De Anza Crossing of the Santa Ana River, 1775 and 1776

The party that forded the river below here on New Year's Day 1776 was not an expedition in the ordinary sense. It was two hundred and forty-odd people, soldiers' families recruited out of Sinaloa and Sonora, most of them poor and many of Indigenous, African and Spanish descent, paid in clothing and rations to walk to a coast none of them had seen. They founded San Francisco. The plaque explains them as a check on Russian expansion. The marker stands on a golf course between the clubhouse and the first tee.

What the plaque says

On January 1, 1776, the first party of colonists to come overland to the Pacific Coast crossed the Santa Ana River south of this marker and camped between here and the river. Recruited in the presidios of Sonora, Mexico, and led by Lt. Col. Juan Bautista de Anza, who had established the trail a year earlier, this humble and heroic band of 242 men, women and children continued north to found San Francisco. Thus was set a boundary to Russian expansion from the north. Three precarious missions were being maintained by uncertain ocean voyages prior to the opening of De Anza's Trail. Afterward, the flourishing missions and ranchos of Spanish California sprang from the droves of cattle, sheep, and horses brought over the trail.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wigwam Motel — 10 mi
  Nineteen concrete teepees on Foothill Boulevard, the last of Frank Redford's Wigwam Villages and still renting rooms.
• Original McDonald's Site — 13 mi
  The corner where two brothers invented fast food, now an unofficial museum the corporation has never blessed.
• Cajon Pass — 24 mi
  The gap the San Andreas tore between two mountain ranges, and the doorway every westbound traveler has used for two centuries.

More markers nearby

• Cornelius and Mercedes Jenson Ranch — 1.9 mi
• Site of Old Rubidoux Grist Mill — 2.4 mi
• Site of Louis Rubidoux House — 2.5 mi
• Parent Washington Navel Orange Tree — 3.1 mi