On a busy Riverside thoroughfare, a statue of Juan Bautista de Anza stands tall and faces south. He’s gazing toward the route he and his countrymen traveled in March 1774.
The first outsider to document a visit to the Inland Empire, De Anza came through Riverside 250 years ago last week.
I stumbled upon this anniversary by pure chance while doing some bedtime reading last month. One page into Glenn Wenzel‘s “Anecdotes on Mount Rubidoux and Frank A. Miller, Her Promoter,” De Anza’s travel to Riverside was cited as occurring on March 20-21, 1774.
What were the odds? The 250th anniversary was right around the corner.
That would also be known as the semiquincentennial, the sestercentennial or the quarter millennial, depending on your preference.
Whatever the name, it might have passed us by.
Wenzel was surprised when I brought up the anniversary to him — we were speaking at my 60th birthday party last weekend — and said if he’d realized, he’d have written his Raincross Gazette history column on it.
Steve Lech, this newspaper’s “Back in the Day” history co-columnist and an expert on Riverside County history, hadn’t keyed in on it either. But Lech generously yielded the ground to me and offered his assistance.
After fortifying myself with breakfast at Little Green Onions, as De Anza and his party could only have dreamed of doing, I went over to Lech’s house in the Wood Streets neighborhood.
This was Wednesday morning.
“I looked it up. Today is the 250th anniversary of De Anza’s journey through Riverside,” Lech confirmed as we headed out.
Probably there should have been a parade. But it was just us.
Who was De Anza? A soldier and expeditionary leader, he was born in Sonora, Mexico and served the land’s Spanish rulers. In 1774, when he was 37, he set out with a troop of soldiers to find an overland supply route to Alta California’s Spanish missions.
I’d written about a related 250th anniversary in 2019. That was the expedition by Gaspar de Portolá from today’s Orange County through the San Gabriel Valley on July 30, 1769. A group of us, led by Paul Spitzzeri of the Homestead Museum, hiked a portion of the route.
Portolá and company were the first non-natives to tread this ground.
“Each step they took was the furthest north any Spaniard had ever been. And the step after that, and the step after that,” historian Phil Brigandi told us that day. “They were walking totally into the unknown with every step.”
That journey established sites for the first Catholic missions. Supplying them was done by sea, a long and expensive undertaking. De Anza wondered if there was a way to get there by land faster and cheaper.
His group left from a spot near Tucson, Arizona on Jan. 8, 1774, riding on horseback through deserts, marshes and sand dunes, through the San Jacinto Valley and Moreno Valley into Riverside.
Lech and I drove north on Magnolia Avenue. For several blocks, roughly Ramona Drive to 15th Street, the land drops away on either side into a deep and wide gully.
“Here,” Lech said, “is the arroyo he came through.”
The De Anza statue on Magnolia at 14th Street looks toward this feature, the Tequesquite Arroyo. But we turned south. That’s because after De Anza reached the Santa Ana River, he had to find a way to cross it.
Today that wouldn’t be difficult. Due to pumping, it’s largely dry. In 1774, though, it was quite a river, perhaps swelled by spring rains. It’s believed to have been so wide that it took in what today is Rubidoux.
De Anza found a comparatively narrow point. Crossing took him a day and cost him two horses. To see the approximate spot, we drove into Martha McLean-Anza Narrows Park. A stone marker, erected in 1942, reads “De Anza Trail 1774.”
The Santa Ana River Bike Trail winds below. The river now is somewhere amid the trees and scrub on the bike trail’s east flank.
De Anza continued on to Mission San Gabriel, arriving March 22, and from there to Monterey before returning to Arizona. He came back in 1775-76, this time with colonists to establish more settlements. He followed much the same route.
Had there been any businesses in Riverside, De Anza could have been greeted as a regular, maybe gotten a second punch at a frozen yogurt shop. “Just eight more expeditions,” he might have been told, “and you’ll get one free.”
It wasn’t until scholar Herbert Bolton translated De Anza’s diaries, retraced the route himself and published his findings in 1930 that it was learned that the expedition hadn’t gone through the Mojave Desert.
“He discovered the route was more inland, which makes sense because that’s where the water is,” Lech said. “Once we found out De Anza came here, Riverside went De Anza crazy.”
Today the name De Anza adorns an avenue, an assisted living center, a surgical center, a self-storage facility and no doubt more.
Most prominently, the former De Anza Theatre operated from 1939, the height of De Anza mania, to 1981. It’s now Clark’s Nutrition, but the De Anza name remains on the tower and marquee.
Two blocks south is the De Anza statue. It’s in tiny Newman Park. I returned there on my own.
Riverside Landmark No. 73, the statue was erected in 1940. Its features were modeled on a De Anza descendant, Ed Loustaunau, a telephone lineman who actually lived in Riverside, a fact that caused great excitement.
It’s an odd duck of a park, devoted to both De Anza and the Riverside Sport Hall of Fame. Past two replica lockers, a pedestal with text faces the statue.
I drew near to read it. It’s dedicated to “Riverside Premier Fast-Pitch Softball 1930-1969.”
But an inscription on the curving relief wall is relevant. The statue is there “to witness a people’s gratitude to Captain Don Juan Bautista de Anza…” Further cited is De Anza’s alleged “disposition to gentleness and piety.”
If this were in dialogue, the conversation might go like this.
Riverside: “Gracias.”
De Anza: “De nada.”
David Allen writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, more to explore. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.
