Store News Weinstock-Lubin & Co.

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Store News
Vol. 500 Sacramento, Monday, July 30th, 1923
The Romance of Sacramento
By Christina Krysto
No. 112
(The Romance of Sacramento began in the Store
News of July 23, 1923, with the legend of the
formation of the Sacramento River.)
III.
The Breaking of the Golden Seal
The Dream of Cortez Realized After Two and
a Half Centuries.
, The visions of adventurous men which were
iirred by tales of Cortez and his sailors could not
f easily forgotten. So, for a long time attempts
further discovery—for the most part wholly unsuccessful—went on. And, side by side with the
straightforward stories of eye-witnesses, stories
of the unattractiveness of the new land, the myths
of the treasures persisted and lived and grew.
For it were strange indeed if the sailors of these
various expeditions had kept strictly to the truth.
We learn from the yellowed pages of the History
of California by Miguel Venegas—published in
1759 that—
"A desire for alleviating in some measure, by strange and surprising accounts,
the uneasy sensations arising from the
miscarriage of the enterprises for its
(California's) conquest stimulated many, at
their ignominious return from those expeditions, to court popularity, palliate, miscarriage and render their company acceptable
by a fruitful invention of fables. The frequent repetition of these opened a door
for improvement and emulation. The last
who arrived thought themselves obliged to
add some circumstances of greater terror
and wonder than what had been related
by the first adventurers: and this they did
with less caution, as their narratives could
not be easily disproved."
So expedition after expedition was fitted out
by adventurous men of Spain, ending, one after
another, in blasted hopes, and nothing was brought
back save the "fruitful invention of fables" referred to in the passage above.
Upper California Explored.
Then, several years after Grijalva's venture,
Cabrillo succeeded in sailing along the coast of
Upper California. He pushed farther and farther
north until he reached the Farrallones at the entrance to the Golden Gate which guards the Bay
of San Francisco. By a freak of chance he did not'
discover the greatest harbor of the New World,
The Seal of the Golden Gate was broken from the
inside—San Francisco Bay discovered.
and the  seal  of  the   Golden   Gate  remained  unbroken for two long centuries more.
The Golden Hind came next—in 1578—a British
ship bearing Sir Frances Drake, who also went
unheeding past the Golden Gate and made his
landing in a bay some sixty miles farther north.
Unaware of the fact that the Spanish flag and
the Spanish cross had already been planted upon
the new land, Drake took possession of it in the
name of Queen Elizabeth, calling it New Albion.
For a long time thereafter the English spoke of
California by that name, describing it as "Drake's
land back of Canada".
Another voyage is recorded, that of Sebastian
Viscayno, who—in 1602—found and named the Bay
of Monterey, but who, like his predecessors, did
not venture even a little way inland.
After that, for more than a century and a half,
Upper California remained unvisited, its Golden
Seal still unbroken, forgotten wholly by the civilized world.
The Jesuit Missions.
Meanwhile, in Lower California, the Church
was taking up the task in which the warriors had
failed, the task of civilizing the natives and developing the country by colonization. And there
is something deeply stirring in this enterprise of
the Fathers, an enterprise requiring far more
courage than was needed for the first expeditions
of discovery. The dreadful loneliness of an untouched land, the actual privations, the unending
patience necessary to the winning of the Indians'
confidence, the readiness to turn into soldiers the
moment  these   Indians   rose   in   actual  revolt—all
(Continued on page 4.)
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