Hispanic Tradition (1769-1846)

1775: Lt. Juan Manuel de Ayala spends 44 days exploring and mapping San Francisco Bay, naming many of its principal features such as Angel Island, Sausalito, and Alcatraz (Wiley 2000: 14).

1776: Capt. Juan Bautista de Anza led a small party of soldiers, accompanied by Pedro Font, a Franciscan brother, up the peninsula from Monterey looking for a site for a new mission and presidio. After camping next to Mountain Lake in Mountain Lake Park, see map on page xiv). Anza picked a place for a presidio on a headland overlooking the Golden Gate now known as Fort Point. Three days later he and Font explored the arroyos and meadows east of Twin Peaks, where they found a stream emerging from a canyon into a small lagoon that emptied into Mission Bay. They called the canyon Arroyo de los Dolores because it was Friday of Sorrows, the Friday before Palm Sunday. Because of its water supply and ample fertile ground, Font pronounced the location suitable for a misssion (Wiley 2000: 14).

Three months later the first settlers arrived in a party of 193 people (Wiley 2000: 14).

06.29.1776: In a shelter of boughs which Lieutenant Jose Joaquin Moraga ordered to be built on the bank of Laguna Dolores, Fra Francisco Palou celebrated the first Christian mass in what was to become San Francisco. This crude shelter was the first structure built in San Francisco by European settlers. Camp Street, a short street leading east from Guerrero between 16th and 17th, marks the site of that first encampment of fourteen soldados de cuera (leather-jacketed soldiers) of Spain, their wives and children, all of whom would soon become the first garrison of the San Francisco Presidio (Alexander and Heig 2002: 3).

09.17.1776: The Presidio dedicated. The 1600-acre San Francisco Presidio was established in 1776 by Colonel Juan Bautista de Anza, who blazed California's first overland trail, from the frontier outpost of Tubac, near what is now Tucson, Arizona, to San Francisco Bay. A small adobe remnant of the former Spanish Comandante's house survives as a part of the officers' club. In a little valley nearby is an acient well, known simply as "El Polin," whose waters once guaranteed fertility to any woman who partook of them. These, then, along with Mission Dolores, are the only physical reminders of San Francisco's Spanish beginnings.

The spot de Anza had chosen as the site for the Presidio was a tableland with a commanding view of the entrance to the bay, but without even one tree to break the wind from the ocean. A small lake (today called Mountain Lake) supplied fresh water, the only amenity. To the west was the barren, broken terrain of Point Lobos, and south of that an enormous wasteland of shifting sand dunes, stretching from the beach up to Twin Peaks. Below the dunes to the south was little Laguna de Nuestra Senora de la Merced, (today shortened to Lake Merced) surrounded by willows.

Crowning the peninsula were Twin Peaks, which the Spaniards called Los Pechos de la Choca, the Breasts of the Indian Maiden (curiously translated by Captain Frederick Beechey on his 1826 map as "Paps"), and the isolated fingertip projection of Lone Mountain, probably called El Cerrito de Plata by the Spaniards, and translated as "Silver Hummock" by Captain Beechey. It was an important landmark for nagigators searching for the entrance to the bay (Alexander and Heig 2002: 6; 11-12).

10.09.1776: Mission San Francisco de Asis, named after the patron saint of the Franciscan order, was dedicated by Father Francisco Palou. Now known as Mission Dolores, it was founded on the western edge of the Laguna de Manatial fed by the Arroyo de Nuestra señora de los Dolores. Shielded from the fog and winds off the Pacific by Twin Peaks this was the most benign part of the generally bleak and inhospitable peninsula. The lagoon covered the city blocks now bounded by 15th, Guerrero, 23rd and Harrison Sts (Wiley 2000: 14).

1779: The first map to show the Mission and the Presidio was made by Josef Camacho y Brenes. Four lakes are shown: Merced, Dolores, Presidio (now Mountain Lake), and what probably came to be known subsequently as "Washer Woman's Lagoon" in the 1880s. Angel Island, Alcatraz, and Yerba Buena island are all shown, though apparently "Alcatraze," designated what what is now called Yerba Buena Island (Alexander and Heig 2002: 6).

1792: The San Francisco Presidio, guarding the entrance to the Bay, and the San Francisco mission, on a sheltered inland cove four miles away, were sixteen years old in 1792, when Sir George Vancouver, the first foreign visitor, came on the British flagship Discovery to spy out the land. As he sailed into the Port of San Francisco, Vancouver observed a group of low adobe and thatch structures clustered around an open plaza, which he took to be "a pound for cattle." This turned out to be the Presidio compound. So much for the grandeur of this remote Spanish colony.

At the south side of the quadrangle, the comandante's house, where Vancouver and his men were received graciously, consisted of two long, low rooms with an overhead loft. The rooms were in perpetual gloom, for their only light came from a few small, unglazed windows fitted with rough shutters and wooden bars. The Comandante's wife and well-mannered children, all neatly dressed, were seated on mat-covered wooden platforms raised a few inches above the earthen floor. The few other furnishings in the room were equally primitive (Alexander and Heig 2002: 12).

1806: One of the earliest visitors after Vancouver was Count Nicolai Rezanov, the Czar's chamberlain, who sailed from Sitka, Alaska, in 1806, with the sole intent of finding supplies for starving Russian colonists there. Rezanov's visit is best recalled not for his narrative descriptions of the Bay Area, but rather for his proposal of marriage to Comandante Arguello's daughter, Concepcion. Although Rezanov's motives for this proposal are open to question, the love affair between the worldly explorer, formerly a chamberlain in the court of Czar Alexander I, and the fifteen-year-old Concepcion Arguello has become a part of San Francisco legend. (Alexander and Heig 2002: 13).

1812: Russian esblishment of Fort Ross, with a farming center and trading post at Bodega Bay, just fifty miles up the coast from San Francisco.

1814: Mexico declares her Independence from Spain.

10.02.1816: The French artist Louis Choris arrived in San Francisco aboard the Russian frigate Rurik. He depicted the celebration at Mission Dolores of Saint Francis Day in a watercolor sketch. His pictures were later published in France, as part of a descriptive account entitled Voyage Pittoresque Autour du Monde [1822], one of the most important sources of information about California in the early 19th Century (Alexander and Heig 2002: 5).

1817: Establishment of Mission San Rafael.

1823: Establishment of Mission San Francisco Solano in Sonoma.

11.1826: Captain Frederick Beechey enters San Francisco Bay aboard the sixteen-gun British sloop Blossom. In his Narrative of A Voyage to the Pacific and the Bering Strait in the Years 1825-1828, published in London in 1831, Beechey ... described the same dismally undeveloped countryside that Vancouver had left some three decades earlier (Alexander and Heig 2002: 14).

11.28.1831: John Mackay was born at Dublin on November 28, 1831. When he was nine, his family migrated to New York, where his Scotch-Irish father died within two years and John left school and went to work to help support his mother and younger sister (Lewis 1959: 65).

1833: In 1833 a red "Time Ball" was installed on the roof of the Royal Observatory Greenwich. The time-ball droped at 1pm to enable the astronomers to undertake telescopic observations at noon.

1834: The Secularization Act freed a vast tracts of land around Mission Dolores. Remote from the Yerba Buena settlement, the Mission preserved its pastoral quality until the Streetcar Era began in the late 1870s and early 1880s.

1835: William A. Richardson, an Englishman, set up his tent store at the corner of Clay and Grant (originally called La Calle de la Fundacion) Sts., near Portsmouth Square. At the request of the Mexican Governor, Richardson drew a map of Yerba Buena so that trading ships could anchor in the sheltered cove, rather than in the violent tides and surf near the Presidio. The map showed the location of Richardson's store and Clay St. leading down to the edge of the bay at Montgomery St.

1835: Removal of the Presidio garrison from San Francisco to Sonoma by General Vallejo. By the end of 1835, the San Francisco Presidio stood abandoned with just one soldier, Juan Prado Mesa, to guard what was rapidly becoming a deserted, crumbling ruin (Alexander and Heig 2002: 14).

1836: Rancho Pajare de Arroyo (Place of the Ravine), granted to Francisco Guerrero. Guerrero, a man of outstanding position and character, was best known for the strawberry fiestas he held annually near Pt. Lobos. Since the earliest times this area had been known for the succulent wild strawberries flourishing in the sandy soil. Each spring when the berries ripened Guerrero would invite all his friends and neighbors to a huge barbecue and feast, with music for dancing. The custom seems to have continued well into the 1850s (Alexander and Heig 2002: 37).

1837: Richardson erected an adobe house, "La Casa Grande", at 823 Grant St., the most imposing structure in the tiny port of Yerba Buena. Today there is a plaque marking the location.