Although
Eusebio Francisco Kino, S.J., had definitively demonstrated in 1700 that
the century-long geographic misconception of California as a great
island off the west coast of North America was false, the region remained,
from a practical point, insular. The great Colorado Desert extending
from central Arizona through the Imperial Valley and to the crest of
the Coast Range effectively defied an overland approach from the settled
areas of Sonora and thus from central New Spain. Despite various attempts
by Jesuit explorers to establish a land route, throughout their tenure
in the Californias and for the first years following their replacement
by Franciscans, contact and supply of the peninsula as well as the
new foundations in Alta California relied upon sailings from the ports
of Matanchel and San Blas on the coast of Nayarit. Given the limited
space upon ships, the movement of large quantities of supplies, livestock,
and particularly colonists to Alta California was severely constricted.
Juan
Bautista de Anza (1735-1788), son of a presidio commander of the same
name, was born on the northern frontier, served as commander of the
presidio of Tubac adjacent to mission San Xavier del Bac at Tucson,
and was charged by Viceroy Antonio María de Bucareli with the establishment
of the long-desired land route to California in late 1773. Departing
Tubac in January 1774, Anza, with Franciscans Juan Díaz and Francisco
Tomás Hemenegildo Garcés and thirty-one men, reached the Gila River,
followed it westward to its confluence with the Colorado, crossed
the Imperial Valley and San Gorgonio Pass, and arrived in San Gabriel
in late March. Although the party was exhausted, Anza had succeeded
in linking the route from Horcasitas (Hermosillo) to the Camino Real
of the Californias. Following a brief trip to Monterey, Anza returned
to Sonora and continued to Mexico City, where he reported his success.
With
plans to expand the Franciscan missions northward to San Francisco
Bay, Anza was commissioned by Bucareli to recruit thirty soldiers
and their families for service in the projected presidio and conduct them
overland via his newly established route. In October 1775, accompanied
by Franciscans Pedro Font, Tomás Eixarch, and Garcés, twenty-five
men as escort, and twenty-eight colonist-soldiers with their wives
and children under Ensign José Joaquín Moraga, Anza again departed
Tubac, and, following the route established the preceding year, reached
San Gabriel in early January 1776. After reorganization, Anza then
conducted the families northward to Monterey, arriving in early March.
Having accomplished the purpose of his march, he returned southward
a few days later. The Anza expeditions had not only opened a land
route to California, but also led to the first explorations of the
interior of Alta California by Garcés and Font, and to the establishment
of the Franciscan missions of La Purísima Concepción and San Pedro
y San Pablo Bicuñer at the confluence of the Gila and Colorado rivers.
The overland route established by Anza in 1774 was, however, short-lived,
and in July 1781 it was effectively closed by the massacre of Fernando
de Rivera y Moncada, a group of settlers he was conducting to California,
and Franciscan missionaries Díaz, Garcés, José Matías Moreno, and
Juan Antonio Barreneche at the hands of the Yumans.
Herbert
Eugene Bolton (1870-1953), founder of the study of former Spanish provinces
in the present United States, the “Spanish Borderlands,” also pioneered
archival research in Mexican archives, and produced a prodigious number
of scholarly articles and books on Spain in Florida, Louisiana, Texas,
New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, and California. During his professorships
at the Universities of Texas and California he supervised numerous
graduate students, many of whom became noted scholars in the field
and who were also unacknowledged contributors to his publications.
The five volumes of Anza’s California Expeditions are the result
of the unrecognized combined efforts of various graduate students,
revised, edited, and compiled by their professor. Vol. 1 contains an
introductory study also published separately as Outpost of Empire:
The Story of the Founding of San Francisco (New York: Knopf, 1931);
Font’s diary of his explorations; translated and annotated diaries
of the first expedition (by Anza, Díaz, Garcés, and Francisco Palóu) and
of the second expedition (by Anza, Font, Eixarch, Palóu, and Moraga);
and selected official correspondence regarding the expeditions. A facsimile
reprint of the five volumes was published in New York in 1966. Although
numerous scholarly studies regarding the Anza expeditions and the
people and events related to them have substantially augmented historical
knowledge of the expeditions since 1930, this work remains a useful
and fundamental source.
——W. Michael
Mathes
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