History of Fresno County, Vol. 1 - Paul E. Vandor

Скачать книгу

the few scattered Spanish settlements near the sea-coast by those who had come by the comparatively easier and shorter journey from Mexico, helped out by occasional Americans and others landed or deserting from trading vessels, or wandering across the country as hunter, trapper or adventurer.

      It required a transcendental event to bring about, as it did, California's phenomenally rapid settlement, to brave and overcome the physical obstacles and geographic barriers on the months' long and dangerous overland journey. But for the lure of gold, California might have long continued a sparsely populated country to be settled and developed slowly by a farming class as Oregon and Washington were in large part. The real, positive and unlooked for development of the state began with the discovery of gold. Only natural that Spain should be first to send settlers, but her error was in not practically following up her decided advantages in the presented opportunity. Existing conditions in a country of plenty and the easy life in a genial climate, without necessity for arduous toil ''tended no doubt toward stagnation rather than progress." Had these pioneers and their descendants been of as progressive a race as those that were to dispossess them, the very barriers separating the west from the east would have been Mexico's most helpful agency in retaining her California province.

      As established in the Californias, the missions were as much political as religious institutions, and they were accorded the protection of the king's soldiers, wretchedly equipped, ill-paid and frequently unpaid for long as they were. Kings of Spain and viceroys of Mexico made their entrances and exits on the world's stage, but California slumbered along and underwent little material change from the discovery days under Cortez, save for the fringe of civilization planted along the sea-coast and spread out thinly from the twenty-one missions from San Diego to Sonoma. In 1831 these missions had already lost much of their splendor and greatness. The downhill grade began in 1824, followed by secularization in 1845, sale of a number of missions for a song, and the neglected Indian converts scattered to run wild and wretched over the country.

      Almost up to the time that the great immigration upon the gold discovery startled the world, ushering in an era so extraordinary in history that H. H. Bancroft, the California historian, has epitomized it in the trite phrase, "The Inferno of 49," the interior valley country, which has been the wealth basis of the state through every development stage, continued terra incognita practically. The little known concerning it was indefinite and much of this conjectural. The very purpose for which the information was gathered — if it was with a definite object in view — existed no more because secularization under the Mexican republic had sealed the doom of the missions and bereft the padres of power and property. The sun then set on the golden age of the missions, the day of another race dawned and with it was ushered in the real and too long held back advancement of a sadly neglected land.

      CHAPTER IV

      "And it all availed nothing."

      Little effect on the substantial new conditions after the American conquest had all the impotent efforts to block manifest destiny during the three quarters of a century of the Spaniard and the Mexican, with the heroic work of the padres in their missionary and civilizing labors. The quoted phrase epitomizes in fitting epitaph the passing of the Spanish rule in California (1769-1828) with its ten vice-regal governors, of the Mexican rule (1822-46) with its thirteen governors, and incidentally the end of the efforts of the padres, at times arising almost to the sublimity of martyrdom, to convert the Indian and introduce an effete civilization.

      The two periods cast over the early history of California a glamor of romance and the picturesque but added little or nothing to the real and materialistic. No effort in Upper California at colonization was made for a little more than two and one-half centuries after Juan R. Cabrillo's voyage in 1542-3 exploring the coast line, half a century before the discovery of Massachusetts bay, nor for more than 160 years after Sebastian Viscaino's, in November and December, 1602, when he set foot in the harbors of San Diego and Monterey.

      To prevent Russian encroachment southward from Fort Ross and Bodega bay and to convert the Indians, successive land and sea expeditions sent out from Mexico eventually established a chain of twenty-one military and religious establishments located at intervals of a day's journey by horse along or near the coast.

      The first of these was founded by Padre Junipero Serra in July, 1769, and the last in August, 1823, as one of two north of the Bay of San Francisco, blunderingly located by Caspar de Portola in a search for Monterey Bay, but ignorant to the last that he had given the world one of its three greatest harbors. San Francisco Bay was long after its discovery mapped as Sir Francis Drake's Bay and was so shown in Colton's Atlas, published as late as 1855 for use in the public schools. In the very early history of California, Serra, the simple friar, was the greatest pioneer, the first civilizer of the western coast, the very heart and soul of the spiritual conquest, and he it was who "lifted California from the unread pages of geological history and placed it on the modern map."

      Upper California's physical geography was imperfectly known until after American explorers and scientists investigated. Little attention was paid this subject further than to learn something generally of the country on the ocean border from San Diego to Fort Ross. This was a forty to fifty miles-wide strip comprising the white settlements concerning which anything was known with accurate particularity. So also as regards the boundaries. Not until the Americans seized Oregon was it that they, and not the English under claim of the Francis Drake (1579) and George Vancouver (1791-94) discoveries, were dealt with in settling the northern boundary dispute. The eastern line question was not determined until the entire country came into the possession of the United States after the war with Mexico. Even then the segregation was by the Americans themselves with California's admission into the union in September, 1850. Down to the American conquest, the Californians occupied only a negligible portion of the interior, yet while knowing nothing of the country east of the Sierras, save by report, they asserted claim to the land as far eastward as Salt Lake.

      The coast mission sites were located with reference to sea harbors at San Diego, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and San Francisco, while the others on the Camino del Rey (King's Highway), connecting them all, were selected with special regard to water for irrigation. California's climate was similar in general to that of Mexico and the solicitude of the padres was ever to choose well-watered sites in fertile valleys for their establishments. Their judgment of sites was admirable. Settlements along the camino manifested no tendency to spread from the coast. The interior was so inaccessible and appeared so dry and inhospitable. The fathers discouraged mining — in short there was no inducement to explore the interior, while the isolation tended to self-support and the development of a quiet pastoral life.

      Barter there was none, except in hides and tallow with the periodical New England traders, and hence cattle raising became the industry. Geographic considerations determined the location of the settlements and the occupation of their founders. The seaports and valleys would probably otherwise have received most of the new comers, until they came to appreciate the necessity for irrigation, when they would gradually have spread to the interior. The search for gold in turn headed them from the agricultural districts into the gulches and canyons of the Sierras, and so with the great stampede, mining camps and towns .sprang like mushrooms in the Sierra foothill belt. Locations were controlled by convenience to some rich bar or stream, often in narrow gulch or on steep mountain slope, rarely with regard to farming prospects or future lines of travel, activity or centers of population, accounting for the desertion of so many of them with the later changed conditions.

      The Spaniards extended the exploration of California with exasperating slowness during the half century and more that they were in undisturbed possession. After Juan B. de Anza's time, in 1774, most of the information concerning the interior was gathered in the search for sites for a projected interior parallel line of missions, or lay punitive military expeditions pursuing runaway neophytes.

      Thus in 1804 Padre Martin crossed the range to the Tulares, which he appears to have explored as far as the Kings River. Gov. Jose J. de Arrillaga (March 1800-July 1814), an enterprising soldier and a more zealous religionist than any of his predecessors, planned in 1806, a more extensive exploration of the interior than any before undertaken. A party

Скачать книгу