Chapter II
4 entries · 1 corrected · 0 contested
Spain was in the Southwest for a century and a half and on the California coast for fifty years, and in all that time never settled an acre of Nevada. That absence is the finding.
founded 1692; the present church 1783–1797
Eusebio Kino founded the mission at Bac, south of present Tucson. The white church standing there now was built a century after the foundation.
why it is Nevada’s The northern edge of real Spanish presence in the interior. It stops there. Nothing comparable was ever attempted north-west of it.
Kino’s foundation record; the church’s construction dates are documented.
San Diego 1769, Monterey 1770
Portolá and Serra moved up the coast: presidio and mission at San Diego in 1769, Monterey in 1770. Twenty-one missions eventually chained the coastline.
why it is Nevada’s The mission system is why coastal California’s peoples met Old World disease in the 1770s and the Great Basin’s did not meet it that way for another seventy years.
the note said “1770 — Spanish Santa Fe into the California coast”
Two separate things in one line. Santa Fe was founded in 1610 — a hundred and sixty years earlier, and on the far side of the continent. 1770 is correct for Monterey.
1776
Garcés worked the Colorado River and crossed to the Mojave. Domínguez and Escalante left Santa Fe looking for a road to Monterey, got as far as central Utah, ran out of season and turned back.
why it is Nevada’s The high-water mark of Spanish reach, and it falls outside Nevada on both attempts. Spain never founded a settlement in Nevada and very likely never entered it beyond the extreme southern corner.
Escalante’s journal traces the route; the party turned back in Utah. Nevada is the part of the future Mexican Cession with essentially no Spanish colonial footprint.
August 1821
The Treaty of Córdoba ends the war of independence. Alta California — and with it everything that is now Nevada — passes from Spain to Mexico.
why it is Nevada’s Nevada spends twenty-seven years as Mexican territory that Mexico never visits, garrisons or surveys. It changes hands twice on paper before anyone holding the paper sets foot on it.
Treaty of Córdoba, 24 August 1821.