacred Expedition,’ proved nearly disastrous. On July 1, 1769, a sorry lot of about 100 missionaries and soldiers, led by the Franciscan priest Junípero Serra and the military commander Gaspar de Portolá, limped ashore at San Diego Bay. They had just spent several weeks at sea sailing from Baja California; about half of their cohort had died en route and many of the survivors were sick or near death. It was an inauspicious beginning for the Mission San Diego de Alcalá Click here, the first of the chain of 21 California missions.
Lest you start feeling sorry for the Spanish, their suffering pales compared with the plight of the indigenous people. The colonizers virtually enslaved the Native Americans and made them construct the missions and presidios. Presidio soldiers, whose job was ostensibly to protect the missions and deter foreign intruders, actually passed much of their time raping and pillaging. Meanwhile, European diseases such as smallpox and syphilis further decimated the Native American population, as they had no immunity to them.
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An excellent resource for learning about early life in SoCal is A World Transformed: Firsthand Accounts of California Before the Gold Rush, edited by Joshua Paddison.
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The missions did achieve modest success at farming, managing to just barely become self-sufficient, an essential achievement during the 1810–1821 Mexican war for independence from Spain when supplies from Mexico were cut off completely. As a way of colonizing California and converting the natives to Christianity, however, the mission period was an abject failure. The Spanish population remained small, the missions achieved little better than survival, foreign intruders were not greatly deterred and more Native Americans died than were converted.
Today, all of the SoCal missions in San Diego (the oldest; Click here), San Juan Capistrano (the prettiest; Click here), Ventura and Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles have been restored and welcome visitors. The best preserved presidio is the one in Santa Barbara.
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THE PATH TO STATEHOOD
Upon Mexican independence from Spain in 1821, many of the new nation’s people looked to California to satisfy their thirst for private land. By the mid-1830s the missions had been secularized and their land divvied up into free land grants by Mexican governors. This process gave birth to the rancho system. The new landowners, called rancheros or Californios, prospered quickly and became the social, cultural and political fulcrums of California. The average rancho was a whopping 16,000 acres and largely given over to livestock to supply the trade in hide and tallow.
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The first Los Angeles telephone book, issued in 1882, was only three pages long.
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Meanwhile, American explorers, trappers, traders, whalers, settlers and opportunists increasingly showed interest in California. Some of the Americans who started businesses married locals and assimilated into Californio society. Impressed by California’s untapped riches and imbued with Manifest Destiny (the doctrine to extend the US border from coast to coast), US president Andrew Jackson sent an emissary to offer the financially strapped Mexican government $500,000 for California. But the Mexicans were not interested in selling and soon a political storm was brewing.
In 1836 Texas seceded from Mexico and declared itself an independent republic. When the US annexed Texas in 1845, Mexico broke off diplomatic relations and ordered all foreigners without proper papers to be deported from California. In turn, the US declared war on Mexico and began an invasion. By July US naval units occupied every port on the California coast,