1772-1821

While the American Revolution was fomenting on the east coast, Gaspar de Portola set out with Father Junipero Serra by land to Alta California to establish the foothold, beginning with a site for a mission in San Diego. Portola, along with Sergeant Ortega, scouted north as far as San Francisco Bay and turned back to establish the capital in Monterey. Portola, already governor of the lower Baja California, became the first governor of Alta California. Others in the expedition would also be part of the later exploration of the central valley—Capitan Pedro Fages and Fr. Crespi. Serra’s founding of the mission in San Diego would be the first that by 1823 had established 21 along the coast.

On the eve of the American Revolution, Spanish Lt Coronel Juan Bautista de Anza led more than 250 men, women, and children 18,000 miles overland across the frontier of New Spain to establish a settlement in the San Francisco Bay. Joaquín Moraga and his family were in that expedition, a soldier whose name would ultimately be given to the Valley by his son and explorer Gabriel Moraga.

While most attention and resources were concentrated on the coast, the interior valley was Tierra Incognito on the maps, unknown territory to be explored. The first expeditions into the valley were to capture natives for the missions and to chase runaway natives and soldiers. Key explorers during this first period were Pedro Fages’s and Joaquín Moraga, with the priests and diarists accompanying them.

When Spain later approved expeditions to explore interior, the most notable were led by Gabriel Moraga’s from 1806-1810. During the same time, the American states were exploring their acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase from the French in 1803 with the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1808.

Spain’s hold was at its weakest, Mexican ideas of independence were fomenting, and the United States already had its eyes on Western expansion.

Meanwhile Spain’s American colonies were drifting away, giving rise to a tide of New World revolutions that swept away nearly all its American colonies. After several decades of Spain’s decline, precipitating the break in 1808 was Napoleon’s occupation of Spain, forcing Carlos IV and his son Fernando VII to renounce their rights to the crown and leaving Spain without a clearly legitimate ruler. The French occupation and an English blockade that cut off trade between Spain and its colonies caused a collapse of colonial trade and revenue that, together with the expenses of war, ruined the Spanish economy.

In Alta California, Spain’s crisis in Spain and the violent rebellion in 1810 in New Spain (Mexico) had disrupted commerce, shut off supplies for soldiers and missionaries, diminished the flow of goods for trade with natives, left unpaid salaries of government officials and made smuggling a necessity. After the American Revolution of 1776, Spanish colonies in the Americas erupted against Spain’s colonial grasp, too weak to hold the empire and left in 1821.

The Spanish did not come to wage war and eliminate the native population, although their intentions went terribly wrong, and they ended up doing much of that. They saw themselves as bringing God and glory and civilization to their colonies in the Americas (while mining it for the riches.) They established missions and attempted to convert natives to Spanish subjects (and workers). They relied on incentives, food and beads and a policy that intended to give back the lands to hispanized native peoples after they were developed by Spanish-speaking settlers.

They brought the Spanish language and Catholic religion, their institutions and law. They gave names to rivers and places and introduced horses and cattle and horsemanship itself. They introduced plants from Spain, olives, oranges, and fruits. This was their imprint, along with their DNA left in succeeding generations. Their legacy was complicated by diseases they also brought and the ultimate destruction of native plants and animals–and natives themselves.

To the native populations, the Spanish proved to be an invasive species, along with their animals and plants. They spread diseases for which natives had no immunity—smallpox, diphtheria, influenza and syphilis— and contributed to the initial decimation of the native population through diseases, abuse, warfare, and colonial subjugation. Native peoples progressed from wonderment or terror at these “whitefaces riding on big dogs” and wielding weapons that could overpower them to increased resistance and adaptation to horse culture and weaponry.

Archeological records indicate there were native populations in the valley 10,000 years ago. In the total length of the central valley there were over 50 triblets, most Yokut and Momo in our focus. Gabriel Moraga estimated around 280 average persons per village. Scholars estimates up to 300,000 in all California. Most natives in the northwest side of the Valley were removed in the first years to supply the missions. Some, located south of the San Joaquin River, melted away into territory inaccessible to white men. Near the shores of Lake Tulare and into Kings county Yokut tribes traded and joined in hunts, Monos kept mostly to the eastern Sierra. We refer to them in this history as native populations, they weren’t then neither American nor Indian. In the Spanish period they were “neophytes” if baptized and “heathen” if not.

It is irony that the Spanish never found the gold that would be discovered in the valley 27 years after they left. Today the names of some tribes survive in Casinos—Mono, Chuchanski, Tachi, and in the names like Kawia. For the most part they were Yokuts, “the people.” In the Tulare and Kings counties area they were lake peoples, Chu-nut, Wowol, Tachi. Some of what we know of them is from the interviews with later generations by Frank Latta in the 1930s. Bob Bautista was the last Tachi medicine man and the last surviving member of the Wowlumne Yokuts. He died in 1923. His grandfather swam the Kern River with Padre Garces in 1776.

The population of Alta California became increasingly mestizo (mixed), the combination of natives and Spaniards, already mestizo themselves. Spaniards brought very few women to the Americas and were partially successful in colonizing the lands they occupied by taking native women as wives or mates, with some encouragement from the Spanish crown, as long as they were Christianized or from a noble native tribe. Those who maintained Spanish ancestry, so very few after 200 years of mestizaje in Mexico, were referred to as criollos in the Spanish casta system. Contrast this with the English pilgrims who mostly avoided intermixing, although some of the success of the later European trappers was through taking native wives, thus entering tribal families. Native and mestiza women were essential to colonization virtually all settlers and soldiers from the Spanish period were not, in fact, born in Spain.  They were overwhelmingly mestizo, criollos, second or third generations removed from their Spanish forefathers.