Imperial (36 page)

Nonetheless, mission after mission implanted itself on the far from fertile soil of the Baja. By 1730 some three hundred Spanish colonists lived in Pimería, and it came time to push closer to Imperial herself, the “real” Imperial, the shrunken one, Imperial as I define her.
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Spaniards had already sailed deep between Imperial’s legs; who knew how far up the Colorado they’d go? Maybe to Thibet! Maybe, maybe; maybe luscious chocolate Amazons still awaited us somewhere; we hadn’t explored every last sandhill.
Girls reached puberty at the age of twelve years; and they would often demand husbands before that age . . . Their word for husband had only a vulgar signification.
That is exactly what a conquistador likes to hear.

THE GARDENS OF PARADISE

The Franciscans now replaced the Jesuits. In 1771, the year that Mission San Gabriel was founded, Fray Francisco Gardés explored the Colorado Desert as far as Signal Mountain. Three years later we find Captain Juan Bautista de Anza setting out from Pimería all the way to Monterey, Alta California—an astonishing overland journey which could have easily ended as badly as those of the Forty-Niners and
pollos
whose desiccated corpses are shrouded in sand. But this de Anza knows exactly what he is about. For example, he establishes alliances. In that bygone wideness of water where the Gila met the Colorado (the terminus of Alarcón’s voyage of 1540), there were, once upon a time, two islands, the larger of which was called Island de Trinidad, and here Captain de Anza and his soldiers are guested by the
Capitán and Chief of the Yuma Nation of savage Indians of the Colorado River drainage of Sonora in the Interior Provinces of this North America . . . known by the surname Palma,
whose real name is Olleyquotequiebe and whose baptismal name will be Salvador Carlos Antonio. The feast occurs in a lodge built especially for the occasion (and from de Anza’s description I suspect that it scarcely differs except in size from the arrow-weed ramada in which Harold Bell Wright wrote
The Winning of Barbara Worth
). In those days the place remains “heavily timbered,” hence surely cooler and less forbidding than it will appear to me. Palma’s Yumans live lushly on river-irrigated watermelons, cantaloupes, Apache maize and diverse other crops. They go naked, and flatten the heads of their children by lashing boards tight against their skulls; they trade dried beans for scraps of red cloth. So an American trapper will report half a century later. In de Anza’s time it may not have been much different. Palma, whom they promptly christen Salvador Palma, demeans himself as a reliable friend, and there is no good reason he should not have remained so.
After mass a proclamation was made prescribing rules tending to the better conduct of the people.
Then what? Guided by an Indian deserter from Mission San Gabriel, de Anza fords the Colorado, thereby entering the area of interest to this book. Creosote bushes make his acquaintance. He descends into the Salton Sink. The New River in its then still modest canyon of clay might be wet or dry that year; either way, it doesn’t detain him. If it’s wet, it will have decorated itself with peppergrass and the occasional desert heliotrope. Regardless, there will be scant good water to drink in that channel.
It is a miserable place, without pasture and with very bad water,
which may be why they’ll return home by a different route equally delectable to travel thanks to its sand dunes and dry plains. In the white sandhills over which unborn Imperial County will lay its road of oiled planks, and upon which Hollywood science fiction movies will be filmed, the expedition gets lost for ten days. Why should it be any different? Soldiers from Mission San Diego in search of runaway Indians had been defeated by Imperial’s sand-mazes not two years since. Sebastián Tarabal, de Anza’s guide, has already lost his wife in Imperial’s deserts, and evidently (the sources conflict) his son as well. Eventually he succeeds in restoring the party to the Indians. They rest. Then once again de Anza marches down the “Devil’s Road” in good and rapid order, sixty-one leagues southwest and northwest through Imperial, until they reach fair water at the Arroyo de Santa Catharina.
This place is in a canyon that runs on up, and through it passes the road that crosses the Sierra Madre de California.
We soon find him passing through the Cahuilla Valley, which I presume must have offered a palm oasis here and there; a century later there was one in what is now the southern sprawl of Indio. It takes about eight days to march from the west bank of the Colorado to Mission San Gabriel if one is unencumbered; with colonists it takes five or six weeks; de Anza shepherds none that time. He reaches Monterey without incident. Thanks to him, there’s a proven line of supply to that outpost of adobe houses in the oak trees. His route
cannot be traced exactly,
says Bancroft, appropriately enough, for this is Imperial, where nothing’s exact; if it’s any help to you, Fonty’s map of 1776 reveals, southeasterly of the intersection of the Gila and the Colorado, the territory of the Yumas, Cajuenches and Cucapahs, then westward of them the white emptiness of Imperial all the way to San Diego, which lies in Quemexa territory.

Home again.
We bade farewell to the Yumas with much tenderness on account of the fidelity and affection which they showed us.

The following year, after stopping again at Palma’s, he explores the Yuha Desert, which I imagine was almost the same then as now, the ocotillos tall and frail, the eponymous Anza-Borrego badlands beginning to swell, bluish-grey glass-shards of mountains to the west and southwest, the Imperial Valley sloping vastly and gently downwards toward what we now call Mexico, and I must not omit the pastel colors and waterless heat. Nobody ever bothers to garrison this spot. This time de Anza brings two hundred soldiers and colonists with him. Eight children are born on the way. While he’s in the desert, Diegueño Indians promote Fray Luis Jayme into California’s first martyr.

Once again de Anza arrives at San Gabriel in good order. Two years later will come the first public execution in Upper California, four insurgent Indian chiefs being shot by firing squad in San Diego for the greater glory of God.

In 1779, as I said, they baptize de Anza’s host Palma (do they require him to remove the turquoise bead from his nose?) and establish two missions in his territory: Portezuela de la Concepción right where Yuma now is, Puerto de San Diablo about ten miles south of it. Imperial’s commerce-inconvenient membrane will be deflowered at last. As a certain El Caballero de Croix explains in his instructions for the recruitment of soldiers and settlers for the upcoming expedition of 1781,
the two Provinces
of Lower and Upper California
should be united and have communication one with the other through the establishments on the Rivers Colorado and Gua.
In short, Portezuela de la Concepción and Puerto de San Diablo are “strategic.” No doubt that’s one reason the authorities trouble to save Palma’s soul. But don’t think they’re not in earnest: The nudity of the Yumas has already been “discontinued,” evidently by the Indians’ own will,
seeing that all are covered with reasonable clothing acquired from the fabric of the Pima Nation.

To be sure, the body-snatchers of 1980 may be distinguished from those of 1780, but only if we forget that the latter group aren’t all priests! Some Northsiders catch natives and brainwash them; others catch them in order to drive them away. We’ve watched the map of Baja California become pimpled with religious islands of Northside; that’s because the Fathers are celibate. When conquerors of both sexes congregate and procreate, then it won’t be long before Southside itself gets surrounded. In 1566 the judge Alonso de Zorita completes his decade of helplessly compassionate witness in New Spain and sails home to the old. He advises the King:
To give a field or other land to a Spaniard is to cause great injury to the Indians. The Spaniards have taken their lands, pushed back their boundaries, and put them to an endless labor of guarding their fields against the Spaniards’ cattle . . . some Indian towns are already so diminished and encircled by Spanish farms that the natives have no space in which to plant . . . They suffer need and hunger throughout the year.
In this book about Imperial we have no call to dwell upon the horrific
deliberate
cruelties of the Mexican Conquest: the workings to death, the hangings and burnings of children, the huntings-down of Indians by vicious dogs. Suffice it to say that as a direct result of the Conquest, disease, enslavement and spoliation killed four and a half million people in Mexico. The few lines which I have excerpted out of Zorita help us to understand the role which delineation plays in all this—or redelineation, I should say, for doubtless each Indian pueblo had its own shape before it gets enclosed, transected, shattered. How could the results of redelineation be any different?

And so, in 1780 the colonists arrived and began to treat Palma’s people about as one would expect. Has bread lost its light, or is there no more bread for Indians? The friars are said to have seen the future, and try to prepare their flock for it by means of especially rigorous Loyolan meditations. In 1781 the inevitable Yuma Massacre, led by Palma himself, erases both missions, the men being put to death down to the very last priest, the women and children taken captive. After they manage to ransom them, the Spaniards proceed to the next phase: reprisals. Unfortunately for the delineators, these accomplish next to nothing. Hence the overlords of New Spain never again attempt to raise up missions in this area. Instead, they found Los Angeles.

And then?
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS .

Chapter 14

LOS ANGELES (1780)

Summer was counted from the time frogs were first heard to croak.

—Perfecto Hugo Reid, ca. 1800

W
hat was Los Angeles like before there was a Los Angeles? What can we imagine of the quicksands and bears of Los Angeles, the California roses in the swamps of the Los Angeles River? To those of us who can read or write this book, it must have still been
once upon a time.

Chapter 15

LOS ANGELES (1781)

It is the destiny of every considerable stream in the west to become an irrigating ditch.

—Mary Austin, 1903

T
here were eleven families of settlers at first, all of them volunteers. It was sometime in June. A corporal and three soldiers,
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whose red-collared blue uniforms were doubtlesss a bit grimy by now, led them to a place adjoining the Indian
ranchería
of Yabit, and there they founded Our Lady of the Angels of Porciúncula.
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS.
In August the Yuma Massacre would be discovered, and so the new Angelenos must have stayed on guard against their neighbors in Yabit, especially since Governor de Neve had recently noted that
the Pagans . . . anxiously ask especially for Sword blades, fragments of these, points of sharp Lances and every kind of cutting Instrument.
Fortunately, he was speaking generally; the pagans of Yabit were
docile and without malice but susceptible, like all Indians, to the first impressions of good or bad example.
Accordingly, the Governor had prudently
taken the necessary steps to prevent transmission of this news
of the massacre
to the natives
of other missions in Upper California.
I can’t help believing in people.

Although the destruction of the two Yuma missions had weakened their connection to Lower California, whose capital, Loreto, commanded them, the settlers were hardly alone in Upper California: San Diego with its three missions, San Carlos de Monterrey with its own three, San Francisco with its two and Mission San Gabriel itself already existed. Santa Barbara was just getting started. On the appended priestly establishments lived one thousand seven hundred and forty-nine Indians whose Christianity was undoubtedly at least as good as that of the Yumans.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

Antonio Clemente Féliz Villavicencio of Chihuahua was the first to enlist. Who was he?
The Head or Father of each family must be a Man of the Soil, Healthy robust
and without known vice or defect that would make him prejudicial to the Pueblos.
We can be pretty sure that he, like the soldiers, wore a blue wool jacket, which, however, lacked insignia. He had probably put on his black campaign hat. He was a Spaniard. His wife, María de los Santos Serefina or Soberina, hailed from Durango. She was a fullblooded Indian. She would have worn one of her chemises of fine Brittany linen and a skirt of serge, blue baize or white cotton now probably gone dust-grey; if it were breezy that day, she might have worn the linen jacket she had made herself out of issued cloth. Very likely she wore one of her two shawls. He was thirty, and she twenty-six; their adopted daughter María Antonia Josefa, who was eight and a mestiza, would at the advanced age of thirteen marry a widower, at Mission San Gabriel. I see that this family purchased six
varas
of ribbons, and it pleases me to suppose that the little girl wore one or two of them in her black hair.

Not a single household consisted of Spaniards only. There were two Spanish-Indian couples; three Indian pairs, one wife of whom was
coyote Indian;
one mulatto couple, a mestizo married to a mulatta; a sixty-seven-year-old Indian with a forty-three-year-old mulatta wife; two Negroes married to mulattas; a mulatto whose wife’s race was not specified; and a fifty-year-old widowed Chino accompanied by his eleven-year-old daughter—and, for your information, a Chino is the child of a salta-atrás with an Indian; a salta-atrás is
a child having negro characteristics but born of white parents.
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