Gateway to Alta California: The Expedition to San Diego, 1769 (Sunbelt Cultural Heritage Books) - Hardcover

Harry W. Crosby

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9780932653574: Gateway to Alta California: The Expedition to San Diego, 1769 (Sunbelt Cultural Heritage Books)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 093265357X ISBN 13: 9780932653574

Publisher: Sunbelt Publications, 2002

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The story of the Spanish expedition to help found San Diego is told through diary excerpts and the author's comments, taking the reader day-by-day on the journey through the unexplored, desolate wilderness of northern Baja California. Listed for the first time are the names of all Hispanic members of the expedition party. Full-color maps provide a graphic statement of the journey.

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From the Publisher:

When Harry Crosby invited me on the 1998 trip to locate a missing link in the first Spanish overland route to Alta California, I knew it would be a thoroughly enjoyable experience. The elements were all there: a wilderness backpack into the search area near the storied Meling Ranch, the company of a few very special Baja California aficionados, perfect spring weather with a full moon, and the Arroyo Valladares leading us to the site through superb floral displays in the oak and chaparral woodland.

Enjoyable experience? Talk about understatement! Little did I realize how much this event would come to mean—that it was a major component in the formulation of our publishing mission, a mission that Harry Crosby has profoundly influenced and helped us to identify. We were coming to understand our calling: to celebrate the natural history and cultural heritage of the borderlands of Alta and Baja California or "La Frontera."

The previous year had seen the publication of the Sunbelt edition of The Cave Paintings of Baja California, which we presented at the tricentennial of the founding of the California missions in Loreto. Earlier in 1998 we had spent a week in the heart of La Sierra de San Francisco, on a trip funded by The Getty Foundation, in order to experience directly the power and mystery of "The Great Murals of an Unknown People."

Meanwhile we deepened our understanding of La Frontera through other Sunbelt authors and works including Judy Botello's The Other Side, Graham Mackintosh's Journey with a Baja Burro, Jennifer and Russel Redmonds' Sea of Cortez Review, and Greg Niemann's Baja Legends. The realization dawned that out of the particular stories of this land and its people, there was a larger concept of the global adventure on the borderlands, frontiers, edges, and gateways of human experience. Judy Botello said it well in describing el otro lado (the other side):

About borders, there is this: They define us as well as divide us. Whether a political line between nations or a psychological line between lovers, every border seems, at first glance, to define who we are in terms of who we are not. Crossing over becomes a kind of odyssey, an adventure not into the other, but rather into new landscapes of the self.

In this work Harry Crosby again draws back the curtain of time to reveal people living on and journeying through a frontier, a harsh land which both inspired and defined them. Little did these pioneers know that their frontier would become a political border between states and a cultural boundary between nations. But as surely as these borderlands have seen walls built through their heart, just as surely they host a larger cultural confluence on a frontier where Hispanic America meets Anglo America.

Gateway to Alta California broadens our awareness of a northern movement to explore and settle the Californias, which long preceded the famed westward movement of American legend. We are grateful to Harry Crosby for his contribution to our understanding of the roots of the California borderland cultures and are proud to present his latest work.

--Lowell Lindsay, Publisher

From the Author:

As a child growing up in San Diego, I had only vague perceptions of its origins as a Spanish mission, presidio, and port town. In elementary school, we were told about the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century navigators, Rodriguez

Cabrillo (always referred to simply as "Cabrillo") and Vizca’no, who sailed off California shores and effected a few landings. We were told about Father Serra and the Franciscans who arrived in 1769 by largely unspecified means, accompanied by various "Spaniards," presumably men from Spain. This force, we were told, founded Mission San Diego de Alcal‡, the first in California. No mention was made of earlier missions on the California peninsula and their collective role in enabling the occupation of what would become American California....So, the present work on the first Spanish overland expedition to Alta California is focused on little known events that were to affect the state history of American California despite taking place south of the Mexican-American border (which, after all, would not exist for another three-quarters of a century). Equally important is research on the identities and backgrounds of the men who powered the Spanish occupation of the area. A dozen or more of the participants in that first march have not previously been identified as such, and it is estimated that several thousand descendants of those men live in the state of California today. To them, this work is dedicated and directed.

Harry W. Crosby

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