Mission San Jose..... Click here for story

It is the oldest city in California.

At the time of its founding, November 29, 1777, the only other towns in the west were the Spanish settlements in Texas and New Mexico and the French villages strewn along the Mississippi River system.

Maps of the city

after its annexation by the United States. San Jose was chosen by the Constitutional Convention which met at Monterey in 1849 to establish a state government and bring law and order to a lawless land then in te frenzy of the gold rush. The first state legislature met in San Jose, and the first governor, Peter Hardeman rnett, resided there

San Jose may very well have saved the infant colony of California from being abandoned by Spain.

The attempt of the Spanish to colonize upper California was launched in 1769 from bases in the peninsula of lower California. The colonizing parties were made up entirely of soldiers and missionaries. Their leaders were Captain Gaspar de Portola, the military governor, and Fray Junipero Serra.

They were entering a land where they would find no food except wild game. The provender of the Indians- However acceptable and nourishing to them-did not appeal to the Spaniards nor the pueblodores.

Its' Spanish speaking inhabitants

The food crisis lasted eight years. All supplies had to be sent by ship from San Blas in the Mexican territory. The cost was prohibitive, and ship cargoes, as the viceroy put it, were “subject to the whims of the ocean.” Transports had to rack into the prevailing northerly winds. Storms compounded the difficulties. There was seldom enough food, and at times the colony faced actual starvation.

(today, of course, California is one of the major food producers of the world; it has lands of enormous fertility, bountiful supplies of water and a highly favorable climate.)

The colonists did know how to farm. Almost all of the soldiers had been recruited from Mexican families who lived on the land and were familiar with tillage and gardening. If there were not enough of them to spare some for this non-military Assignment, the good viceroy in Mexico City would help out. With that very purpose in mind, he included families of farmers in the colony Juan Bautista de Anza brought to California from Sonora in 1775.

Then, too, the missions were meant to be food producers. They were to support themselves through agriculture and had been equipped with farm implements, seed and experienced instructors to train the Indian neophytes in working the land.
Why then was there a difficulty?

The problem was that the Spaniards had not occupied the right areas. The three presidios-San Diego, Monterey and San Francisco-were built, for strategic reasons, on the only three decent bays the coast afforded. None of the three sites offered good farming land, plentiful sunlight or adequate rivers that could be dammed for irrigation purposes Governor Neve, traveling through Alta California, Could see where the troubles lay. The presidio locations, he wrote, “had neither the right kinds of soils nor enough water, and they presented other inconvenient features as well.”