ABSTRACT
Scientific exploration of California proceeded on two fronts. One of those was in Colonial America and its eventual westward expansion in the early nineteenth century. The other was along the Pacific Coast that began in 1542 when Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed the galleon San Salvador up the west side of Baja California north into Alta California as far as Monterey Bay. Spain did not begin settling Alta California until around 1770 when it established its presence to discourage Russia, England, and France from gaining a permanent foothold. These other powers were already competing with Spain for influence and commercial advantage. With each successive voyage from Europe to California, a ship’s crew included at least one person familiar with, if not trained in, botany and zoology. By the latter half of the eighteenth century, expeditions were being launched for the expressed purpose of scientific discovery.
The expedition of Don Gaspar de Portolá from San Diego to Monterey in 1769 established the main route between San Diego and San Francisco. By the end of Spanish rule in 1822, four presidios and 21 Franciscan missions were in place from San Diego to San Francisco. Alta California was politically ill at ease in the early 1820s as Mexico took over the territory from Spain. This did not, however, inhibit the continued exploration of the land by naturalists both foreign and domestic.
Thomas Jefferson was in the second year of his presidency (1801–1809) when he set about securing the United States’ access to western lands. By 1820, exploration of the American West was well under way through commercial and government-sponsored expeditions. At the end of the war with Mexico in 1848, boundary and railroad surveys in the West added even more natural history data.
By the time California achieved statehood in 1850, an impressive league of geologists, botanists, zoologists, and meteorologists were calling California home. Natural history societies were formed, and institutions were built to serve as repositories for collections.
