Once A Forefront For Wars And Peace While It Was Being Conquered And Built Between The Spanish, Mexicans, And Ultimately The U.S.
Long before Americans collectively imagined the adventure of traveling west for freedom, property, and (sometimes) gold, a rag-tag group of Spaniards traveled nearly 3,000 miles from inner Mexico up to what we now call San Francisco.
On a bluff overlooking the ocean and a giant bay that reaches eastward, the leader, Juan Bautista de Anza, concluded that this was the spot to stop. Little did any of them know that their camp on the beautiful bluff would become a colony and base that would last more than 200 years, and that it would someday overlook one of the most iconic bridges in the world?
“About 200 people came up, more than half of them were kids, more than half of the adults were women, and it was really a group of families coming in north – looking for opportunity, to kind of settle and start anew,” said Eric Blind, the director of Heritage Programs and Sites at the Presidio Trust. “Having that site there is in one way a testament to the deep roots of Spanish speaking people in the West.”
From the Presidio bluff, one can see the Northern Pacific stretching around the horizon of the world, and large parts of the San Francisco Bay, including Angel Island and the infamous island prison, Alcatraz.
Until the early 1990s, the fort established by those original travelers was occupied by various groups or armies, sometimes in peace and sometimes war -- a stretch of time that matches the entire length of time the United States has been a country. Today, the land is managed by a trust set up after the U.S. shut down the army base on that spot, a sprawling 1,500-acre rolling hillscape that has innovated a new way of funding public lands.
But back up… Even before Juan Bautista de Anza and his crew set up shop at the edge of the Golden Gate, there were a native people living here, park interpreters and archeologists report.
The indigenous Ohlone people settled the area in villages on what is now known as the San Francisco peninsula. They gathered shellfish along Presidio’s bayshore, including Baker Beach, a stretch of sand made famous as the original gathering place in of weirdos and punks that would eventually become the Burning Man festival. Overlooking this expanse of water and seashore, the Ohlone people would have certainly had a tactical advantage over all newcomers. The descendants of this important indigenous population still live throughout the San Francisco bay area.
Bautista de Anza set up the base and established El Presidio as an outpost to defend various missions, ranches, and pueblos, under the administration of New Spain. Suffice to say, in those days the matter of who would rule North America was far from settled, and Spain had been tramping out West for more than two centuries before Thomas Jefferson sent the Declaration of Independence back to Mother England. Moreover, there were teams and armies of Russians, British, and French soldiers who were all seeking to lay claim to the same pristine real estate that the Spanish had settled.
In the 1820s the Presidio garrison fell into the hands of the newly established Mexico, after that nation declared its independence from Spain. In 1834, the base was the site of the first official election to create a civil government for the area. After the vote, the commandant relinquished control over the civilian population and the military leaders set aside a piece of land adjacent to the base for housing and businesses. Records of these transactions and elections were kept in a drawer inside an adobe building at the Presidio – these early documents being the founding of San Francisco.
“Today it is clearly just a spectacular place- beautifully spectacular,” said Blind. “Up until the Cold War, anyone who came here would have immediately recognized its strategic importance. If you can control that very narrow strait of water that opened up to the best natural harbor on the west coast, you knew you could control from that spot much of the northern Pacific as well as much of western America. It is just one of those lynchpin spots in the world.”
That was the story of the settlement from its earliest days until there were nuclear arms stationed there in the Cold War. It is the unequivocal defensive spot on the West Coast. Around the time the 49ers – the gold seekers – arrived in the mid-19th century, the U.S. government had decided that the Presidio land was of extraordinary strategic significance. It literally became the nerve center of the Western coastal defense system, a role it would play through numerous wars.
Blind, who headed the project in recent years to restore the base’s officer club, waxed sentimental on the meaning of that patchwork building. In candle light, over drinks, many of the men who were stationed here were bound for foreign lands in the most significant conflicts of the last two centuries.
“Many people had their last drink there before going overseas to war,” Blind said.
Over the centuries, the Presidio base would be integral to saving San Francisco itself, after the infamous and historic earthquakes of 1906 and 1989 brought the city to its knees. The 1906 quake, with a 7.8 magnitude, was terribly destructive, leading to more than 3,000 deaths and destroying upwards of 80 percent of the city. The Presidio operated as a make-shift refugee camp, a tent city, for more than two years as crews struggled to rebuild the great city.
As storied as the history of Presidio is, the U.S. Military had no more need of it after the old Soviet Union collapsed. The land – which must be one of the most valuable spots in the entire country – was left without a tenant. But another rag-tag group of adventurers were about to establish the Presidio all over again.
David Irvin
A graduate with a Masters Of Science from the University Of North Texas, David has written on many beats including crime and business for such outlets as the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Montgomery Advertiser & USA. He enjoys RVing and surfing the Internet.
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