San Francisco founded

Around the same time as the American colonists on the east coast were gearing up for the war of independence, the Spanish, who were well established in South America, began moving up the coast on the west. Juan Bautista de Anza, an officer in the Spanish army, was charged with finding an overland route from roughly today’s Arizona to central California. That was the expedition that mapped out present-day San Francisco.

On this day, March 28, in 1776, de Anza’s expedition came to the site of their settlement on the west coast. De Anza located the site of the church that would serve as the mission’s administrative center, and the Presidio of San Francisco, which was a small fort before it became a park.

While de Anza established the sites for the mission and presidio, he did not actually establish the settlement himself: that was outside the scope of his mission. He returned back to Spanish land and was handsomely rewarded. Meanwhile another Spanish explorer, José Joaquín Moraga, built up the site of the Presidio, and established for its support the farming village El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, better known today as San Jose.