Alta California once spanned Nevada, Utah and slices of Wyoming and Colorado
Before California was a state, it was the far northern edge of Spain's and then Mexico's empire, a province that also took in all of Nevada and Utah. Its traces survive in city names from San Diego to Sacramento, and in the missions built on the sites of Indigenous villages.
Spain split the province of Las Californias in 1804, creating a northern province called Nueva California separate from the Baja California peninsula. After Mexican independence it became a Mexican territory in April 1822 and took the name Alta California in 1824. Mexico's 1836 Seven Laws merged it back with Baja California as one department with more autonomy, a change reversed in 1846. Two years later the Mexican-American War ended with most of it handed to the United States, and California became the 31st state in 1850.
Settling it had long defeated Spanish planners. Deserts and Indigenous resistance blocked overland routes, and ships had to fight southward currents, while New Spain lacked the money and people for so distant an outpost. Schemes in 1716, 1737 and 1744 came to nothing. Interest revived under the reforming official José de Gálvez, spurred by alarm at Russian fur traders in Alaska and a 1768 Russian naval expedition.
In 1769 the Portolá expedition, the first European overland entry into what is now California, reached San Diego suffering from scurvy and thirst; the Kumeyaay villagers of Kosa'aay gave them food and water. There the Spanish founded a presidio, the first European settlement in the present state, and Junípero Serra and Gaspar de Portolá founded Mission San Diego de Alcalá. Later missions followed the same pattern, rising beside villages such as Toviscanga, where Mission San Gabriel stood. Los Angeles grew at the village of Yaanga, and its first settlers included African and mixed-race Catholics.
For the peoples already living there, including Great Basin and Pueblo nations, the arrival was an invasion. Mission life brought forced labour, poor food and abuse, and many fled; one village chief at Wá'peat refused to hand runaways back. The medicine woman Toypurina led a major revolt at San Gabriel in 1785. A missionary there recorded that three in four children born at the mission died before turning two. Today, place names such as Monterey, Santa Rosa and Las Vegas are the most visible reminder of the province.
Source: Alta California
