Commentary: 250 years? California was already going strong when the 13 colonies got their act together

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Set us as preferred Don’t get all cocky, you 13 original colonies.Yes, yes, 250 years, congratulations, enjoy the cake.But here on the West Coast, a whole continent away from your powdered periwigs and your Philly bell-ringing, 1776 was a banner year, too.Unbeknownst to you — and truth be told, unbeknownst to the people here — the future of these United States, the modern nation, was being shaped in California, too.Granted, it was only a seed, hardly even a seedling.

In Spanish California, mission-building was on the 1776 checklist.A new San Gabriel mission was being built, five years after Franciscan missionaries had founded the original mission in a flood zone, which flooded.In the San Francisco Bay, on June 29, 1776, the same day that the Continental Congress was taking a breather to pore over Thomas Jefferson’s eloquent and incendiary declaration, newcomers from Spain knelt in an arbor of rushes to celebrate the first mass of the future Mission Dolores.

They’d soon start building their presidio fort a few miles away, the twin foundations of Spain’s God and empire.That name — “dolores,” meaning sorrows — “seemed appropriate given what was to come,” San Francisco historian Alec Scott told me.For Native Americans like the Ohlone, who watched that first mass that turned out to be the founding of San Francisco, 1776 was the first of many increasingly bad years.Los Angeles is a complex place.

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