Overland Journeys to California
The narrative of westward expansion to California is often painted with images of sturdy wagon trains, filled with intrepid pioneers who braved the overland trails following the discovery of gold in 1848. Some might recall stories of travelers arriving by ship, enduring a challenging trek across the Isthmus of Panama, often with young children in tow. However, these figures represent a later chapter in California’s rich and diverse history.
Before the surge of Anglo-American migration in the 19th century, California had already experienced two significant waves of settlement. The first inhabitants were the diverse Native American tribes, who had thrived in the region for millennia before the arrival of European explorers. Challenging the myth of an empty, unclaimed land, recent research indicates that pre-contact California was one of the most densely populated areas in North America, north of central Mexico. What was often described as "wilderness" was, in reality, a complex tapestry of human activity, encompassing gathering and hunting sites, burial grounds, work areas, sacred spaces, trails, and established villages.
Our understanding of California’s indigenous peoples is limited by the scarcity of written records, save for a few petroglyphs adorning cave and canyon walls. Furthermore, a comprehensive understanding of California’s ecological landscape before European influence remains elusive, given the extended period of contact that unfolded over several centuries.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the indigenous inhabitants actively managed the environment through practices such as planting, pruning, irrigation, and controlled burns. Within these activities, Native American women played crucial and well-defined roles, highlighting their deep connection to the land and its resources.
The second wave of immigration brought Spanish colonists to the northern fringes of the Spanish empire. Driven by concerns about British and Russian encroachment, Spain sought to establish a strong military and civilian presence along the California coast. Between 1769 and 1821, twenty missions, four presidios (military forts), and three civil settlements known as pueblos were constructed, stretching from San Diego northward to the area just north of San Francisco. These settlements served as strategic outposts and centers of cultural and economic influence.
A pivotal figure in this era was Juan Bautista de Anza, who pioneered an overland route connecting established settlements in New Spain with the remote California outposts. This ambitious undertaking involved forging a new trail across 600 miles of challenging terrain. His initial expedition in 1774 successfully transported forty soldiers, twelve women, and several children. Upon his return to Monterrey, Mexico, to report his success, Anza had traversed over 2,000 miles, demonstrating his exceptional leadership and navigational skills.
Maintaining this overland route required fostering positive relationships with the Native American tribes along the way. Recognizing the need for continued settlement to bolster Spanish interests in the region, Anza embarked on an even more remarkable feat: guiding 240 men, women, and children, including seven infants under eight months old, across the arid desert and up the California coast. This exemplifies the resilience and fortitude of these early settlers.
The 1775 expedition departed from Tubac on October 23rd. An unusually early winter brought severe cold, record-breaking snow, and ice. The colonists, accustomed to the warmer climates of Mexico, were ill-prepared for the harsh conditions. Rations were scarce, potable water was difficult to find, both people and livestock fell ill, and many animals succumbed to the elements. Despite these formidable challenges, Juan Bautista de Anza reached Monterey, California, with more people than he had started with, as three individuals were born en route. Tragically, only one person perished during the journey: Señora Felix, a mother of six, who died in childbirth on the first night. The rest of the party, including the newborns, survived. This unparalleled success in traversing the overland route to California remains unmatched, before, during, and after the Gold Rush. Had the thirteen diaries documenting his two expeditions been written in English rather than Spanish, Anza would be celebrated globally as a renowned leader, and the names of the extraordinary women who accompanied him would be widely remembered. The tales of Overland Journeys to California would be more prominent in history.
Although the women who journeyed north from Mexico did not leave behind written accounts of their personal experiences, thoughts, and emotions, intriguing glimpses into their lives can be gleaned from the diaries kept by the men who traveled alongside them. For example, it is known that Anza actively recruited young married couples for the 1775 expedition, aiming to increase the population of Spanish California. Three marriages even took place along the way. The ideal of womanhood prevalent during the 18th and 19th centuries influenced the selection of suitable colonists from among the poorer Mexican families. Spanish expectations for women largely mirrored those across Western cultures: piety, purity, domesticity, and modesty were highly valued, regardless of whether a woman was English, French, or Spanish-Mexican. However, there were exceptions to these general patterns of behavior and family composition expected of all women, irrespective of their social standing.
From the outset, families were dispatched to these remote outposts to augment the population of Spanish citizens. In addition to the relatively few individuals of purely Hispanic descent, the majority of colonists hailed from Mexico, where their families had resided for at least two generations. This included many mestizos (of mixed Native American and Spanish/Mexican ancestry), as well as mulattoes and people of African descent. Thus, California, already inhabited by diverse Native American groups, became a melting pot of cultures with the arrival of these new immigrants, a characteristic that persists to this day.
The two overland expeditions led by Juan Bautista de Anza in 1774 and 1775 stand out as some of the best-documented journeys in North American history. The story of how families migrated from the Spanish provinces of Sinaloa and Sonora (present-day Mexico) to the San Francisco Bay area, traversing the Sonoran Desert, the treacherous Gila and Colorado Rivers, and rugged mountain ranges, and then moving up California’s Central Valley, is one of the most remarkable and yet least known chapters in American history. These Overland Journeys to California shaped the future of the state.
The women who accompanied Anza primarily belonged to the lower classes of Mexican society. However, one notable exception was Maria Feliciana Arballo, born into a wealthy Spanish family. At the age of twenty, she and her mestizo husband joined Anza’s expedition, seeking to escape the rigid social hierarchy of the established Spanish empire, which discriminated against her husband based on his race and skin color. Despite her husband’s untimely death before the journey commenced, she insisted on accompanying Anza to California with her two young daughters. Perhaps her compelling arguments persuaded Anza, against the strong objections of Father Pedro Font, to make an exception to his policy requiring male family members to accompany all women. She and her daughters, one riding in front of her and the other behind, traveled on horseback to California. Upon arrival, she further asserted her independence by leaving the group in San Gabriel and entering into a second marriage with a mestizo soldier.
Arballo’s independent spirit often drew the ire of Father Pedro Font, who repeatedly expressed his annoyance with her and Anza for allowing her to travel to California against his wishes. Font confided in his diary that she consumed excessive amounts of alcohol during a celebratory evening, and he also criticized her "inappropriate" behavior, describing her as a "very bold widow" who "sang some verses which were not at all nice, applauded and cheered by the crowd." She defied the submissive and modest role expected of women during that era, and by performing in public, she challenged the social norms governing Spanish women’s actions. She further defied the class and color constraints of Hispanic culture by marrying ordinary soldiers who were mestizo, despite her own Spanish heritage. In defying her priest’s advice, resisting male authority, and acting boldly in the public sphere, she subverted the gendered expectations of proper behavior for women of her time.
At the highest echelons of California’s social hierarchy, though not a member of Anza’s party, was Eulalia Callis, born in Spain to an influential family. She became the wife of Alta California governor Pedro Fages. In 1785, she publicly accused her husband of infidelity and refused to share his bed, demanding to return to Mexico City. The governor denied any wrongdoing, and their priest advised her to drop the matter when she sought a divorce. She refused to comply and was punished for her defiance through imprisonment, isolation, the constant threat of flogging, and ex-communication from the Church. Although her contemporaries were unsympathetic, Callis’ actions, in retrospect, appear to have been driven by a strong survival instinct, as she had endured four pregnancies in six years, buried two of her children, and understandably yearned for a safer and more comfortable life in Mexico City.
Apolinaria Lorenzana, who arrived on the ship Concepcion with her widowed mother, also demonstrated remarkable independence. According to Spanish norms, as exemplified by the dispatch of ten female foundlings to California in 1800, Lorenzana was expected to marry and bear children to bolster the population of the northern borderlands of the Spanish empire. However, she never consented to marriage, despite receiving a proposal from a young Californian. Her strategy for avoiding marriage, "because I was not particularly inclined toward that state even though I knew the merits of that sacred institution," was to dedicate herself to valued work, such as cooking, nursing, and caring for the Native Americans who lived near the mission. "La Beata" was respected, admired, and loved for her life of service, and she maintained control over her sexuality and lived a life of independence, supporting herself through her work for the Church. Her contributions were recognized with a land grant in her name, making her one of the few women in California to receive such an honor.
The American conquest of the Mexican province, followed swiftly by the discovery of gold in 1848, the subsequent influx of immigrants during the Gold Rush, and California’s admission to the Union in 1850 marked a profound turning point in California’s history. Socially, economically, and demographically, California underwent a rapid transformation. San Francisco evolved from a small town into a bustling port, and mining camps and villages mushroomed along the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. The Overland Journeys to California became more frequent.
American and foreign immigrants further enriched the diversity and complexity of California society. Several mulatto families had traveled to California with Anza, and intermarriage between races was so common that colonial New Spain developed a highly formalized racial classification system, including terms such as "castizo" and "morisco." One scholar noted that "approximately 55 percent of the Spanish-speaking population in California in 1790 was of mixed heritage," and 20 percent may have possessed some African ancestry.
The Gold Rush attracted fortune seekers from all corners of the globe. The influx of immigrants from China, particularly notable due to the extremely small Asian population in North America prior to the Gold Rush, created a unique community in Northern California. However, relatively few Chinese women immigrated. In 1890, there were 69,382 Chinese men in California and only 3,090 women. San Francisco customhouse records for 1852 indicate that 20,026 Chinese arrived by sea that year. Soon after, the city’s Chinatown included Chinese girls imported for prostitution, many of whom had been sold by impoverished parents or abducted from the streets of China.
However, the vast majority of men and women who migrated to California during the Gold Rush originated from east of the Mississippi River. Many had already relocated once to the Old Northwest, departing for California from small farms in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Others, such as Mrs. D. B. Bates, the wife of a sea captain who experienced three ship fires during her voyage around Cape Horn to San Francisco, set sail from the eastern seaboard. Those who traveled overland across the Isthmus of Panama documented their novel experiences, including riding mules, sometimes wearing men’s clothing, sleeping on the ground or in indigenous huts, and their dismay at being served baked monkey for dinner. For some, it was an exciting adventure; for others, an excruciating ordeal.
While the story of the overland journey from the east is widely known, recent scholarship has provided deeper insights into the social and psychological impacts of displacement and the effects of life on the trail on women. In her comprehensive work, "Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey," Lillian Schlissel has identified and analyzed nearly 100 diaries and journals kept by women traveling west between 1840 and 1870. Schlissel points out that male family members typically made the decision to move west, with women often accepting it reluctantly. This disparity in enthusiasm stemmed from the different stages of life for men and women. Men were often in the most active phases of their lives, eager to break free and pursue wealth, even if it meant taking risks. If their search for gold proved unsuccessful, they could acquire land and resume farming. However, most women were in their childbearing years and desired to establish roots, enjoy a sense of community, and connect with other women and their families. Many women went to California with reluctance. The Overland Journeys to California were not always willingly taken.
The arduous journey to California often strained marital relationships, and women exercised their options in California when seeking a divorce. The legal grounds for divorce were extensive, including "natural impotence, minority, adultery, extreme cruelty, habitual intemperance, desertion, willful neglect, consent obtained by force or fraud, and conviction for a felony."
Despite the obvious differences between the women who traveled with Anza and the Anglo-American women regarding divorce, both waves of migration shared many similarities. Women in both groups experienced childbirth, miscarriages, and death. Few women traveled outside of their family unit. All faced hardships, deprivation, and constant exposure to extreme temperatures and weather conditions. Women were consistently tasked with cooking, washing clothes, nursing the sick, and tending to their children.
However, the degree of suffering differed significantly. Those traveling westward in the mid-nineteenth century often lacked the cohesion and leadership that characterized the Anza expedition. Ill-advised shortcuts and turnoffs resulted in tragedies such as the Donner Party disaster. Cholera was rampant, and the trail became marked with the graves of those who succumbed to measles, dysentery, smallpox, and fevers. Infant mortality was a major factor in the loss of life, and contaminated water and spoiled food contributed to the overall misery and deaths of others. One diarist, Cecelia McMillen Adams, morbidly documented over two hundred grave sites along the trail from Illinois in 1852.
The Spanish success in California was due to superior planning, which included blazing the trail, maintaining good relations with the Native Americans, and properly equipping the participants. The Spanish specifically recruited individuals deemed most suitable for the journey and life on the frontier, an advantage that the Anglo-Americans on the westward trail did not have. While the Anza expedition was a small and relatively cohesive group, the forty-niners were an unstructured collection of thousands of individuals and families who lacked leadership and experience on the difficult journey west. Except for the evening when Father Pedro Font criticized Anza’s decision to provide liquor for the Fandango instead of offering prayers of thanksgiving, and the young widow entertained the group with her bawdy song, conflict among the Spanish leaders and rank and file was primarily expressed through personal journals. In contrast to the tales of crime and punishment that unfolded along the trail of the forty-niners, the Anza group remained peaceful and well-disciplined.
However, Spanish supremacy in California was short-lived. The outpost of the empire fell first to the Mexicans and then to the Americans. Within eighty years, the era of Hispanic dominance was over as the American government implemented Manifest Destiny and solidified its conquest by altering property laws, including those that had enabled women to inherit, own, buy, and sell land and to enjoy the profits earned during marriage through community property. Despite prolonged legal battles, most Hispanic landowners eventually lost their holdings, large and small, and the marginalization of those not of Anglo ancestry began. Increasingly isolated by language and culture, the people of Spanish and Mexican extraction, as well as those of African origin, and the original Californians—the Native Americans—were relegated to the economic and social shadows.
Perhaps future studies of the earliest residents of the Golden State will restore strong, independent women such as Maria Feliciana Arballo, Eulalia Callis, and Apolinaria Lorenzana to their rightful place in the broader narrative of American history. These women and their stories of Overland Journeys to California deserve recognition.