by Gary Kamiya
The first European to set foot on the soil of what is now California was a former crossbowman and companion of Cortéz’s named Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo. Considering the genocidal impact the “civilized” races would later have on California’s native inhabitants, it is appropriate that Cabrillo as a boy had taken part in a hideous massacre of Indians in Cuba and, during the siege of Mexico City, caulked ships with pitch made from the rendered fat of slain Indians. (These facts do not appear in any of the standard accounts of the discovery of California.)
Cabrillo’s mission was to find the mythical Strait of Anian—the supposed passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that would allow Spanish ships to sail directly to the East Indies. He set sail from Navidad in New Spain (Mexico) on June 27, 1542. After three months at sea, Cabrillo discovered “a port, closed and very good,” which he called San Miguel—now known as San Diego. On September 28, 1542, he landed and formally took possession of Alta California. (Alta, or “upper” California, was the name the Spanish gave to the area that was to become the American state. Arid Baja, or “lower” California, was a Spanish possession and remains a Mexican one.) Cabrillo followed the prescribed ritual: He claimed the land in the name of the king of Castile, placed his hand threateningly on his sword while saying he was prepared to defend it, cut down some plants and tore up grass, moved stones around, and splashed water from the sea onto the land. According to accepted tradition, this symbolic mumbo jumbo conferred upon Spain eternal ownership of the land. Alta California would remain first in Spain’s hands, then in those of its former colony Mexico, for more than 300 years.
Soon after this, the captain suffered one of those ordinary mishaps that often proved fatal in the days before antibiotics. While on San Miguel Island, Cabrillo heard that his men needed help in a battle with local Indians. Jumping out of a rowboat, Cabrillo broke his arm or leg slipping on a rocky ledge. He continued to sail north, making it as far as a cape near Fort Ross, 90 miles north of San Francisco, before turning back. He discovered Drakes Bay but did not put in there. Like every other explorer for the next 234 years, he missed the Golden Gate, either because his course took him too far out to sea, or because of fog, or because the opening was obscured by the East Bay hills and Angel Island. Meanwhile, Cabrillo’s wound had become gangrenous. While wintering in the Channel Islands near Santa Barbara, the old conquistador died on January 3, 1543.
Cabrillo had discovered California. But the discovery had almost no effect on history. No one followed up on it. Cabrillo’s voyage had been a failure. He had not found the Strait of Anian, or any passage to the riches of the East, or the fabulous cities of gold and silver. His expedition did perhaps leave one tangible legacy: a small rock. In 1901, on a small Channel Island, someone stumbled upon a rock bearing the initials “J.R.C.” If that stone—which now sits in the anthropology museum at the University of California, Berkeley—is indeed Cabrillo’s gravestone, it is the oldest European artifact in California.
Cabrillo’s voyage was followed by one of the most storied and romantic chapters in Spain’s entire imperial saga: the Manila galleon. And once again, San Francisco remained just outside the frame of this Technicolor epic.
The Manila galleon carried spices and goods from the Philippines to Acapulco. Their northerly route followed the trade winds across the Pacific to Cape Mendocino in Northern California, then south past the Farallon Islands and on to Mexico. It was a brutal journey, the longest regular voyage in the world, and the most dreaded, but for those who braved it, the rewards were great: A single voyage could make a captain comfortable for life, and ordinary seamen could make more money than on any other trip. Starting in 1565, and continuing for an astonishing 250 years, the great treasure galleons would sail past the Farallones, one each year. But they never saw the Golden Gate.
In 1579, a Manila galleon named the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción played a key role in the oddest of all the peculiar episodes that make up San Francisco’s long non-history: the mysterious visit of Sir Francis Drake.
The celebrated English privateer had left Plymouth in 1577 in his flagship, the eighty-foot Pelican, which he later renamed the Golden Hind. Drake took her through the stormy Strait of Magellan, emerging into the Pacific like a wolf in a sheepfold. The Spanish ships sailing up and down the coast of South and Central America were unprepared for this hostile interloper into their ocean (until the 17th century, the Pacific was called “the Spanish lake”), and Drake found the pickings rich. He captured several ships and sacked Spanish towns before coming upon the Concepción, the biggest prize of his career, on her way to Manila. After a short fight, Drake seized 80 pounds of gold, 26 tons of silver, 13 chests of silver coins, and jewels—a haul worth twice as much as Queen Elizabeth’s tax income for the year.
Drake sailed north, searching for—what else?—the Strait of Anian. Unable to find it but not wanting to sail back south where Spanish warships would be searching for him, he looked for a place on the northern Pacific coast to refit his ship and take on supplies, before heading west toward the Moluccas and home. He landed somewhere near San Francisco. The exact location of his landing remains controversial—his own journal is lost, and his chaplain’s record was deemed unreliable by Drake himself. But most scholars believe, and the federal government now concurs, that the great mariner sailed into Drakes Bay, guided the Golden Hind over the shallows into Drakes Estero, and careened his ship in a shallow cove about a mile inside the mouth of the estuary.
Drake remained in the cove for three weeks, repairing his ship and meeting the friendly Miwok Indians who came down to the shore to stare at the great wooden ship that had suddenly glided into their unchanging world. It was the first encounter between northern California Indians and white men. When the hull was shipshape, Drake left a “plate of brasse” inlaid with a sixpence that claimed “Nova Albion” for England. (He named the harbor New England because the white cliffs of Drakes Bay reminded him of the white cliffs of Dover.) Then he sailed off into the Pacific, passing the Farallon Islands (which he named the Island of St. James) but missing the Golden Gate. In 1580, more than two and a half years after he had left Plymouth, Drake returned to a hero’s welcome. He was the second man to circumnavigate the globe.
The appearance of an Elizabethan mariner in Point Reyes was like a deus ex machina conjured up by one of the less intelligent gods on Mount Olympus. This contact with the Age of Shakespeare had no effect on San Francisco’s subsequent history whatsoever, except to leave an embarrassing boo-boo on the legacy of a famous professor.
There is no physical evidence that Drake visited Point Reyes. But an inscribed brass plate found in 1936, supposedly the one left by Drake, was pronounced genuine by the eminent U.C. Berkeley historian Herbert Bolton, who excitedly exclaimed, “One of the world’s long-lost historical treasures apparently has been found.” Bolton’s view was initially confirmed by metallurgical testing. Although many were immediately skeptical—debates raged about such arcane matters as whether the letter “J” existed in the English alphabet during Drake’s lifetime—the plate was generally considered genuine until 1977, when exhaustive analysis revealed it to be a fake. The motive for the hoax has never been established—no one made any money off it—although it has been suggested that it was an elaborate student prank at Bolton’s expense, whose perpetrators were too embarrassed to admit what they had done after their esteemed professor was taken in.
With the infamous “Calaveras skull,” which allegedly proved that humans, mastodons, and elephants coexisted in California during the Pliocene epoch that ended about 2 million years ago—and also snookered an august academic—the “plate of brasse” is California’s most famous fraud.
The Drake episode was weird enough. But 16 years later, another captain, sailing under the flag of Spain, landed in the same toy harbor. The adventure he had in California was even more epic than Drake’s, but in the end just as pointless.
In 1590, the scurvy problem that had always plagued the
Manila galleons had become intolerable. By the time the big-bellied ships got near California, the bodies of dead crewmen were invariably being tossed into the sea. Moreover, Spain was increasingly worried about the raids of Drake and another feared (and less chivalrous) English pirate, Thomas Cavendish. New Spain’s new viceroy decided that it was essential to find a way station on the California coast where the crew of the Manila galleon could regain its health, and pick up word of English pirates and possibly an armed escort.
A Portuguese mariner named Sebastián Cermeño was chosen to head the voyage of discovery. Cermeño sailed from Acapulco on March 21, 1594, to Manila, where he changed ships to a smaller, 200-ton ship named the San Agustín. With the ship fully laden with Chinese porcelain and silks, Cermeño sailed for California, reaching the coast several months later. After an abortive attempt to enter Trinity Bay, he sailed south and anchored in Drakes Bay.
A week later, disaster struck. While almost the entire crew was ashore, a rare southeast storm blew up, driving the San Agustín onto the rocks. Helplessly, the crew watched as their ship—it might as well have been their space shuttle—was battered in the pounding surf. The ship and everything in it was lost, and several men were killed. Fortunately, the Spanish had a small open dugout with sweeps and one or two sails called a viroco. Cermeño packed all 70 members of the crew and a dog into the tiny launch and headed for Mexico. In one of the epic feats in the annals of seamanship, they made it, although the unfortunate dog was devoured skin and all.
Cermeño’s voyage, like Cabrillo’s and Drake’s, had no effect whatsoever on California history. A few years later, Spain sent another captain, Sebastián Vizcaíno, on a similar voyage. In 1602 Vizcaíno discovered the harbor of Monterey, which he praised effusively. But in an appropriately deflating end to the whole saga, the viceroy argued that if Spain did establish a port in Monterey, it would actually attract the English, who would simply take it over. The viceroy’s letter was the opening strategic salvo in a long game of chess over California that would eventually involve Spain, England, France, Russia, and finally a country whose first settlers would not land in Jamestown, on the other side of the continent, for five more years—the United States.
Vizcaíno’s voyage was the last attempt to explore California during the Age of Discovery. In one of those strange discontinuities of history, the west coast of North America simply vanished again. For a few moments three or four spotlights had probed the darkness, illuminating fugitive glimpses of an unknown world. Then the spotlights flickered out and the darkness fell again, not to be lifted for 167 years. When San Francisco was finally discovered, it was not by sea at all, but by land.
Marx said that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. But San Francisco reversed his dictum. It started out as farce. For the native people, whose unchanging existence was spared for almost two centuries by the European failure to find the Golden Gate, the tragedy would come later.
Chapter 6
The Canyon
Glen Canyon
Every great city is like a memorable cassoulet, containing secret ingredients that give it a unique flavor. One of San Francisco’s secret ingredients is its Mystery Hills.
Because I am obsessed with horizons, I have tried to explore all the hills that you can see from San Francisco, from the 50-odd ones in the city itself to the dozens that surround it, some of them 40 miles or more away. But it is a vast undertaking, and I’ve barely started. And even after I’ve climbed a hill, I often don’t recognize it later. The landscape here is so complicated that little pieces of hills, both inside and outside the city, are constantly coming into view. There are so many hills, the relationships between them are so convoluted and the views of them so fragmented, that no matter how long you’ve lived here, half the time you’re not sure what you’re looking at. For example, I know that from the summit of Nob Hill at Sacramento and Jones, the long ridge eight miles to the south that appears behind Bernal Heights and drops down to Highway 101, is the eastern end of Mount San Bruno. But I am not sure what the higher rounded ridge behind it is. I think it’s Sweeney Ridge, the bay discovery site, but I’m not positive—even though I’ve hiked to the top of Sweeney Ridge twice. Even more irritatingly elusive is a piece of a big hill in the southeastern part of town that keeps popping into view. Is it the ridge in McClaren Park, Hunters Point, Silver Terrace, or Bay View? And what about the most distant mountain of all, somewhere way up north in Napa—is that part of the Mayacamas? The list is endless.
These Mystery Hills—does any other city contain so many unknown vistas?—make San Francisco feel permanently enigmatic, like one of those surreal backgrounds in George Herriman’s Krazy Kat cartoons in which new mountains and objects appear in every panel. I sometimes suspect that the hills are gaslighting me—getting up in the middle of the night and moving furtively around.
In this cryptic landscape, the most surprising site of all is Glen Canyon. Glen Canyon is not only the most peculiar geographical anomaly in San Francisco—a concave feature in a convex city—it is also the least known. In any other city, a deep, wild, rocky canyon with a creek flowing through it, in almost the exact geographical center of town, would be celebrated far and wide. But even most San Franciscans have never set foot in Glen Canyon. In a city of Mystery Hills, it is the Mystery Gorge.
Glen Canyon is literally a tear in the city’s fabric. It runs directly south of towering Twin Peaks and east of the city’s highest point, Mount Davidson. Its ancient chert boulders were formed by the same chthonic forces that lifted up those 900-foot hills, and the little stream that trickles through it is a reminder of the river that scoured it out. Glen Canyon was formerly called “Little Switzerland,” but it feels more like a weird combination of Scotland and the Wild West. Its steeply sloping sides, verdant riparian strip, and long views to the southern mountains give it the feeling of a highlands valley; its massive red boulders, sparse trees, and parched beauty recall a canyon in Utah.
Aside from the Farallones and Lands End, Glen Canyon is the wildest and most unspoiled part of San Francisco. To hike through this deep notch surrounded by the highest hills in the city is to experience San Francisco’s primordial landscape in its most dramatic form. Owls nest in its eucalyptus trees, raptors circle above it, and two or three coyotes live in the dense willow thickets along the creek. An area that still shelters coyotes is a nut that man has not yet completely cracked.
By rights, Glen Canyon should have been developed or filled or otherwise ruined decades ago. It’s economically useless, and it takes up 70 acres of land in the heart of the city. If it had been a wetland and not a narrow, rocky gorge with a 350-foot drop, it would be home to a Costco today. It’s only here because it was too big to fill in.
But that landscape was almost ruined. Glen Canyon’s history is a microcosm of San Francisco’s evolving attitude toward nature—from primordial innocence to man’s-dominion-over-nature callousness to patriotic triumphalism to wrongheaded rationalism to citizen activism and enlightened ecological stewardship.
The native Californians were drawn to Glen Canyon because of Islais Creek. The creek, which over millennia carved out the canyon and still trickles through it for a mile, was once one of the few major streams in San Francisco, pouring down from Twin Peaks on its way to the bay four miles away. During the Mexican period, when the canyon was part of a vast land grant called Rancho San Miguel, cattle were grazed on it. But Glen Canyon’s bucolic existence came to an end after the American conquest. In a development so egregious that it seems like an allegory of man profaning nature, the first dynamite factory in the United States opened in what was then called Rock Canyon in 1868. (The fact that dynamite was invented by Alfred Nobel, a lifelong pacifist who established the prize that bears his name so that he would not be remembered as “the merchant of death,” makes the allegory even stranger.) After an explosion killed the factory’s chemist and his teamster, the plant was moved into the remote sand dunes of the Richmond District.
In 1889 the estate of railroad tycoon Charles Crocker bought Glen Canyon from philanthropist and former mayor Adolph Sutro. In 1898, the Crocker estate, the largest landowner in the city, opened a pleasure garden and zoo in the canyon, hoping to use Little Switzerland to lure buyers to its development in nearby Glen Park. One of the attractions of the pleasure garden was a replica of Morro Castle, the citadel in Santiago, Cuba, that American troops had conquered just months before during the Spanish-American War, the fateful intervention that marked the rise of the United States as an imperialist power (and was bitterly denounced by an old San Francisco newspaperman named Mark Twain).
After complaints about rowdy behavior in the canyon, the city bought it in 1922 and turned it into a park. The peaceful canyon seemed finally to have escaped the depredations of industrialism, jingoism, and other all-American by-products. But in 1958, the hyperrationalist postwar planners who saw the unfettered use of the automobile as America’s salvation decided that the best use for Glen Canyon would be to install a “Crosstown Freeway” that would go through the canyon, tunnel under Twin Peaks, and emerge near Seventh Avenue to join up with—what else?—another freeway. Facing widespread resistance from citizens—a movement that would become known as the Freeway Revolt—a city official impatiently said, “Someone is always hurt by construction of a freeway. It comes back to the basic question facing the city: Does San Francisco want freeways, or not?” The residents of Glen Park did not, and their resistance, spearheaded by housewives, saved the canyon.
But it was too late to save Islais Creek. Starting in the 1920s, the expanding city had begun relentlessly covering its three miles of meandering, gentle, green-fringed chaos. Today the creek runs down to an old Works Progress Administration–built recreation center at the southern end of the canyon, then vanishes into a culvert leading to underground pipes. The water doesn’t appear aboveground again until it flows into the bay north of Hunters Point, three miles away.