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It was in 1774 that Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, of the presidio of Tubac in Arizona, was detailed by the Viceroy of New Spain to open this road. He made quite an expedition of it, 240 men, women, and Indian scouts, and 1050 animals. They named the San Gorgonio Pass the Puerto de San Carlos, and the San Bernardino Valley the Valle de San José.
His fourth journey was with the intrepid Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, when he set forth in 1774. to discover a road from the missions already established in Northern Mexico, over the then unknown Arizona and Colorado deserts, to the new missions of California.
In the meantime events were shaping elsewhere for the founding of the Mission of San Francisco. Away yonder, in what is now Arizona, but was then a part of New Mexico, were several Missions, some forty miles south of the city of Tucson, and it was decided to connect these, by means of a good road, with the Missions of California. Captain Juan Bautista de Anza was sent to find this road.
Here Anza met Rivera, who had arrived the day before from Monterey. It will be remembered that just at that time the news came of the Indian uprising at San Diego; so, leaving his main force and the immigrants to recuperate, he and seventeen of his soldiers, with Padre Font, started with Rivera for the south. This was in January, 1776.
When Captain Anza reached California from Sonora, by way of the Colorado, on his first trip in 1774, accompanied by Padre Garcés, he stayed for awhile to recuperate at San Gabriel; and when he came the second time, with the colonists for the new presidio of San Francisco, San Gabriel was their first real stopping-place after that long, weary, and arduous journey across the sandy deserts of Arizona and California.
Captain Rivera y Moncada, with whose march from the peninsula we are already familiar, was appointed governor; and at the same time that he received his instructions, August 17, 1773, Captain Juan Bautista de Anza was authorized to attempt the overland journey from Sonora to Monterey.
Padre Font was Anza's chaplain, and with Garces's aid later made a map of the country.* At Yuma Garces left the Anza party, went down to the mouth of the Colorado, and then up along the river to Mohave, and after another trip out to San Gabriel, he started on the most important part of all his journeys, from Mohave to the Moki Towns, the objective point of all entradas eastward from the Colorado.
The padres brought the mustard seed later. A little south of the present mission," I continued, "you will see a group of willows bending to drink the crystal waters of the Arroyo de los Dolores, so named because Anza and his followers discovered it on the day of our Mother of Sorrows, and to the east is the shining laguna." "It's clear as a San Francisco fog," he laughed.
"Yes, Anza christened it in 1776 when he climbed up here for a view after selecting the sites for the Presidio and the Mission. He called it La Loma Alta, and the High Hill it remained until the Americans put it to commercial use in forty-nine.
Rama treated me with kindness. Perhaps he believed that this time I was really with him. He invited me to his house. He invited me to the desert. He invited me to partake in his chemical experiments. Roughly one hundred fifty miles southeast of the beaches of Orange County, in the Anza Borrego Desert State Park, was a peak called Split Mountain.
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