Los Angeles Founded: A Spanish Settlement Begins

Forty-four settlers walked north from the San Gabriel Mission on September 4, 1781, and founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora La Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula on a sun-baked plain along the Los Angeles River. The group included 11 men, 11 women, and 22 children, drawn from the diverse population of colonial Mexico: Indigenous, African, mestizo, and Spanish. Governor Felipe de Neve had personally recruited the settlers to establish an agricultural community that would supply food to the military presidios defending Spain's tenuous hold on Alta California. The founding party reflected the complex racial dynamics of New Spain. Census records from the settlement's first years show that more than half the original settlers were of African or mixed African descent, a demographic reality largely erased from the city's popular mythology. The pueblo's land was laid out according to Spanish colonial law, with a central plaza, surrounding house lots, and communal agricultural fields irrigated by a system of zanjas, or open ditches, that channeled water from the river. For its first century, Los Angeles remained a small, dusty ranching town. The population reached only about 1,600 by the time the United States seized California during the Mexican-American War in 1847. The arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1876 and a subsequent real estate boom in the 1880s began the transformation from sleepy pueblo to major city. The discovery of oil in the 1890s, the development of the port at San Pedro, and the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which brought water from the Owens Valley 233 miles away, fueled explosive growth in the early twentieth century. The pueblo that 44 settlers scratched out of the Southern California dirt became the second-largest city in the United States, home to nearly four million people within city limits and over 13 million in the metropolitan area. Its founding party, smaller than a school bus full of passengers, planted a seed that grew into the entertainment capital of the world.