A SKETCH

OF THE

SETTLEMENT AND EXPLORATION

OF

LOWER CALIFORNIA.

Br J. ROSS BROWNE.

SAN FRANCISCO:

H. H. BANCROFT AND COMPANY.

1869.

ENTERED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by

D. APPLETON & COMPANY,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.

HISTORICAL SUMMARY OF LOWER CALIFORNIA,

FROM ITS DISCOVERY IN 1532 TO 1867.

BY ALEXANDER S. TAYLOR,

Author of the "Bibliografia Californica entre 1544-1867," "The Indianology of California," etc.; Hon. Mem. of the California Academy of Sciences and of the Mercantile Library of San Francisco, and late Clerk of the United States District Court at Monterey.

INTRODUCTION.

THERE is no such thing in existence as a present and past history of the California Peninsula, which may be said to have been the mother of the State of California. The missionary histories prior to 1700 are well as far as they go, but are full of omissions, mistakes, grave errors of fact, and innumerable errors of type, all of which have been copied in every publication issued down to the present day, and making "confusion worse confounded." This little work is not designed as a serious history, the printed materials for which would take years to digest and arrange, and the consulting of immense numbers of manuscripts in California, Mexico, and Spain, kept secret, from government motives, which alone would occupy a lifetime. The sketch is intended as an historical précis or procession of events from the past to the present times, which has never been made before-a skeleton guide collated, compared, and deraigned from the most authentic and reliable sources, and the chapters and materials are compiled and arranged in a manner, we hope, convenient and simple, the plan of which has never been attempted before in any work relating to the Pacific Coast. It will thus, we flatter ourselves, be found useful to the immigrant, the merchant, the seaman and navigator, the naturalist, the journalist, the traveller, the statesman, the historian, the miner, the manufacturer and the speculator, and, we may add, it is made from the study of long years of California life.

Having been pressed, as it were, into a remote corner of the world for over three centuries, the progress of events induced by the discovery of gold in 1848 has brought thousands of ships and millions of men in sight of the peninsular shores for the last twenty years; yet that immense country is still empty-a mere frame without a picture. But the rapid completion of railroad communications across the continent, with hourly telegrams, the steamer lines now securely connecting between Cape Horn and the Oregon, the opening in 1867 of the steamer routes to Australia and China, and the institution of legalized railroad corporations to connect the Gulf of California with the Bay of San Francisco and the Gulf of Mexico, will very soon draw, voluntarily or not, the California peninsula within the periphery of events, big with the fate of the future States, commonwealths, nations, and empires of the great ocean which the Divine Father of All seems ordaining for the immediate future.