20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY MARCH 12-18, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com of CSU Monterey Bay faculty and president of the Monterey County Historical Society, sees Anza’s careful preparation as critical. “He wanted to make sure that this community of colonists and settlers would survive such a harrowing expedition, over mountains through harsh deserts, across rivers,” Mendoza says. “By the time they arrived in Monterey, they had seen everything imaginable.” Anza also factored in who would need to be a part of the new colony. He chose military men and their families—he wanted young families with children who would populate the new outpost—many from the lower classes of Sonora, people who had few opportunities to advance and would be inspired by the promise of a new life. Mendoza points out the expedition included one of the largest contingents of Afro-mestizos, people of mixed heritage descended from enslaved people brought to the New World. (Spain outlawed slavery of Indigenous people in the 1500s.) Anza and 175 others left Horcasitas in Sonora on Sept. 29, 1775, heading for Tubac. There they would gather with the rest of the train, as Anza referred to the group in his journal, before embarking on the majority of the journey. The expedition left Tubac on Oct. 23, 1775 with the full contingent of 240 people. In the group was Manuela Ygnacia López Peñuelas, a mother who was very pregnant. At the end of their first day of travel, she gave birth to a baby boy, but died hours later from complications. Hers would be the only death of the entire trip. It was a challenging 1,200-mile journey, over mountains and deserts, through snow storms, rain storms and blazing sun. Through it all, Anza was mindful of their limits. For example, he did delay the trip at times after women gave birth. (There are discrepancies among reports of the exact number of births. At least eight women were pregnant. Several babies were born successfully and there were at least two miscarriages on the trip.) When the expedition finally made it to what is now Monterey County on March 6, 1776, Father Pedro Font, the expedition’s spiritual leader, noted in his journal that they had entered the Cañada de los Robles, or Canyon of the Oaks. They camped at Mission San Antonio, which still stands today. Anza reported in his journal that they arrived at the mission at 4pm, after about eight hours of travel over 24 miles. The priests welcomed the troops with “two very fat hogs and a supply of suet from them, a present which, on account of the condition of the country and the needs of our soldiers, has been appreciated accordingly,” Anza said. Font’s description of the roughly 500 Indigenous people at the mission was harsh, calling them “small in body, degenerate and ugly, both men and women,” adding that “they live in their heathendom scattered through those mountains and canyons without any special knowledge of God.” After two days at Mission San Antonio, the expedition left and headed through what today is King City, and north to Soledad, before traveling over what is now Highway 68 to Monterey, arriving on March 10. It rained heavily nearly the entire day, “so that we arrived at Monterey very wet,” Font noted. He called the road into Monterey “like all the rest is through pretty country, green, shady, flower strewn, fertile, beautiful, and splendid.” The soldiers and priests of the Presidio of Monterey—at that time located about where the Royal Presidio of Monterey sits today—were “overjoyed” to see them, Font said. They were greeted with three volleys from the small cannons there and musket fire by presidio soldiers. The next day Father Serra and other priests of the Carmel mission came to Monterey to greet Anza, who then headed with Font back to Carmel to rest. Within a few days, Anza was inflicted with severe pain in his groin— “I could barely breathe and thought I would suffocate and die on the spot,” he wrote. On Friday, March 22, Anza, who was better but still in some pain—and against a doctor’s advice—saddled up to ride with a military detail to San Francisco to scout locations for a presidio and mission, leaving the colonists in Monterey. They stopped overnight in Salinas, near where Natividad Creek Park is located, then headed up and over a pass at the north end of the Gabilan range, and toward the area of San Juan Bautista, via what is now Old Stage Coach Road. The party reached San Francisco on March 27, then returned to Monterey and Carmel. The colonists remained in Monterey a few months before embarking on the last leg of the journey to San Francisco, arriving on June 27, to start their new lives. Susie Gularte of Monterey and Julie Amaya of Santa Cruz are both members of the California Mission Walkers—a group dedicated to walking the route of the 21 missions from San Diego to Sonoma—but they had never met until they were both on a group walk about four years ago. As the two women chatted, they suddenly realized that they shared the same ancestors who were a part of the Anza expedition, their fifth-great-grandparents, Maria Gertrudis and soldier Ignacio Linares, making them cousins. “We’ve been fast friends ever since,” Gularte says. The expedition’s census lists Linares as “Indio,” which at the time was a legal, racial and social classification of people considered of pure Indigenous ancestry. Gertrudis was listed as “España,” of Spanish European ancestry. She would have been from the highest caste of society at that time. Their children would have been considered “mestizos,” of mixed heritage. “A lot of times in these small towns there was really no other choice [but to marry outside of one’s caste], and that was very frequent,” Amaya notes. Gertrudis was 22 at the time of the expedition, with three small children and pregnant with her fourth child, Salvador, who was born on Christmas Eve in 1775 in the Anza Borrego desert. Font noted in his journal that he was called to take Gertrudis’ confession: “She was very fearful of dying, but having consoled her and encouraged her as best I could I returned to my tent, and at half past 11 at night she very happily and quickly gave birth to a boy.” “And that puts our family on the map, pretty much,” Amaya says. It was thanks to Anza’s and Font’s journals that their family has such a precise record of their history. For a long time, Salvador’s birth was reported as the first nonnative born in Upper California, Amaya says, but that wasn’t true. A plaque in the Anza Borrego desert declares Salvador Linares as the first white child born there, she says, “and it’s wrong.” Neither woman knew of their history as descendants of the expedition until later in life. Gularte says her grandmother never spoke of the history because she was ashamed of it. She found out in her 20s after a cousin of hers who is a priest was able to access records and write it all down. Amaya got interested in genealogy in her 20s and spoke to older family members—she descends from Gertrudis and Linares on her father’s side, but none of those relatives mentioned the expedition. As she explored her genealogy further along the paterThe Anza expedition arrived at Mission San Antonio, in what is now Jolon, on March 6, 1776. The 240 men, women and children, plus horses, cattle and mules, camped around the mission, which still stands today. In 1976, markers were placed outside of the mission commemorating both the U.S. bicentennial and the 200th anniversary of the Anza expedition. PAM MARINO
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjAzNjQ1NQ==