El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  THE CONCERNS THE Spanish had about Nootka also stretched much farther south, though with the 1768 establishment of the San Blas base, ships could begin a more targeted campaign to establish fortifications at key points along the coast, and members of religious orders could be brought along so that missions would rise in tandem. California represented the final continental frontier. It still remained unknown to most Europeans, including the Spanish, though the legend of the warrior Queen Calafia persisted, as did the belief that California was an island. The fantasy was, for some time, a cartographic truth. Maps produced in the mid-seventeenth century, such as the 1650 effort by the Dutch mapmaker Joan Vinckeboons, depicted it as a long, thin, green wedge floating a few miles from the mainland, separate from the deserts and mountains across the bay.32 One reason for these errors was that few Europeans had traversed the region, though the extensive journeys Father Eusebio Kino made in the 1680s and 1690s around the Baja Peninsula and Pimería Alta would help correct these misconceptions. Kino reasoned that there must be a land connection to California, on the basis of his observation that the Yuma people and other Native Americans possessed blue shells like the ones he had seen when he reached the Pacific in 1685, signifying travel and trade by foot.33 His extensive notes resulted in a raft of new information, but another century passed before mapmakers absorbed it into their work.34 Indeed, even as late as the mid-1800s, Japanese maps continued to portray California as an island.35

  California also troubled Spanish administrators because it had no reliable connections to the other parts of the empire. The overland journey from New Spain was long and arduous and there was no main road to Alta California. Work on creating such a route began a decade before Captain Cook landed in Nootka Sound, and it would represent the final stage of Spain’s concerted efforts at expansion in North America after more than two centuries in pursuit, over land and sea, of everything from the cities of Cíbola to a suitable place to plant crops. By this point, Spanish exploration and settlement were far more extensive than anything the French had managed; and the British settlers had lagged behind, rarely venturing farther than a three-week journey beyond the East Coast ports.36 In the decades to come, the people of the new United States would be ready to push into the west, and Spain, without realizing it fully at the time, was now helping to open the way.

  José de Gálvez—along with the governor of California, Gaspar de Portolá; and a Franciscan named Junípero Serra—started planning what they came to call the “sacred expedition” to connect the farthest reaches of California with the rest of the empire.37 By this point, there were enough missions in Baja California to run the length of the peninsula, one after another, like a decade of rosary beads. Taking the missionizing effort into Alta California would be the Franciscans, who had replaced the Jesuits in Baja after the latter’s 1767 expulsion. Serra, a diminutive priest who was just over five feet tall, came from the Spanish island of Mallorca (Majorca) and had already enjoyed a long career in the Americas. This included a period, along with former student and fellow missionary Francisco Palóu, in the Texas territory—a period which was cut short by a Lípan Apache attack on the San Sabá mission in 1758. The authorities considered the site too dangerous and they were ordered to leave.38 Portolá, for his part, had a military background and had participated in the expulsion of the Jesuits by suppressing angry or violent local supporters of the priests.

  Gálvez decided the best course of action would be to place soldiers at a presidio in Monterey, in the north of California, to ward off any potential Russian incursion. Portolá was put in overall command, and at a meeting in San Blas, it was decided that one group would go by sea and another by land, “so that both expeditions might unite at the same harbor of Monterey, and by means of the observations made by one and the other they might acquire for once and for all complete knowledge” of the routes to California.39

  The first ship, the San Carlos, left La Paz, Baja, in January 1769 and storms drove it off course. It lumbered into San Diego at the end of April with much of the surviving crew suffering from scurvy. In the meantime, the other packet, the San Antonio, left in mid-February and arrived by April 11. A third vessel, the San José, was lost at sea.40 Serra, meanwhile, had joined one of the overland parties, which were suffering their own hardships. The first group, which had around seventy soldiers and Indians, arrived in San Diego by May; the second party—which included Portolá and Serra, and initially about forty Indians—reached it in July. By the time all the members of the expedition were reunited, about half had died.41

  On July 16, 1769, Serra placed a cross in the ground and dedicated San Diego de Alcalá, the first mission planted in Alta California. Meanwhile, Portolá made arrangements to continue to Monterey, five hundred miles to the north, taking Father Juan Crespí and a group of soldiers. They had only the report of the explorer Sebastián Vizcaíno, from more than a century earlier, to help them find the bay. So when they arrived overland at what they thought was the correct latitude, they could not see anything that matched Vizcaíno’s description, in part because the original map had been rendered from the sea.42 They continued north, reaching San Francisco Bay by November, before turning back to San Diego, where they were greeted by the news that, in their absence, the site had been attacked by a group of Kumeyaay in August, and Serra’s assistant had been killed.43 Meanwhile, the San Antonio had returned to Baja for supplies, but it took so long to return that the colony was now on the edge of collapse. Portolá was about to fold up the whole enterprise when the ship returned in March 1770, bringing much-needed reinforcements.44

  Portolá soon sailed again in another attempt to locate Monterey. This time he was successful, and with the new supplies he was able to establish a settlement there in June 1770. Serra had traveled with him and later described the voyage, which lasted for more than a month, as “somewhat trying.” A land expedition that had been sent out at the same time had already arrived.45 Soon afterward, the priests and soldiers erected a cross and a chapel. They even suspended bells from the trees for the celebratory Mass, after which, according to Serra, “the officers proceeded to the act of taking formal possession … unfurling and waving once more the royal flag … all accompanied with cheers, ringing of bells, cannonades, etc.”46 Soon, Serra was able to add his second mission, San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo, alongside the civil presidio. The Spanish explored to the north after this, but San Francisco would not have a settlement until after 1775, when the San Carlos sailed into the bay. The following year, work began on a presidio and the mission San Francisco de Asís. At the same time, three thousand miles to the east, rebel forces in the British colonies had declared their independence. California, at this point, was still a world unto itself.

  The Native Americans that the Spanish encountered in California were as diverse as the landscape in which they lived and prospered. Small communities were scattered up and down the coast in villages with anywhere from tens to hundreds of people, places the Spanish called rancherías. The sea was an obvious source of food for the coastal communities, but inland the mild climate and fertile land provided edible plants, and abundant animals to hunt. Many of these groups moved around according to the season in order to make the best use of natural resources.47

  There was great diversity—even among the seventeen thousand people in the San Francisco Bay Area alone and just within the Miwok language group there were subdivisions into Coast, Bay, Plains, and northern peoples, all of whom further divided into speakers of a number of languages, such as Unisumne, Huiluc, Chilamne, or Julpun.48 Wider estimates of the language groups along all of Alta California claim that roughly ninety languages existed under the umbrella of seven broader linguistic families.49 The peoples of California were known to use cardinal directions—northern, southern—to describe who they were, but this concept was probably not understood by the Spaniards.50 Some of the names used for the Native American groups today were quite possibly Spanish interpretations, as misunderstanding was commonpl
ace. Spanish words soon came to dominate, for example, describing people as Costanoan (sometimes Ohlone), which comes from the Castilian word costeños for people who live near the coast.51 An accurate population figure is also complicated, but it is thought that some three hundred thousand Native Americans lived in Alta California at the time of the arrival of the Spanish.52

  Farther to the south of San Francisco were the Chumash, whom the Spanish met during their first trek to Monterey in 1767 through what is now the Santa Clara valley. Father Crespí described in his diary coming upon a large village, where “we counted about thirty large, comfortable, and well-constructed houses,” and he estimated that about four hundred people lived there, writing that they were “a large and healthy people, quick, industrious, and clever.” The Spaniards traded beads with them in exchange for goods, including wooden plates, which “could not have been more elegant if they had been made on a potter’s wheel.”53

  The missions, as had happened elsewhere in the Americas, would have a transformative and traumatic effect on the people of California, turning the Chutchui and Ohlone, the Oroysom and Salinan, among so many others, into Christians. In this process, their ways of life did not end entirely but were adapted to these new circumstances. The missions in California tried to tie Native Americans to the land, ending their seasonal movements and changing their relationship to the natural world. The friars baptized the native Californians and gave them Spanish names, which were recorded in a mission register.54 The priests and officials likened them to children, and Native Americans were not considered gente de razón, or, literally “people of reason,” a social category that signified someone who spoke Castilian and was Catholic and loyal to the Spanish crown.55 It was a term that was meant to exclude Indians but was extended to mestizos, in part because most of the settlers who came to Alta California from New Spain and Baja during this time were varying degrees of mestizo, and in some cases of African origin as well. Twenty-six of the first forty-six settlers in the civilian pueblo Los Angeles, established in 1781, were either black or mulatto.56 By 1790 such descriptions would change—even with regard to the same person. Manuel Camero, for example, was described as mulatto in 1781 but as mestizo by 1790. In 1781, José Navarro had been a mestizo, but by 1790 he was an Español.57 Everyone who changed went a few shades lighter, and by 1790 Los Angeles had a population of seventy-three Spaniards, thirty-nine mestizos, twenty-two mulattoes, and seven Indians. This pattern of “whitening” was repeated throughout Alta California, in part because the necessities of frontier life wiped away many of the casta categories that dominated New Spain and replaced them with the local Californio identity of sin (without) razón or de (with) razón.58 This allowed a degree of social mobility and gave some black and even indigenous people access to privileges that may have been granted only to lighter-skinned or Spanish immigrants elsewhere in New Spain or the wider empire.59

  The Indians participated in mission life for a variety of reasons, some social and some economic. They could access European wares and tools and were introduced to farming and livestock, though the priests made them do much of the work. Animal husbandry changed the way that land was used—large areas were required for grazing—and the animals consumed what had previously been food for the Indians, who were then increasingly forced to rely on the missions.60 Some Indians lived in the mission settlements and learned trades, such as how to handle livestock as a vaquero, or artisanal work.

  The frontier missions in California, like those elsewhere in the Spanish empire, turned the religious orders into landowners and the indigenous people into their laborers. The missions were supposed to offer food, protection, and stability, though the arrival of the Spanish was part of what brought instability in the first place. Despite the conversions and changes, many of the California Indians retained their own beliefs within Catholicism; native symbols, for instance, were later found incorporated into mission decorations.61

  The mission walls did not keep out the violence inflicted upon Native Americans by the Spanish, and priests complained about soldiers stationed at the presidios. One priest based in San Diego wrote to Serra in 1772, saying some of the troops from the presidio “deserve to be hanged on account of the continuous outrages which they are committing in seizing and raping the women.”62 These violations, coupled with other changes the Spanish were trying to impose, caused numerous rebellions. In 1775, some Kumeyaay people attacked the San Diego mission again.63 An eyewitness report by Father Vicente Fuster described how, by his estimate, some six hundred people “pillaged the church of its precious articles, and after they set fire to it.” Fuster recalled that he “saw on all sides around me so many arrows that you could not possibly count them.”64 He survived the attack, but the mission’s other priest, Luis Jayme, was not so fortunate, and Fuster described the terrible moment when he found the body:

  He was disfigured from head to foot, and I could see that his death had been cruel beyond description … he was stripped completely of all his clothing, even to his undergarments around his middle. His chest and body were riddled through with countless jabs they had given him, and his face was one great bruise from the clubbing and stoning it had suffered.65

  That mission, however, was rebuilt, in 1780. For his part, Serra accepted the many challenges and was known as well for his deep personal asceticism, including scourging himself and sleeping on a board.66 He continued to be resilient in the face of not just Indian resistance but also difficulties with Spanish authorities. Disagreements between the Franciscans and colonial officials were constant, with the governor, Felipe de Neve, and Serra arguing over the treatment of Indians. Neve thought they were becoming too dependent on the missions and wanted them instead to have secular settlements and more civic integration. He pushed Serra to allow them to have certain official roles, such as alcalde or mayor; an angry Serra had little option but to comply.67

  One non-Spanish visitor to California in these early years of settlement was Jean-François de Galaup, Count of Lapérouse, in 1786. The Frenchman had earlier warned the viceroy about the Russians in Nootka Sound and had been on a larger exploratory mission to search for the Northwest Passage, as well as to investigate the trade in the north Pacific.68 He sailed into Monterey and spent time in California, where he observed the missions and their work with the Indians. It all left an unfavorable impression, and he noted that the Indians’ “condition hardly differs from that of the negroes of those households in our colonies.”69 This feeling was further confirmed after his time at the San Carlos mission: “It hurts us to say but the resemblance [to the slave colony in Saint-Domingue] is so great that we have seen men and women loaded with irons, others in the bloc, and finally, the blows of the whip.”70 Floggings were common and violence was part of mission life.71

  Rebellions continued as the missions grew. In 1776, the Ohlone people resisted mission encroachment until many of them were whipped, and in the same year Indians set the roof of San Luis Obispo on fire.72 In 1785, a woman named Toypurina, who was not Christian, and Nicolas José, a convert, were convicted with two others of plotting an attack on the San Gabriel mission. Under interrogation, Toypurina told the Spanish officials that “she was angry with the priests and the others at the mission, because we were living on their land.” She was first imprisoned, but later converted to Christianity and went to the mission of San Juan Bautista.73 There was also the inevitable invisible enemy facing the Indians: disease, the spread of which was facilitated by the resettlement of Indians into smaller, settled spaces.74

  Serra died in 1784 before he saw any serious epidemics take hold, and during his time in California he remained optimistic. At his death, nine missions and four presidios had been built.75 By 1823 there would be twenty-one missions, almost all of them concerned with the conversion and subsequent labor of the Indians, while two towns—Los Angeles and San José de Guadalupe, founded on the southern edge of San Francisco Bay in 1777—were established and intended to have civilian settlements.76
/>
  Attempts to connect California to other parts of northern New Spain, such as New Mexico, also had been ongoing. In 1774, Viceroy Bucareli commissioned Juan Bautista de Anza, a soldier with a distinguished record, to establish and record that route. Anza left on January 8 from the small presidio in Tubac, in today’s Arizona, located just north of the Tumacácori mission. He took thirty-five men and headed west, using existing Native American trails to forge a path through the desert and over the mountains. By March 22 they had reached Los Angeles, before heading up the coast to Monterey. Then the party retraced their steps back to their starting point, ensuring that the route was a certainty, not an accident.77 After their return to Arizona, Anza was promoted to lieutenant colonel and led a group of 240 soldiers and settlers back to California, this time going north from Monterey all the way to San Francisco, arriving in June 1776.78

  Elsewhere, two Franciscans—Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Francisco Silvestre Vélez de Escalante—and a handful of men began a potentially epic journey from Santa Fe into the northwest. They left in July 1776, passing through parts of the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin area of Utah before turning back, fearing for their survival, after two months of travel left them only a few hundred miles to the west of where they had started. They had completed a loop around the modern “four corners” region of the states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. A Spanish cartographer who lived in New Mexico, Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, was on that expedition, charged with mapping this difficult terrain. Part of the problem had been that there were no geographically accurate maps of the diverse and enormous lands between New Mexico and California; instead they had to depend on any Indian guides willing to help them. Although the expedition ended in failure, Miera managed to produce what was known as the “Geographic Map of the Newly Discovered Land to the North, Northwest, and West of New Mexico”—a work of art in itself, depicting some 175,000 square miles and measuring two feet high by three feet wide—which became a valuable resource for future western exploration.79