Unforgettable: Long Ago San Diego
General Kearny’s “Army of the West” had straggled 2000 miles from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The day before in the Ballena Valley, 101 “wet to the skin” dragoons joined with 39 mountain men from San Diego.
A large American army to the east, soldiers from San Diego on his trail, horse thieves who’d kill him out of self-defense, and his slow-moving party an easy target, Coronel was boxed in.
It was hard to tell which group was worse off, Carson’s alkali-caked express or Kearny's glum dragoons, riding "jaded beasts,” eating half- rations spiked by cacti, and harassed by swarms of mosquitoes and buffalo gnats.
About the only certainty: the creator of the Rancho Bernardo style never considered him- or herself an artist in the traditional sense. The designs — so abstract, schematic, intricate — look like nothing in nature.
Kelly came outside, firing. “As the revolver had only three loads, I concluded the best plan would be to run; and so I did.” He crawled under the store and stood in Campo Creek, which ran in a manmade culvert, for almost an hour.
Until 1940, Campo was the center for Customs and Border Patrol. To avoid U.S. “line-riders,” smugglers came to the store in darkness. They traded “gold, silver, whiskey, you name it” for manufactured goods.
In what became the “battle of the telegrams,” E.H. Harriman, president of Southern Pacific Railroad and funder of earlier efforts, and President Theodore Roosevelt haggled about who should finance the operation.
Nature had dug two deep, 40-mile-long ditches for the Imperial Valley. They carried to the Salton Sea four times the sediment excavated for the Panama Canal. And the Colorado River flowed unchecked.
The banks of the cut began to cave in. On August 9,the entire Colorado made a right turn at the Mexican cut, powered through the breach, gushed down the Alamo canal into the valley, and created the Salton Sea.
The skies turned oceanic, or seemed that way. Dams and reservoirs filled beyond capacity and burst. Flash floods barraged every canyon and arroyo. They carried off barns and houses, some rolling head over heels on the rapids.
The trunk of the Acacia cyclops has a rubbery, spongelike quality. When Watson declared it a potential buffer for cars out of control, the state planted tens of thousands along its most dangerous hairpin turns.
In 1850, people poured into California, greedy for gold. Fortunes bulged. All of this led to planning on a grandiose scale. Entrepreneurs envisioned cities on bare patches of dirt — or better sites for what …
The spot came to be known as Punta de los Muertos, “Point of the Dead,” or just Punta. Gray camped at Punta and saw the obvious: protected, accessible to ships, deep anchorage, “the logical location for a port city.”
Father Mercado would answer that the immigration would be dangerous; that they would pour in by the thousands and overrun the country; Protestants would swarm here, and the Catholic religion would be endangered...
Diego turned the convent into a hospital. During the plague, he was”caught kissing the sores of those affected with a contagious disease, he replied that it was the best way to treat this kind of illness.”
Travelers from San Diego to Los Angeles had to drive west around Mt. Soledad, through Pacific Beach and La Jolla. On December 13, 1930, the Rose Canyon Highway opened: a five-mile shortcut on the east slope of Soledad.