San Diego brands itself California's first European shoreline
San Diego, Pacific California beside Mexico, holds over 1.4 million people as the U.S. eighth and California's second city. Kumeyaay homeland became Spain's first West Coast claim when Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo arrived in 1542; Sebastián Vizcaíno named the bay for Saint Didacus in 1602.
People of the San Dieguito complex lived here at least 9,000 years ago; whether the Kumeyaay descend from them or arrived around 1000 CE is disputed, and archaeologist Malcolm Rogers's influential claim that the two were separate was later revised by Rogers himself. The Kumeyaay village of Kosa'aay, meaning drying-out place, sat in today's Old Town: thirty to forty families in pyramid-shaped houses beside a hillside spring. North County speakers of Luiseño called the place Pushuyi.
Europeans came by sea. Cabrillo, sailing the San Salvador from Navidad in New Spain, first called the bay San Miguel, and Vizcaíno surveyed the harbour, Mission Bay and Point Loma in November 1602. Permanent settlement began in 1769, when two ships, the San Carlos and San Antonio, and two overland parties arrived. That May Gaspar de Portolà set up the presidio on a hill above the village, and in July Franciscans under Junípero Serra founded the mission, which moved six miles up the San Diego River after a Kumeyaay revolt in 1775; by 1797 more than 1,400 converts lived around it.
Under Mexican rule from 1821 the presidio was abandoned, the town grew on the flat land below, and in 1834 the mission was secularised and its lands granted mostly to former soldiers. Its 432 residents won pueblo status and elected Juan María Osuna as first alcalde, but conflict with the Kumeyaay drained the town to perhaps 100 to 150 people, and it lost that status in 1838. Americans learned of its fine harbour through the hide trade, notably from Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast.
In the 1846 war, Californio partisans drove the American garrison out in early October and held the town until US forces returned on 24 October. Today the San Ysidro crossing into Tijuana is the busiest land border post outside Asia, at the heart of a cross-border region of about five million people.
Source: San Diego
