BAY OF SMOKES

THE BIRTH OF LOS ANGELES

1781

For 227 years, nobody told the Native Americans they were living in the Viceroyalty of New Spain.

First, the Spanish won Alta California when they conquered the Aztecs in Mexico. Then, their explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo headed north, the first European to set eyes on the land that is today's Los Angeles. He staked a claim for the Viceroyalty of New Spain in 1542. What did Cabrillo see? Smoke. A fragrant cloud, stoked by two-dozen Native American campfires, permeated the area. Cabrillo named this indentation in the coastline Bahia de los Fumos, "Bay of Smokes." (Yes, LA's "discovery" was also its first smog joke.)

The natives called their home Yang-na, but their story is no joke. When the Spanish first arrived, the Yang-na people were scattered in little clusters between the ocean and the Los Angeles River; their center stood where City Hall stands today. They spoke a language similar to the Shoshones (on the other side of the Sierra Nevada); they lived on fish, small game and the flour they milled from acorns; they wore almost no clothing. The Yang-na believed in an afterlife, they practiced cremation and they savored hallucinogens during coming-of-age rituals. Temescals, ceremonial sweat lodges, were used for cleansing and for communion with their god Chinigchinich, but most rituals revolved around cycles of life. They had no demons.

Compared to their colorful relatives the Aztecs and the Great Plains Indians, the Yang-na were lackluster natives. They didn't farm the land, didn't make war, didn't build, didn't weave blankets or make terra cotta pottery. Yet, unlike the Aztecs and Mayans, these simple natives held onto their land and their lifestyle for hundreds of years beyond those sophisticated civilizations. California was one of the last habitable places on earth that wasn't being planned for the white man's empires. However, in 1781, more than two centuries after Cabrillo first smelled smoke, the Viceroy needed a plan.

Russian fur trappers were venturing too far south from their northwest trading posts; this concerned the King of Spain and his Viceroy in the New World. To protect Spanish holdings in California, the Viceroy appointed a governor. That governor, Gaspar de Portolá, was a romantic. Instead of lining Alta California with soldiers awaiting confrontation, Portolá installed an army of a different sort: the Franciscan Friars. They planned for the construction of 21 missions along an Indian path that was soon called El Camino Real, the Royal Road, from San Diego to San Francisco 500 miles away. Of course, every mission still had a military Presidio attached to it to keep the peace, but the king got his wish. The missions took 42 years to build; no nation challenged the Franciscan Friars or their Spanish sponsors, not even the local Yang-na. Roman Catholics would build California, mission by mission.

Situated just six miles from the San Gabriel mission, Los Angeles was not a mission. It was to be a pueblo, a community. On an expedition in 1769, Governor Portolá named the local river El Rio de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúnculá, "the river of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels of Porciúnculá." The expedition's journalist wrote that on August 2 they encountered "eight heathen," the local Yang-na, who gave the strangers gifts of baskets "and strings of beads made from shells." This friendly exchange marked the end of an era for the native people. In 1779, Portolá's replacement, Governor Felipe de Neve, would populate El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúnculá. It would no longer be the Bay of Smokes.

When word went out across Mexico that pobladores, settlers, were invited to this new land, the response was limp. Eventually, 11 impoverished farmers were recruited with promises of seven-acre farms, along with seed, tools, horses, 10 pesos a month and a plot of land 20 varas (55 feet) by 40 varas (110 feet) facing the plaza they planned to build. With their wives and children, they formed a community of 44 pobladores, the first settlers in Los Angeles. Two were full-blooded Spaniards, plus four Indians, one Mestizo, two Negroes and two Mulattos. Twenty-two were children. Governor Neve designed a traditional pueblo where each residence faced a common plaza with a church in its center. September 4, 1781, the day that Governor Neve completed his plan, is recognized as the birthday of Los Angeles. (The LA County Fair coincides each year to celebrate this date.)

As the pobladores went to work on the community, the friars at the San Gabriel Mission went to work on the Indians. While learning to communicate with the Yang-na, they produced foods from seeds never seen before by the natives; they provided shelter to the native people in exchange for their labor. Then the friars introduced stories about evil, about Satan, and why the red man was...