A Port at the Edge of the World I

The Age of Discovery (1400 - 1769):  Spanish conquistadors meet the advanced native civilizations of the Americas, leading to a clash akin to an invasive species disrupting a longstanding ecosystem. Tens of millions will perish before the dust settles. As English colonization builds, powerful new threats will set the stage for the birth of a city that will become the heart of the Manifest Destiny and the American Dream.

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Beneath  the surface. 

Beyond  the wild lie 

the untold  stories.  America's 

savage beginnings. 

These are those stories. This.  This  is the Savage West. 

 If you know much about the gold rush in San Francisco in 1849,  you've probably heard the story told from the English perspective  about the American colonies in the east  and how the discovery of gold in the far port of San Francisco was really the  pistol shot  for pushing westward.  You may have heard about Marshall's discovery on the American River and know some details about What life was like as minors.

But  if you read it in the history books, when you're in high school, like I did,  it's kind of portrayed as this glorious moment in American history.  And it's told at a very  on the surface level,  you get the big details, but you don't really understand what it meant  and what it meant for America.  And why I'm so interested in San Francisco  is it really acts.

as a microcosm for what America becomes.  It was the first time in human history where a port had been discovered  after all the developed nations had the naval capacity to sail across vast bodies of water to one place.  And so when the world begins to learn that gold has been found near San  Francisco,  you have all these nations rushing across oceans  to this one particular port. 

On the edge of the world,  mostly men  armed to the teeth.  And imagine what it was like back then, where you have no conception of what someone from Asia looked like, or the islands of the Pacific, people from Chile, South America, Native Americans.  Most people couldn't read at this time.  You grew up in your little village or town. 

You hear of gold.  You don't really know where it is.  All you know is that you need to get to California, particularly to San Francisco.  So what happens is that San Francisco at that time, which is really just, like I said, a port at the end of the world, there's no infrastructure, no government,  and you have all these people coming,  all these different cultures, all these different ways of living,  colliding with one another. 

And they're all living in this one, small, seven mile by seven mile peninsula, waiting to go to the Sierra Mountains to mine for gold.  And so you can imagine the dramas that take place in San Francisco during this time. You have all these cultures coming together,  and they need to survive,  so they have to find some ways to survive.

So you have gangs,  the city nearly burns down seven times. Within the first two years,  you have governments beginning to expand. You have committees of vigilance going in and killing all these gang members.  You have people shanghaied, which means they're knocked out in the bars and then dumped on ships because everyone's fleed to the gold mines.

Ship captains need a crew.  And they wake up in the middle of the ocean on their way to, in the worst case, Shanghai, which is a year long journey.   We're going to get to all that and we're going to get to the descriptions of the miners and how people got to San Francisco and  what their individual cultures were like  and how the city began to grow from nothing, from really tents and shanties in one tiny corner in the eastern portion of San Francisco Bay, as you know it today,  to expand to a larger city and get into detail about some of the dramas that take place.

But Before we arrive at that point,  and before we even reach San Francisco, I think it's important  to understand from a much higher level  what the world was like at that time  and how San Francisco developed prior to Gould's discovery.  Because I think that really lays the foundation for what it becomes  and what we know it as today. 

So rather than tell this story from the English perspective, Which most people commonly know from the colonies and beginning with Columbus, and then the expansion westward.  I'm going to try to tell it from, well, two perspectives, really.  Native American history in conjunction with the Spanish history. 

Kind of look back and forth. As those two cultures move along,  detailing also what's happening with the English on the side.  So let's begin with the period around 1400 that was known as  the Age of Discovery,  or the Age of Exploration, or the Age of Genocide, depending on which culture you speak with. It's really rough detail of a period in which the developed nations of the world have begun to explore new territory. 

If you're looking at Europe at that time, the naval capacity up to that point, So, Hadn't allowed them to travel across oceans, but it's beginning to excel.   Ships were equipped with compasses, which were new.  They began to learn how to tack, which is sailing into the wind.  The ships themselves were faster, so they could actually travel across vast bodies of water.

In a reasonably safe manner, it's still extremely dangerous and takes months to years to travel anywhere notable, but they're able to do it.  And so many countries begin to set out exploratory journeys, particularly Spain and Portugal, the two naval powers at that time.  Before we get into the explorations, let's kind of pull back again. 

1400, the population of the world is roughly 450 million people.  And for context, the United States is about 375 million people . 80 million of those are in the European countries.  And that population, the European population, have a lot of trade. You have a lot of interaction between countries through wars and it's just more compact. 

And that population as well has gone through a number of,  uh,  let's call the mass death events.  You have things like the bubonic plague, which kill off large populations. And because they're seafaring nations, they're more prone to spreading diseases.  And why this is important is because when the populations die down and then build back up again, what results is the new population, the growing population, has a resistance to whatever disease caused the mass death event previously. 

But you do that a number of times, you build up a population resistance, a herd resistance if you will, herd immunity, that's passed from generation to generation.  And again, this happens with Europeans because they're more compact and because they're more seafaring nations and disease spreads much quicker.

So it's essential to them to have this immunity to survive.  While this is going on in Europe, we have the Americas.  The population, the Native American population at that time is thought to be around 60 million.  So roughly a tenth, 10 percent of the world population.   Native American communities, they weren't seafaring, so they couldn't travel as easily , but they were cultured. 

If you look at the tribes to the east, a lot of them were isolated, and so they didn't have a whole lot of contact with one another.  But the tribes, particularly in Central America, which is where a lot of this story takes place, at least this episode,  were extremely cultured,  particularly the Aztecs, the Incans, and the Mayans. 

The Aztecs, for instance, had a population of roughly 25 million.  Their capital city was larger than Paris or Rome, any of the major cities at that time.  They had laws, they had religion,  they had writing, they had science. They were all laws against infidelity or sleeping with another man's wife,  and these laws were vastly different than the European laws, but they were laws nonetheless. 

So these were highly developed people,  which the scientific advances we attribute to Europeans today we're learning were actually developed earlier by the Native American    But again, they had developed within their own communities, and they had evolved based off of the rules which applied to them at that time. 

Because they weren't seafaring peoples, they hadn't built up large immunities like the Europeans.  And that's crucial, as you'll find in the story.  So we have these two sides of the world.  The Europeans, 80 million strong, naval capacity is growing to have this immunity because they're a seafaring nations.

The Americas, roughly 60 million Native Americans, civilized in their own right, but not seafaring nations so they do not have this immunity.  The European countries, particularly Portugal and Spain. They're trying to find a number of different trading routes. And so they send exploratory expeditions all over the world. 

I'm going to say all over the world. It's not like they're sending a ton of men out to sail everywhere.  These journeys are extremely expensive, require numerous ships, supplies, men.  There's no guarantee that you're going to make any money off of these expeditions because a ship might be lost at sea. It might be a mutiny. 

You don't know what's going to happen out there.   When you sail out into the ocean at that time, you have no idea what you're going to find.  ,  and really,  you know, they say quote unquote trade, but really what most of the European countries were looking to do was colonize. 

They'd set up missions. They'd enslave the native populations . They'd take what they could.  And these were brutal.  Brutal expeditions.  If you've learned about any of them, I'm sure you've heard a lot of the names of the famous explorers, but if you actually like read into what happened ,  there's mass killings, there's noses and ears taken for treasure, there's enslavement, people taken back to Europe,  these are not good men going to do good things.

They were going to find gold and silver and trying to make their wealth.  And so the expeditions began with colonizing the eastern portion of Africa, the Spice Islands.  And if you're looking at this from really any native's point of view,  the only thing comparable to seeing a European ship come to your coast during that time is an alien invasion today. 

You have this ship approaching, you've never seen a ship before,  you have these men getting off who look physically different than any other man you've ever seen.  Much of the time they're riding horses, which you've never seen before.  So there's accounts of natives mistaking a horse and a soldier for a single being. 

Imagine that, I mean, it's hard to do   they're wearing steel plates. They have these weapons that shoot thunder.  They must seem almost like godly to a lot of these native populations. Because you've never seen anything before.  I mean, if an alien came down today  and were shooting laser guns at us, and had spaceships and technology that we've never seen before, we'd probably meet them with the same kind of awe that the natives met the Europeans at that time. 

And that's, that's kind of what it's like.  They also had war dogs. I mean, these natives didn't know what war dogs were. These were dogs bred for war and they'd go and attack these people, you know, these beasts that would follow the commands of the Europeans.  And it's got to be hugely intimidating.  So you have the African nations beginning to be colonized, you have the East Indies beginning to be colonized, you have Columbus who's hoping to find a trading route to the East Indies when he takes off for Spain. 

Columbus himself is Italian.  You'll find if you research, you know, the explorers and the countries they were for, it wasn't always they were natives to those countries.  They're really, Sea captains at the time were just looking for someone to fund their expeditions because these journeys were so expensive. 

There's high risk and high reward.  If they did find gold, which is what most of them were looking for, or trading routes to the Spice Islands,  they could have, you know, all these silks and rubber and  a number of natural resources that were rare in Europe. They can make their fortunes. And many of them, they're aiming to do that because a lot of the conquistadors, they were Nobility, a few rungs down. 

Primary janitor was prominent at the time. So everything was passed to the firstborn.  So if you were, a second or third son and you're trying to make your fortune, being a conquistador or a sea captain was one of the more promising routes.  Plus you have the thrill of adventure.  The world wasn't explored at the time.

You didn't know what you'd find out there.  Didn't know what kind of people were out there. This is also the age of  mythology and monsters. If you're sailing across the oceans and you find a giant squid, you think, What else is beneath me? What kind of man eating creatures are below? If you land on these new islands or eventually continents,  You'll experience people that physically look different than anything you've ever seen. 

You'll find animals and plants that are different than any others you've experienced before.  So again, it's, I mean, it's astounding to think of it and put yourself in the perspective of either side.  Either the, , explorers, the navigators, the conquerors, whatever you want to call them.  Or the natives. 

Again, I would always go back to the space invader analogy.  So when Columbus sets off, he's looking for this trading route to the East Indies. He takes off in his three famous ships, the Nina, the Penta and the Santa Maria. Although there's a question of whether that's, that was their actual name. 

And he heads off on a route that he thinks is going to take him directly to the Spice Islands without having to go and sail around the tip of Africa.  And if you look at a map and that makes sense, if you don't know the American continent is there, you can go directly across.  He lands in the Caribbean,  you know, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic. 

Again, it's extremely brutal. He takes a number of the native slaves, slaughters a number of them,  takes noses and ears,  and then he sets sail back.  Contrary to the songs about Columbus in his 1492 and discovering America, Columbus did not discover America. There had been Norse sailors that had arrived in Canada previously.

It's been more recently discovered.  But because of what happened after his discovery, he becomes the de facto discoverer,  returns to Spain, tells them what he found there.  He also leaves something like 39 soldiers in what is now known as Haiti to begin colonization.  He makes three more journeys, so four in total, back and forth. 

He lands back in the Caribbean, and he also lands in Central America.  And that begins the Spanish colonization of the Americas.  Columbus, at this point, continues to think he has been in the East Indies,  which is why Native Americans, for so long, have been called Indians.  Even the term Indian is a little misleading because you naturally think it, it refers directly to India, but it doesn't necessarily, it refers to the East Indies in Columbus's case. 

So there's a lot of confusion.  Columbus will maintain until his death that he actually sailed to the East Indies.  And he's actually kind of disappointed with his discoveries,  but they do have gold.  So they begin to go back. They begin to colonize the Caribbean,  becomes a section known as New Spain. More explorers begin to venture into Central America. 

And if you're trying to imagine what this was like, the colonization process, it's the same idea as what  the English colonization of the East coast of the Americas was like. Same idea. New Spain is the same idea as a colony. And you have the mother country of Spain that these new colonies report to,  and begin calling  these colonies viceroys,  which were like states. 

You have the governors of the viceroys, although there's the Spanish term for it,  and begin reporting back to Spain.  And so over the years, you have more people coming, you have horses coming,  and they build up settlements, colonies.  They actually try to colonize the east coast of the Americas, which is a failed colony and a failed mission in Virginia from the Spanish,  but the takeaway is they're beginning to colonize. 

They're moving into Central America,  although they don't yet have a stronghold on it. 

Of course, that would change with the introduction of Hernan Cortes.  He was a conquistador. Like so many  other explorers at the time looking to make his fortune,  he was looking for gold and silver, and he'd heard rumors that there were large quantities of gold to be found in Central America.  So kind of disobeying the governor of New Spain and the Caribbeans, he takes a ship or a number of ships, heads to Central America and begins to explore that region. 

Now, again, this is.  Tricky to understand because you have a ship coming in, these natives that have never seen Europeans before,  and even Cortes doesn't know what he's going to find there. You heard from other explorers that there are huge civilizations there, tons of gold.  And so he's hoping to find gold.

Really that's the reason for all of this. And he has roughly 500 men and war dogs and horses with him as he goes in to what is now Mexico.  And he begins to make his way. Into the heartland, he starts to hear about the Aztecs, may have heard about them before, but he begins to hear more about them from the native populations around there. 

And he heard that they have mass quantities of gold at their capital city known as Tenochtitlan.  And so he's trying to make his way in to Tenochtitlan to  meet with their ruler, a man named Montezuma.  Now, if you've heard any history about this or you read up on some history about the conquest of the Aztecs, some historians say that Cortes arrived with 500 men and then with 500 men conquers the Aztecs. 

That's very misleading. So he arrives with 500 men,  but you have to remember that the Aztec kingdom, much like the European kingdoms, a lot of it was you have this kingdom take over other smaller kingdoms. And they kind of have a subservience to the, the mother kingdom, if you will.  And a lot of those smaller kingdoms want to revolt.

They don't really like being conquered by the Aztecs.  And so if you imagine you have the Aztecs who are controlling you,  and then all of a sudden you have Cortes and his men.  And they're riding horses that you've never seen before. They have weapons you've never seen before. They physically look different than everything you've ever known. 

They have war dogs.  They have steel.  The Aztecs have obsidian.  You're thinking to yourself, well, I can join with these guys and then get revenge off of the Aztecs for conquering my civilization.  A lot of them are thinking this is a great opportunity. So by the time Cortes arrives at Tenochtitlan,  he has essentially amassed a Native American army.

So it's 500 men plus thousands of Native Americans.  And he's not just going in straight to battle. And again, there's roughly 25 million people in the surrounding area of Tenochtitlan.  So he's going in to meet with the ruler, Montezuma, who'd been hesitant to meet with him, he'd heard about him, and finally concedes to meet  after sending, you know, a bunch of gold to try to ward him off. 

 So Cortes arrives in Tenochtitlan.  Tenochtitlan is, by the way, a massive, beautiful city, temples surrounded by water.  Cortes meets with Montezuma. In his main temple, and immediately just captures Montezuma,  tells him to tell all his followers to throw down their weapons, that all of his property is theirs. 

He's a really, uh, diplomatic, uh, fellas, Cortez and his men.  Montezuma, as the story goes, He walks out and tells all his peoples who've gathered around to hear what he has to say about these new Europeans who've come. Essentially, the alien invaders have captured our ruler.  Now picture that, the alien invaders capture  our president. 

You're going to react to that pretty negatively,  regardless of whether or not you support the president. I mean, they capture the leader of your country.  If, if an alien life form were to capture America through capturing the president, I don't think we'd take too kindly to it.  I think most Americans would want to grab their guns and start shooting. 

Get all our military weapons and go after them. That's a very hostile act.  At that point, you know that they are out to conquer.  That's what the situation was like with the Aztecs. I mean, they were a warrior nation. They had conquered many people.  And so when Montezuma goes out to tell them to throw down their weapons to save his own life,  the story is that the people stoned him to death. 

And now Cortes and his men are trapped in the kingdom or whatever you want to call it. 

Somehow they manage to escape  and they retreat toward the coast.  For roughly a year they stay away.  And when they finally return,  Tenochtitlan is decimated.  The population is nothing compared to what it was before.  From all accounts, it's rather astounding how many people have died.  You have what was once this ruling empire, this all powerful tribe that had been in power for a number of centuries,  and now they are sick and dying. 

Whatever disease the sailors, Cortes men, had carried with them had spread throughout that population, and so it just decimated.  Cortes would take over Tenochtitlan, which would eventually become Mexico City,  and a new Viceroy, or New Spain, would be established with Mexico City, Tenochtitlan, as the capital. 

The conquest was in 1521.  Soon the Incans would follow another great Native American power, also very civilized in their own right.  So too would the minds that battle would  drag on much longer. 

Now  before I move on from here,  I think it's important to note what kind of impact this has on really the global population, and in particular the Native American population.  So, as I mentioned before, the Europeans built up this immunity to this disease, or to whatever disease might come.  They built up immunities through mass death events over and over again,  so the population would die down and grow up with the genes that prevented them from dying out.

Native Americans, because they weren't seafaring nations, didn't have that.  And so there are accounts from all these explorers.  Particularly ones that go into the Amazon of these vast civilizations, all these different people and buildings and temples and scientific discoveries. And from all accounts, it was a blossoming, blossoming civilization  and in all parts of America, not just one civilization, but numerous. 

And the first explorers,  report this. And so when other explorers go back, they can't find these civilizations and you have to remember that the land around there grows quite quickly.  And so if you have a population decimated a century later, the earth is going to take back that property. 

All the fields that have been cleared for agriculture, whatever land they'd been maintaining before would be overgrown.  It'd be hard to find a lot of these villages. 

The death rate, the mass death rate in Central America is such that these entire communities are wiped out.  And so a lot of these villages are really just being discovered now through enhanced technology because the overgrowth is so thick.  In the end,  the amount of deaths resulting from this Spanish exploration and the Portuguese exploration, , the Spanish weren't the only people over there,  resulted in 90%.

Of the Native American population dying.  Let's just pause and think about that for a second.  We just surpassed 500, 000 deaths by coronavirus and it's national news.  And it's something we're all worried about. We're all wearing masks. I'm sure we all know someone who's been affected by it.  90 percent of the Native American population, 90 percent of 60 million people  dying. 

So that's roughly 54 million people,  10% ish  of the world population. I  mean, imagine if the United States were to just 

die   📍   📍   like that.  We make up 4 percent of the world population.  This mass extinction event was 10%.  You can't comprehend what impact that had on, you know, the world.  And humanity,  you lose so much history.

From the native Americans, so much culture, so much science died with them  because they, they kept things in an oral tradition most often. So they don't have things written down, which is why we don't have a lot of their stories  and we can't tell a lot of their stories of what happened during this time,  but one thing that I want to mention,  it's come out relatively recently, it gives some sense of what this mass death, uh, what effect it had on the world at large. 

So the Central Americans, one of the things that they gave to the rest of the world was a lot of agricultural products that we didn't have before. You know, you think of avocado,  quinoa,  tomato, the potato.  That wasn't Irish, that was Native American.  And so many other staples of our diet today came from the Native Americans, and particularly the Central America Native Americans. 

So they were a, a mass farming community.  And when you have the population that maintains all this land that's been cleared for farming, die out.  And the earth slowly takes over  that land.  Now that's going to change a number of things. And one of the things that scientists have learned recently, is that the overgrowth on those fields that have been cleared, and all the land that had been maintained by the Native Americans, by the earth taking back that land, and the greenhouse gases absorbing the carbon in the atmosphere,  it actually cooled down the temperature of the earth. 

And many scientists point to this mass extinction event as the leading cause of what is later known as the mini ice age.  So just think about that.  The death of all these Native Americans, the death of roughly 10 percent of the human population,  resulted in  A mini ice age.  That's the kind of impact this sort of mass extinction can have on a, on a world level  that's not even getting  into the weeds of how it affects humanity as a whole. 

So just keep that in mind as we move forward.  But to return to our story  and our progression towards San Francisco,  you know, we're narrowing in  telescope is zooming.  With their binoculars, I guess a telescope can't zoom, or can it? I don't know.  But you have the Spanish, they have their foothold in Central America.

  By this time, it's roughly the early 1600s.  And the English, they're beginning to settle to the east.  Jamestown is in 1607.  The French begin to colonize the central coast of North America.  So if you think about America during the 1600s, it's occupied by England on the east,  France, Louisiana territory,  particularly New Orleans and Louisiana, I mean, you say they occupied most of America's still vast wilderness at this time.

It's mostly fur trappers and they have a few rude forts maybe,  but  most people aren't going to go into that territory. It's just too dangerous.  And then the Spanish in the west, but they don't occupy the northwest.  Mexico City is about as northern as they are at this point.  But they need to find a port on the northern part of the American west coast .

The way  they communicate with Spain, mother country, where they hear all their orders and they get their money and they need that because they're in a wilderness trying to make the settlement work  and send back, you know, what they find and get more support from Spain. But they have to get orders from Spain.

They have to get supplies.  Letters telling them to meet so and so here to get these supplies and go there to trade with our new allies. You know, they have no idea what's going on in Spain until they. Receive notice from Spain. They have no idea who their allies are. It may have been treaties. They just don't know. 

Communication takes a long time.  For about 166 years. In fact, the entire communication between New Spain and Spain was one ship a year.  And I think about how important it is for that ship to arrive safely.  And the way travel worked from the capital city of New Spain in Mexico city.  Ships would travel to the Indies,  where Spain had sent word by traveling across the Mediterranean, dropping off notice in one of their colonies. 

And so a ship would sail from Mexico City south along the west coast,  loop west across the Pacific,  push north, arriving at the East Indies,  and then they go north.  The currents would take them east  and then they'd sail down the coast of the Americas.  That's a pretty long journey and it's a pretty rough journey. 

There are  descriptions of ships just wandering at sea with nothing but cadavers and silk.  Ships would get lost. That journey is incredibly hard and long, especially if you have No port in which to stop and resupply.  The West coast of the United States, if you're familiar with it, it's, it's a lot of rocky coast. 

If you land on shore, you land on the beach. Most of those beaches are really hard to get through.  As a captain, it'd be threatening to risk going along the coast because there's so many rocks further out.  So most ships would stay miles out at sea just to be safe.  If you know the Fairlawns along, just north of San Francisco. 

You know, things like that. If you see one rocky structure like that and you have no idea what the waters are like.  You don't know if there's another one of those out there that you might hit in the night.  You need to be safe, or else, you know, if you wreck into one of those, you and your crew are going to die. 

And again, there's all these superstitions too. You don't know what you're going to find if you land on the coast. You don't know what native populations are there.  And there could be a civilization that's stronger than yours. It could overtake you.  They hadn't found that yet, but it's a possibility.  And there could be new animals there that can overtake your crew.

You just don't know. I mean, this is the time of myths and monsters.  But they need a resupply port.  Because they can't lose this communication with Spain.  And so the governor of New Spain decides to send explorers up Alta California's coast, hoping to find somewhere where ships can resupply.  One of the explorers ends up discovering what is today the port of Monterrey, which he names after the governor of New Spain, hoping that that port will be famous and that they will go and settle it. 

It's actually a pretty terrible port.  It's really rocky, not great for landing,  but if this guy makes it out to be a good port, no one's going to know probably in his lifetime, maybe he'll get some notoriety from discovering this port.  And so I'm going to name it after the governor with the hopes that he's going to occupy that port and I get some chunk of change or notoriety. 

And so he returns back to Mexico,  tells them he finds this port.  And then more silver and gold is discovered further south. So Monterey,  except for this one discovery, remains largely unexplored for the next hundred ish years.  They, they hear this news and then forget about it essentially. 

And the world progresses.  The world moves on.  You have the English colonies beginning to expand through the 1700s.  You have French beginning to expand.  There's the threat that these nations will colonize in different areas along the Spanish conquered land, but you have no idea what's in Northern California.

You don't know if any of sea capable nations are trying to establish colonies in the land you supposedly have claimed to, but you have no one there to defend it.  For a while, there's, there's really no one that can threaten the Spanish hold on the West coast.  Until the Seven Years War. 

The French and Indian War is another name for it.  If you've ever seen The Last of the Mohicans, that's that war.  The French and the English are beginning to compete over land, natural resources.  So from 1756  to 1763, they go at it.  Native populations in that area are decimated.  The English eventually win. 

And now you have a large swath of land that's really not claimed, I guess is a word for it.  It's, it's questionable.  And a lot of this land is questionably owned. If you can put your stamp on it and get a foothold, get a colony in, it's yours.  So that's what a lot of these countries were afraid of. And that's what the Spanish were afraid of. 

Word had gotten around that you have the English colonies that are getting pretty strong, but they're mostly on the East coast.  To, to go to the West would be to spread too thin,  but you have other nations that are building up their naval powers and they are a threat. 

Now, I think we need to take a step back here and look at this all from the Native American perspective, or at least understand what is going on with the various Native American populations.  Because most people,  when you hear the term Native American, you think of The traditional Plains Indian.  You have this kind of a royal like features, very proud.

You have the headdress,  warring tribes, horse riding tribes,  and the features look almost Spanish, almost European in many cases.  And that's largely because the European blood is beginning to spread in a lot of these Native American populations.  Again, the Europeans, their conquests were extremely brutal, rape women and they would take slaves.

If they didn't do that, they'd leave behind their diseases and then just slaughter all these people. So you have, it's just kind of a,  the frontier is kind of a culture of brutality  and this is before the wild west and you think of how wild the west is. This is the savage west. It is brutal.  And when you have one population coming in to a relatively peaceful population, in some cases, and perpetrating all these horrific acts on them,  that teaches them to do the same thing to other people. 

And that's not to say that the Native Americans were all peaceful tribes and peaceful people. I mean, the Aztecs were involved in the same kind of conquest, not to the same extent, but they had slaves. They had mass killings.  The way they would attack other Native American tribes is they were experts at wounding the other Native Americans. 

And the reason they'd wound them is because they wanted to, it was kind of a point of pride to take as many prisoners as you could.  So then the next sacrificial  ceremony, you'd have more people to sacrifice.  And of course the Europeans would point to this and say, this is why they are savage, because they are sacrificing all these people. 

Look how terrible they are.  In reality, they were doing the equivalent, but in a much grander scale.  And then their religious practices, because you know, the sacrifices of the Aztecs, it was to appease the gods.  It's not to forgive it, but  doing it, believing it was this religious thing.  If the Europeans on the other side, they had.

Pretty brutal religious practices or acts perpetrated by religion, wars perpetrated by religion.  I think Europeans enacted more brutalities than the Native Americans.  I guess it depends on the tribe you're talking about.  But one important thing to note is that Native Americans, like Europeans, there are many different subgroups. 

You think of Europeans is all these different countries and each country has its unique features and cultures and the way it's governed. And there's some of them that are pretty similar, but you know, they have their own unique ways of doing things, depending on who the ruler is and how many people they conquer, et cetera,  the native Americans were the same  when each tribe was distinct  and some of them had more interaction with others, but a lot of them were completely foreign to one another. 

A lot of the different tribes hated one another, and the same with Europeans. Some of them were constantly at war . And if you imagine the tribes in the West, particularly in California,  you'd want to think of them more as like, uh,  like an Amazonian you'd think of today.  You know, short, very tan skin because of exposure to the sun,  that distinctive Amazonian hair, kind of that sort of feature. 

And again, it depends on the tribe and they had their unique physical distinctions, whether it be through jewelry or feathery or what have you. But that was kind of the general idea of how these different tribes worked. And, and  again, there's so many different subgroups, I think within  the Bay area alone at that time, there were something like 12 or 16 separate tribes. 

And most of them hadn't experienced Europeans before. I  mean, San Francisco at this point still has not been discovered.  You think, well,  you have these ships that were sailing down the coast of the Americas. How did they not see San Francisco? Well,  San Francisco is a hard port to spot, particularly if you're miles out at sea. 

There's heavy fog most of the time.  So if there's any fog, you're not going to see the opening.  But even if there is no fog, and from miles out, the very small slit that is the entrance into San Francisco Bay,  while it's wide when you are there, about two miles long,  from out at sea you can hardly see it.

It looks just like the rest of the coast.  It's pretty, uh, uniform.  Unless you get up close or spot it by land, it's almost impossible to see.  And so a lot of these tribes  have no European contact still,  particularly in Alta California.  And the East Coast Native American tribes  are beginning to have more and more contact. 

When the Spanish came over through Florida in a failed colonization attempt in Florida,  they and others left mass amounts of horses.  Native Americans didn't have horses before the Europeans came over . And  then they drop off their horses,  and overnight  📍 the Native American tribes in the plains quadruple the amount of land they can travel in a day. 

So where you have these hunter gatherer tribes that are mostly worried about food, water, shelter, and that's all they have time to worry about, because those things are so, you know, essential to life. And they didn't get them easily.  But now that they have the horse, those things come much easier.  And it's after the horse that they begin to start developing into these warring nations.

 That's  not to say that they didn't fight before the horse, they did.  But when you have more spare time, you have more time to war with other nations.  When you're not worried about food and shelter all the time, you can worry about other things. Where do I spend my time? How do I build up my notoriety as a Native American within my tribe? 

It's either through hunting or warring in a lot of cases, not every case, but a lot of cases. And so  a lot of these tribes developed into warring tribes with the introduction of the horse.  So you have the physicality changing, you have their cultures changing.  This kind of thing is happening all over the Americas. 

The introduction of the Europeans into the Americas changes so many different things.  It's not like the Europeans are just taking over at this point. You know, the Native American tribes, particularly the horse tribes, are pretty formidable forces.  They are experts at the horse. They're kind of the equivalent of the Mongolians. 

At least they develop into that as time goes on. But by this point, they've kind of developed into that. Horses have been around that long.  So it's not like all the Native Americans are being pushed around.  Although certainly the dominance goes to the Europeans, but it's kind of all these different entities warring with one another, pushing for new positioning, trying to maintain control  and oftentimes losing control. 

So at this point you have. The English in the East, having just defeated the French,  not necessarily taking over the French land. It's not like when you win this, this kind of skirmish that you automatically absorb all this property. No, the land was so spread out, the French would still have a stronghold there for a long period of time, but the English had won that skirmish and they were beginning to grow as a power in the East. 

Again, they're not going to go to the West quite yet.  But there are other nations who are doing it  because they don't have a hold in the Americas like the English do on the east coast.  They don't have that  direct link to the natural resources or direct trading route.  They want to make the stamp for themselves.

They  see all this new land. They see all this possibility with natural resources.  If you're a country in Europe at that time and you're seeing all this stuff happening, you're thinking to yourself, well, I need to get, that's,  I mean, this is a new world. There are natural resources there we haven't seen before, and there's gold and silver. 

We need to get over there quick.  The Spanish begin to realize that we need to make a stronghold  in Alta, California, or else we're going to lose it.  There are reports that the Russians have already landed further north, and that they were slaughtered by the savages.  Who knows how true that is, but  Reports like this, because communication is so long in the taking and you really don't know what is true and what's not, it's extremely confusing and it doesn't come very often. 

It's safer to believe that sort of thing and to make a stronghold. Nor so the governor of New Spain begins to think, well, there's that port in Monterey  is named after someone long before the guy discovered  hope to get famous by it. Poor guy, he was gone.  But they're like, Oh, why don't we go up  and colonize Monterey? 

And the way that the Spanish had been colonizing in Central America was through the mission system.  And so the King of Spain in 1769  orders  21 missions be established along the Alta California coast,  beginning with  San Diego.  And extending to  what is today known as Drake's Bay,  but was then known as  San Francisco. 

 Okay.   

 Thank you so much for listening.  If you liked what you heard,  I hope you'll subscribe.  There should be a button at podcast.  And if you really enjoyed what you heard,  please leave a review.  Every little bit of support helps. Especially considering that I'm doing these podcasts currently on my own and for free. 

And they take a long time to produce.  Each episode takes  hours, days, weeks, months to research.  You have to pay for podcasting, hosting sites, royalty music.  It's honestly more than I expected. Luckily I had a base of knowledge about a lot of this material just through other research projects.  While I love doing these podcasts, it's going to be hard to continue without some sort of monetary support, eventually. 

But for now, I'd really just want to build a following. So if you subscribe or leave a review, that very much helps the cause. Thank you again.  I do need to note a few corrections for this episode.  Most of them are minor. You probably didn't notice them, but I did have a few slips of the tongue. And if I don't point to them, historians might give me a hard time.

So,  uh, the first,  at the beginning of the episode, I referred to something called  Spice Road. In actuality, that should have been Silk Road, which was the trading route developed  across Europe and Asia in the early, um, I think 1200s, 1300s, I'm not sure when it began, but it'd been extended through the 1700s, 1800s,  and there are a number of interconnected trading routes, mostly overland, but also there are a few sailing connections across the Mediterranean Sea. 

I also refer to the Spice Islands, which is technically a correct term, but most people know the Spice Islands as the East Indies.  Also, when I was comparing the Spanish colonies to the English colonies, I said that each colony was called a viceroy, and then there was the Spanish governor, though there was a Spanish term for it. 

In reality, the Spanish colonies were called viceroyalties, and the governors of each colony was called a viceroy.  So, another slip of the tongue.  And those are the only real major corrections for this episode.  I'm sure there are a few more,  but again, nothing major.  Next episode titled the pacification of Alta California  will cover the discovery of San Francisco Bay,  the naming of San Francisco Bay,  the Alta California missions,  and the relationship between the missions.

and the Native Americans.  I hope you'll join me for that one and for the rest of the episodes in this first season,  A Port at the Edge of the World.  I'll see you then.