Into Alta California

Coyote Canyon offered the expedition a miraculous passage from desert to coast. At San Gregorio (camp 53), the column entered a year-round stream lined with sycamores, willows, and California fan palms — a corridor of green after weeks of bare sand and salt flats. Each mile of elevation gained brought cooler temperatures, thicker vegetation, and renewed hope. The canyon was a route long used by Cahuilla people moving between the desert floor and the mountain meadows, and their knowledge of these passes was indispensable to Spanish navigation. The battered third division, last to emerge from the Imperial Valley, found the grassy valley at Santa Catharina Spring on Christmas Eve.

On that Christmas Eve of 1775, Salvador Ignacio Linares was born at Santa Catharina Spring and named 'Savior' in honor of the holiday. His mother was back in the saddle within 36 hours. The colonists celebrated with a fandango at the next camp, Los Danzantes — 'the dancers' — firing the name permanently into the landscape. The mountain country continued to restore their spirits: at Puerto de San Carlos the column crested the divide and caught its first view of the broad inland valleys rolling toward the Pacific, while at San Patricio Father Font noted 'large white flocks' of geese on the wetlands, a glimpse of the extraordinary wildlife of pre-development California.

On New Year's Eve, the Santa Ana River ran nearly unfordable from winter rains. One horse and one cow drowned in the crossing near present-day Riverside, and the caravan of 240 settlers, exhausted but intact, camped on the northern bank as 1776 began. Three days later, on January 4, the expedition reached Mission San Gabriel Arcangel near Los Angeles. There, devastating news arrived: the Kumeyaay people had attacked Mission San Diego on November 5, killing Father Luis Jayme. Anza dispatched 17 of his 20 soldiers south to help suppress the uprising and rode away himself from January 7 to February 8, leaving the families to rest at San Gabriel while he fulfilled his obligations as a military commander.