Boone again. Roll your window down if you can, and look up that canyon, because I want you standing in the right year. Not this one. The winter of seventeen seventy-five.
It's late October when Juan Bautista de Anza sets out from a frontier outpost called Tubac, down in what's now Arizona, leading a column you would not believe if you saw it strung across this desert. Around two hundred and forty people, more than half of them women and children. Better than three hundred horses. A hundred and sixty-odd mules. Three hundred head of cattle, lowing and stubborn, raising a dust you could see for miles. They are not soldiers on a raid. They are families, with everything they own, and they are walking to the far edge of the known world to plant a town on San Francisco Bay before the Russians or the British can get there first. Spain wants California held, and these tired people are how it intends to hold it.
To get there, they have to cross this. The dry, killing desert you've been driving through all day. And the whole gamble comes down to water. Up this canyon, Coyote Creek, where the creek that vanishes into sand for miles suddenly rises and runs clear. Anza's chaplain, a sharp-eyed Franciscan named Father Pedro Font, keeps the diary, and navigates the company by the stars the way a ship's captain reads the sea. They labor up through the rock and the cold, and on Christmas Eve, camped at a spot up there, a soldier's wife everyone feared was dying instead, near midnight, gives birth to a healthy boy. A child born on the march, in the cold, in the dark, with the whole desert holding its breath. They name him and they keep going, up over a high pass and down toward the coast, and the following spring they reach the bay and found the city that's still there.
But hold on, because there's a thing I owe you, and it matters more than the rest. When Anza came up this canyon, he did not come into empty land. None of it was empty. This is Cahuilla homeland, and has been since long, long before any of those names were spoken here. That camp where the baby was born was a Cahuilla village, with its own people, its own fires, its own children already born under these same stars. The Spaniards did not discover a gate to California. They walked up to a doorway that other people had been living beside for thousands of years, and asked, in their way, to pass through. The Cahuilla are still here today. Remember that when you tell this one.
So here's the picture I'll leave you. Two hundred and forty souls and a thousand head of livestock, threading the eye of this one wet canyon in the dead of winter, betting their lives on a creek. The desert at your back is the size of the gamble. And this quiet dead-end road, where the pavement just gave up, is the very gate they walked through to reach the sea. Turn the car around now. They couldn't.
