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San Diego History

The Native Population | The Early Days | Father Junipero Serra

The Early Days

San Diego was discovered by Europeans in 1542, 50 years after Christopher Columbus touched land in the Western Hemisphere for the first time. When Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, the Portuguese-born conquistador sailing under the Spanish flag, sailed into San Diego Bay on Sept. 28, 1542, Spain's power was reaching its zenith. Mexico and Peru had been subdued. The wealth of the Aztecs and of the Incas had begun flowing back to the mother country.

Though the records are silent, Cabrillo himself must have been searching for new cities of gold, for the long-sought short route to China and the Strait of Anian, which the explorers of all seafaring countries believed existed. This was a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, somewhere to the north, by which ships could sail directly from Europe to the Spice Islands of the Indies.

Cabrillo never found the gold, China, or the Strait of Anian. More than four and a half centuries later a U. S. Navy submarine slid under the northern ice pack, above Alaska in the Bering Sea, and reappeared in the Atlantic Ocean. Cabrillo lies buried on tiny San Miguel Island off the coast of Southern California. His grave has never been found. A skillful fighter and able navigator, he succumbed to infection from a broken bone. His expedition made it as far north as the coast of Oregon without him.

Because of Cabrillo, San Diego remained under Spanish rule for almost 300 years. San Diego was governed by Spanish kings for three times as long as it has lived under the American flag.

Sixty years after Cabrillo, another Spanish explorer, Sebastian Vizcaino, arrived to give the port the name it bears today. Another 167 years passed before more attention was paid to California. In Mexico, cathedrals were built and universities founded. The conquistadores and those who followed them became the landed hidalgos who fastened on the country a feudalistic system that could be broken only by revolution and civil war. Indian villages became the towns and cities of Acapulco, Loreto, La Navidad, Colima, Culiacan and Sinaloa, from which were to come the men and supplies for the founding of new colonies in California. Under the pressure of Russian probings along the coast and the menacing excursions of English and other foreign ships, Spain at last bestirred herself to establish some kind of a settlement at San Diego.

San Diego was a lonely place, geographically. San Diego always has been isolated, with deserts and mountains to the east and south, an ocean to the west, and only a narrow coastal plain opening to the north. It was isolated in the sense of being separated from the main stream of history as it unfolded across the Atlantic, to the eastern shores of America, and as it developed in Mexico and parts of South America. But in the long reach of time, San Diego has been in the path of significant movements of people and events. Anthropologists believe the Indians of the Americas came by way of a Siberian land bridge, in prehistoric times, many of them coursing down along the Pacific Coast, some to remain, others eventually to populate Mexico and South America. Most certainly other peoples came as visitors by sailing across the great sea. Ancient Chinese literature tells of visits to the land of Fusang on the other side of the ocean, with descriptions that fit California.

In 1769, Fr. Junipero Serra arrived to establish the Presidio of San Diego and to found nine of the chain of 21 Franciscan missions, opening California to settlement. When Mexico declared her independence from helpless Spain in 1822, it was a long time before anybody in San Diego heard about it. When the mission systems were broken up by the Mexican government, by secularization, and their vast lands distributed, a quaint pastoral interlude began, fostered by the old factor of political and economic isolation. It was the Days of the Dons, of vast private baronial ranchos and tremendous herds of cattle, of a time when life in the Presidio of San Diego was easy and pleasant, and fiestas and sports filled the days. California became, in imagination at least, a land of romance. The handsomely equipped vaqueros of the ranchos became the legendary cowboys of the western plains. But all this couldn't last. Americans-traders, trappers, gold seekers and adventurers-were pressing hard upon California, by land and sea.

The threat of the possible seizure of California by other European powers, particularly England or Russia, was ended when California became a part of the United States in 1848. The pastoral lull lasted but fifty years. It was all over in the early 1860s. The great ranchos were sold or divided. Old Spanish families were scattered and their rambling adobe haciendas fell into ruins. The last of direct Spanish influence was gone. San Diego itself was destined to become the home of the new force that henceforth was to dominate the Pacific, the United States Navy.

Adapted from "The History of San Diego" by Richard F. Pourade, editor emeritus of The San Diego Union, a book that was commissioned in the 1960s by publisher James S. and Helen K. Copley of Copley Newspapers. It has been excepted and adapted for SanDiego-California.com with edits for length and readability.