History of Santa Barbara, California
The history of Santa Barbara, California, begins approximately 13,000 years ago with the arrival of the first Native Americans. The Spanish came in the 18th century to occupy and Christianize the area, which became part of Mexico following the Mexican War of Independence. In 1848, the expanding United States acquired the town along with the rest of California as a result of defeating Mexico in the Mexican–American War. Santa Barbara transformed then from a small cluster of adobes into successively a rowdy, lawless Gold Rush era town; a Victorian-era health resort; a center of silent film production; an oil boom town; a town supporting a military base and hospital during World War II; and finally it became the economically diverse resort destination it remains in the present day. Twice destroyed by earthquakes, in 1812 and 1925, it was rebuilt after the second one in a Spanish Colonial style.
Pre-contact history
The lands flanking the Santa Barbara Channel, both the mainland including present day Santa Barbara, and the Channel Islands, has been continuously inhabited by the Chumash people and their ancestors for at least 13,000 years. The oldest human skeleton yet found in North America, Arlington Springs Man, was unearthed on Santa Rosa Island, approximately from downtown Santa Barbara.In more recent pre-Columbian times the Chumash had many villages along the shores and inland, at least one of which, on present-day Mescalitan Island, had over a thousand inhabitants in the 16th century. They were peaceful hunter-gatherers, living from the region's abundant natural resources, and navigating the ocean in tomols, craft closely related to those used by Polynesians. Their rock art work can be seen in nearby Chumash Painted Cave, and their sophisticated basket weaving at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. The Santa Barbara bands spoke the Barbareño language dialect of the Chumashan languages group. As Europeans settled in their homelands the Chumash population declined.
Spanish period
First encounters and Portola expedition
The first Europeans to see the area were members of a Spanish expedition led by the Portuguese explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, who sailed through the Channel in 1542, and anchored briefly in the vicinity of Goleta. Later, on the return voyage, Cabrillo injured his leg during a fight with natives on Santa Catalina Island and died from gangrene. He was buried either on San Miguel Island or Mescalitan Island – the exact burial place of Cabrillo has long been a mystery.In 1602, Spanish maritime explorer Sebastián Vizcaíno gave the name "Santa Barbara" to the channel and also to one of the Channel Islands in gratitude for having survived a violent storm in the Channel on December 3, the eve of the feast day of that saint.
A land expedition led by Gaspar de Portolà passed through in 1769, and spent the night of August 18 in the area of today's lower Laguna Street, where at that time there was a freshwater pond. There was a large native town nearby, which Franciscan missionary Juan Crespi, who accompanied the expedition, named "Laguna de la Concepcion". Vizcaíno's earlier name, however, is the one that has survived. The next night, August 19, the expedition moved a short way to a camp by a creek, probably Mission Creek, but not as far up as where the mission was later established.
Portola's expedition encountered large numbers of exceptionally friendly natives, many of whom lived in Syuxtun, a village just in back of the beach between present-day Chapala and Bath streets. Indeed, the natives – which the Spaniards dubbed the Canaliños for the "canoes" they used so skillfully – so irritated their guests with gifts and boisterous music that Portola changed the location of his camp on August 19 so the party could get some rest. On Sunday, August 20, they held the first Catholic mass in Santa Barbara history, at Arroyo Burro near Veronica Springs.
The Portolá expedition was the beginning of Spanish efforts to occupy Alta California and fortify it against perceived threats from other encroaching European colonial powers – principally the early British Empire and tsarist Russian-Pacific Empire. In addition, missions established by Franciscans under Junípero Serra were intended to convert the natives to Christianity and turn them into loyal Spanish colonists.
Presidio, Mission, Cieneguitas chapel, and 1812 earthquake
Portola himself, however, did not stay, and it was not until 1782 that a force of soldiers, led by Don Felipe de Neve came to build the Presidio of Santa Barbara, one of several military outposts meant to protect Alta California against foreign interests and to protect the missions against attacks by hostile natives. The Presidio was not completed until 1792, and Father Fermín Lasuén dedicated the nearby Mission Santa Barbara on the feast day of Santa Barbara. He chose for his building site the location of a Chumash village on Mission Creek named Tay-nay-án.Many of the soldiers who came to build and garrison the Presidio had brought their families with them, and after their terms of service ended settled in Santa Barbara. They built their adobes near the Presidio, arranged haphazardly; a Boston journalist described the scatter of these buildings "as though fired from a blunderbuss." Most of Santa Barbara's old families are descended from these early settlers, and many of their names linger in the street and place names, such as Cota, De la Guerra, Gutierriez, Carrillo, and Ortega. Among these early settlers was José Francisco Ortega, who was an important figure in the Portola expedition and became the recipient of the only Spanish-era land grant in Santa Barbara County, Rancho Nuestra Señora del Refugio, in 1794. This rancho would be the namesake for modern Refugio State Beach, and Ortega would be remembered as the capitán in the name of El Capitán State Beach on the Gaviota Coast
In 1793, Captain George Vancouver, the British explorer who was circumnavigating the globe on the Vancouver Expedition, anchored HMS Discovery off West Beach and received permission for his seacook to chop stovewood from the Mesa oak groves, and refill his water tanks from a seep at the base of the Mesa bluffs near Pershing Park.
Building the Mission itself continued throughout the rest of the century, along with the work of converting the Indians to Christianity, a task which proved difficult: according to the Mission registers, by 1805, only 185 of the more than 500 Indians in Santa Barbara had been baptized. The burial register shows that 3,997 Indians died between 1787 and 1841, the majority from diseases such as smallpox, to which the natives had no natural immunity. By 1803 the Mission's chapel was finished, and by 1807 a complete village for the Indians had been completed, largely by their own labor. The site of this village is on the Mission grounds along modern-day Constance Street.
The Spaniards also built a chapel to the west of the Mission, in an effort to Christianize a group of Indians that lived in the Cieneguitas area between Modoc Road and the El Sueno tract who refused to be moved to the Mission compound. Known as the Cieneguitas chapel, it took the form of an adobe asistencia complete with a tile roof and two bells donated by the King of Spain, and stood from 1803 until the 1890s on a ridge opposite Cuna Drive at what is now 4308 Modoc Road, at the northern edge of Hope Ranch. When the first adobe mission was wrecked by the 1812 earthquake, this chapel was the only house of worship left to the friars.
On December 21, 1812, one of the largest earthquakes in California history completely destroyed the first Mission along with most of Santa Barbara. With an estimated magnitude of 7.2, and a hypothesized epicenter near Santa Cruz Island, the quake also produced a tsunami which carried water all the way to modern-day Anapamu Street, and carried a ship a half-mile up Refugio Canyon. Following the devastating earthquake, the Mission padres decided to build a larger and more elaborate Mission complex, which is the one that survives to the present day. The Franciscans began a search for material in 1815, obtaining limestone from a cantera at 1450 Cantera Avenue in present-day Hope Ranch, mixing it with seashells, and baking it in a brick calera, the ruins of which lie at the foot of the slope south of 1161 Las Palmas Drive. While the church was ready in 1820, the bell towers were not finished until 1833.
Bouchard raids
The most serious military threat to Santa Barbara during the Spanish period was not by a colonial power, but by Hippolyte Bouchard, a French privateer working for the Argentine government, which was, along with Mexico, attempting to throw off Spanish rule. Bouchard, who was given the task of destroying as many Spanish assets as possible, and in particular the ports in the Americas, possessed two well-armed frigates, which had sufficient armament and crews to destroy any lightly defended towns they encountered. He had done exactly that to Monterey, the capital of Alta California, shortly before coming to Santa Barbara.Bouchard's raiders landed first at Refugio Canyon on December 5, 1818, where they pillaged and burned the ranch belonging to the Ortega family, killing cattle and slitting the throats of horses. However, after being alerted by messengers from Monterey, the Presidio dispatched a squadron of cavalry, who caught three stragglers from the ill-disciplined raiding party and dragged them back to Santa Barbara in chains. Bouchard sailed the remaining to Santa Barbara a few days later, anchoring off of present-day Milpas Street, and threatened to shell the town unless his men were returned to him. José de la Guerra y Noriega, the comandante of the Presidio, granted his request, but Bouchard did not realize that he had been tricked. The town was not as heavily defended as it had seemed to be; the hundreds of cavalrymen Bouchard had seen through his spyglass were but the same few dozen riding in large circles, stopping and changing costumes each time they passed behind a patch of heavy brush. Although Bouchard had recently destroyed Monterey, he departed without attacking the town.
When Santa Barbara faced Bouchard's attack, the mission friars, on orders from Governor Pablo Vicente de Solá, used San Marcos Pass as an escape hatch through which they sent the church treasures and evacuated the pueblo's women and children to the asylum of Mission Santa Inés in present-day Solvang.
The incident frightened De la Guerra so much that he petitioned the viceroy to rush military reinforcements to bolster the defense of Santa Barbara. The so-called "Mazatlan Volunteers", 45 calvalrymen led by a man named Narciso Fabrigat, were assigned to De la Guerra's garrison. Fabrigat became a civilian when Mexico overthrew Spanish rule in 1822, and in 1843, he was awarded the 3,232 acres of Rancho La Calera by the Mexican governor Manuel Micheltorena. When the street grid was created, Voluntario Street was named after his group of volunteers.
A more lasting effect of Bouchard's California raid was the arrival of Joseph John Chapman, an American sailor who had been a member of Bouchard's crew but was left behind to become the first US-born permanent resident of Spanish California. Many years later, Chapman also became the first US-born permanent resident of Santa Barbara.