California - Her Story in Brief

It is ironic that the earlier colonizers of California all saw its development in personal, almost secular, terms. The Franciscans saw souls to convert to the glory of God. The Russians and British-Canadians coveted her furs. The French thought it just another primitive island and were indifferent. The Spanish saw it as a fortress, a shipping port, a vast expanse of land for horses and cattle to graze. None saw it as a literal gold mine.

For over a half-century California lay beneath the Spanish crown. Her upper geography was unknown save for sketchy reports of sea captains and explorers, coordinates on dubious maps.

In Mexico proper, since the conquest by Cortez in 1521, Spain's governors, generals, and diplomats oversaw the regime. A century and a half later, these worthy senors were exiling the Jesuits from their northern Mexico empires in Sonora, Sinaloa, Loreto,Nayarit, and Baja California.

It fell to the soldiers to force the Jesuits' departure. Soldados – infantry, cavalry, artillery – and the notorious Catalan skirmishers who had fought the mountain indios. Colonel Elizondo had led them to the Sonoran Mountains, chasing the Pima, the Seri, and Apache. Only the Catalans were already familiar with guerilla ambush tactics. They were a hundred against the invisible tribal warriors.

Only twenty men from the 2nd Volunteers of Catalonia were suddenly ordered away from the Sonoran hell of Elizondo's making. Pedro Fages, their commander, had been pulled from his duties by Governor Gaspar de Portola and told to find The Bay of Montrey in Alta California.

From one mosquito-ridden, ramshackle port to another, from Vera Cruz to La Paz and San Blas, the Catalans were shipped closer and closer to the Unknown California. How many indios would be there? Were they as fierce and lethal as the Apache or the Seri? What were they – the best light infantry in the army – expected to do? They were put to work building crude shelters for supplies. At last, their transport ship limped into port months late on a routine run across the Sea of Cortez.

Local built, the San Carlos was part brigantine, but mostly merchant, a coastal supply ship, dwarfed by the Manila galleons at Vera Cruz. At last, setting out for the Bay of San Diego in Alta California, the San Carlos was lost for one hundred and ten days 1. Bad navigation and worse captaining, storms and contrary windfalls, delivered at San Diego a crew dead and dying of scurvy and several very ill Catalan soldados.

Franciscan President Fray Junipero Serra and the expedition leader, Gaspar de Portola, were anxious at their arrival. Two hundred and nineteen men had left Lower California only months before and barely more than a hundred now survived.

Because of the length and variety of California landscape, it promised to be an Eden on the Pacific Ocean and a Hell within the scorching scrubland canyons. Game abounded – deer, rabbit, birds, and in a special valley filled with oaks: grizzly bears.

As they do, the aboriginals greeted the expedition warmly and stole everything possible from the strangers. Although offered trade beads and trinkets, the indios were most fascinated by the Spaniards' clothes. A few bolts of cheap textile were exchanged for honor and the expedition would advance to another indio rancheria.

Neither the soldados nor the priests could understand the nativos talk. Elaborate pantomimes and postures were acted out on both sides. The soldiers cruder body language silently made trades unseen by the officers. They were mountain and brushland people, like the Catalans, only pagan. The soldados trusted the indios would not kill them, but remained wary.

The indios in Mexico had not yet experienced the mestizo melting pot though it had begun with the conquistadores' wives in the mid-16th century. The tribes still fought for their rightful lands with arrows and bullets. The California indios seemed placid compared to an angry Apache.

Still using bare rock, the California indios built rush huts and ate from the sea. Complex and elaborate head adornments and nothing below the waist, the painted men approached with bows and arrows. The thunder of the Catalans' short muskets dropped them all to their knees in wonder.

Up California's spine the expedition tried to keep near rivers, hoping to discover an outlet to the ocean. If the explorers were correct, a great deep bay would lay to the west. Following sunsets, they drove onward: men, horses, mules. Across mountains, down canyons, up oak-covered hills and across swampy reeds, riding, marking, mapping. From indio rancheria to dried thorn thicket; hungry, thirsty, far from anything familiar. For God and Spain.

Imagine, if you can, like me, this soldado – Jose Antonio Yorba, of San Sadurni, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain – is your ancestor. Your 4th great grandfather to be specific.

The son of an artisan glassmaker and the daughter of the town's largest sandle factory owner, Jose Antonio Yorba was a middle child. His elder brother – according to law and tradition – inherited everything, including their widowed mother. The careers options in Spain were Army or Church. At age nineteen, he enlisted at Barcelona in the 2nd Catalonian Light Infantry Regiment, for the planned invasion of Portugal in 1762.

At the signing of a treaty, the troops were sent to garrison the largest fort in Europe, overlooking Barcelona. Its massive artillery aimed down into the city streets across a No-Man's land. For years, the drudgery of drill and counter-drill until – at long last – the call for duty overseas. In a place far away from Barcelona. Cuba.

The garrison at Havana was a smaller, more primitively-built Barcelona fortress. Palm tree palisades and more damned drill and marching.

Then came reports of a huge army gathering to punish the Seri and Pima and Apache tribes for killing Spanish ranchers and stealing livestock. The Catalan skirmishers were the front line in attacks and scouting.

And now: California. Unmapped, unmarked. And it was huge and rugged. Here they would build churchs and forts, someday ranches and towns. They marked the land well as they pursued the elusive Bay of Monterey.

1 Because of an error in determining the latitude of the San Diego harbor by Vizcaino, 167 years earlier, the ships passed by San Diego and landed first near Los Angeles, before finding their way back.

The San Antonio took 54 days to arrive. A third vessel was to follow with supplies, but was probably lost at sea.