The Anza Expeditions of 1774-1776 and Misión Vieja

One of the newer national historic trails established and maintained by the National Parks Service is the Anza Trail, commemorating the route taken by Juan Bautista Anza in his colonizing expedition of 300 settlers from Sonora, Mexico [the trail starts at Nogales, Arizona at the Mexico-U. S. border] to San Francisco in 1775-76.

There was a preliminary exploration in 1774, during which the Anza group, which was looking to establish an overland road, stopped at the original Mission San Gabriel site at Whittier Narrows. Anza and his compatriots stayed for almost three weeks before continuing their journey north. On the return trip, the group stopped at the mission, in early May, resting for two days before proceeding southward.

While it is not certain when the move of the mission was made from Whittier Narrows to the current site, the closest documentation after Serra’s February 1775 report (see the last blog entry) is the arrival of the Anza-led colonization expedition early in 1776.

This large group left Sonora in late September 1775 and reached Mission San Gabriel on 4 January 1776. The difference was that this second visit was not to the original mission at Whittier Narrows, but to the newly-selected site, on higher, drier ground at the current location. This is referred to in the diary of Father Pedro Font from the colonists’ expedition, after the group reached the San Gabriel River on the 3rd: “I celebrated holy Mass. We moved away from the Arroyo de San Gabriel at nine in the morning, and at eleven we arrived at the Mission of San Gabriel.”

From 1775 onward, the original site at Whittier Narrows became a relic and its tule and wood structures were undoubtedly pillaged for use elsewhere or were inundated by the occasional flooding occurring from intense rain seasons. Very little survives in the historical record for decades afterward. The next post looks at the first census of the Los Angeles area, taken under Mexican rule in 1836, for clues on who was occupying Misión Vieja.

Source: Zephyrin Englehardt, San Gabriel Mission and the Beginnings of Los Angeles (San Gabriel: Mission San Gabriel,) 1927.

Link to the Anza Trail website: http://www.nps.gov/juba/index.htm

Contribued by Paul R. Spitzzeri.