Arrival at San Francisco Bay

The 240 colonists rested at Monterey while Anza departed on March 23, 1776, with a 20-person reconnaissance party including Father Font. Moving light and fast, they rode north through the Santa Clara Valley — land the Ohlone people had inhabited for thousands of years — noting its extraordinary fertility in arroyo-fed meadows below the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Diablo Range. By March 26 the party was ascending the San Francisco Peninsula itself, riding through coast live oak and redwood stands with the bay expanding to the east. At Arroyo de San Josef de Cupertino, Font's diary entry named a creek that would eventually lend its name to a very different kind of enterprise: the headquarters of Apple Inc.

On March 27, Anza reached the tip of the peninsula at Mountain Lake and selected the site for the new presidio on the dramatic headland above what is now Fort Point at the foot of the Golden Gate. He noted 'abundant pasturage, plenty of firewood, and fine water,' though the surrounding landscape was bare sand dunes. Father Font chose the mission site at the Arroyo de los Dolores — the stream that would give Mission Dolores its enduring name. A bear encountered near the lake added a moment of drama, and the party planted a cross at the chosen site before departing. The bay spreading before them was one of the finest natural harbors in the world, and they knew it.

From San Francisco, Anza's party swung around the entire southern and eastern shore of the bay, camping at the Carquinez Strait near its connection to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, then returning south through the Livermore Valley and down to Monterey, arriving on April 14, 1776. His mission was complete. He had delivered 240 civilians across 1,200 miles of wilderness without a second death, and he had sited the settlement that would grow into one of the great cities of the world. Anza departed soon after for Sonora; on June 27, 1776 — just a week before the Declaration of Independence was adopted on the opposite coast — Lieutenant Jose Joaquin Moraga led the colonists north from Monterey to found the city of San Francisco.