Juan Bautista De Anza set out to make an overland path to Alta California in 1775. This description from De Anza's journals shows what kind of life the pioneers in his party had during their journey.
"The seasoned Anza led a diverse party, including – according to his diary – expedition chaplain Pedro Font, Franciscan missionaries Francisco Garces and Thomas Eixarch, Lieutenant Don Joseph Joachin Moraga, Sergeant Juan Pablo Grijalva, 10 escort soldiers, 28 soldier/settlers, 29 soldiers' wives (at least five of them pregnant when they left Tubac), 136 family members and volunteer settlers, 15 muleteers, 3 vaqueros, 5 interpreters, 4 personal servants, 3 missionary servants, and a commissary. Anza and a few soldiers had the pure blood of Spain flowing in their veins, but the rest of the party descended from Spanish and Indian, Spanish and African, or pure Indian parentage. Children, most of them 12 and under, made up well over half of the emigrants.
The expedition marched out of Tubac, Anza in the lead, with a flourish. The soldiers wore red government-issue military coats and carried festooned lances. The friars wore their order's blue habits and leather sandals. The colonists, their children shouting in excitement, felt anticipation about their futures in California and, in the beginning, uncertainty about their places in the column. After a few days on the trail, the expedition would assume the characteristics of a movable village, with men, women, children and even livestock taking up customary places in the order of march and seeking out familiar neighbors in the nights of encampment.
"I may note," said Font, "that the order observed on the march during the whole journey was as follows: At a suitable hour an order was given to drive in the cavallada [the livestock], and that each one should proceed to catch his animals, the muleteers the mules, the soldiers and servants the horses for themselves and their wives and the rest. While they were being bridled and saddled it was my custom to say Mass, for which there was plenty of time. As soon as the pack trains were ready to start the commander would say, 'Everybody mount.' Thereupon we all mounted our horses and at once the march began, forming a train in this fashion: Ahead went four soldiers, as scouts to show the road. Leading the vanguard went the commander, and then I came. Behind me followed the people, men, women, and children, and the soldiers who went escorting and caring for their families. The lieutenant with the rear guard concluded the train. Behind him the pack mules usually followed; after them came the loose riding animals; and finally all the cattle, so that altogether they made up a very long procession." On the trail, the column typically traveled about one league, or roughly 2.6 miles, per hour.
According to his diary, Anza brought 220 horses and mules as mounts for the expedition; colonists brought another 120 mounts. Anza furnished 140 pack mules to transport camp gear, baggage, supplies, provisions, munitions and gifts (for the Indians); the colonists brought another 25 pack mules. Anza's vaqueros drove 302 beef cattle, some to serve as provisions for the expedition, others, as seed stock for the new settlements. According to the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail Website!, Anza supplied 12 tents, including one for himself and his four servants, one for the three friars and their servants, and ten for soldiers, families and others. (In good weather, soldiers slept outside.) Anza gave the colonists clothing, probably more than many of them had ever seen. He brought six tons of food, including flour, beans, cornmeal, sugar and chocolate. The muleteers loaded the pack mules every day before the expedition took to the trail; they unloaded the animals every night.
If Anza took care of the pioneers' material requirements, Friar Pedro Font took care of their spiritual needs. 'I exhorted everybody to show perseverance and patience in the trials of so long a journey,' he said in his diary, 'saying they ought to consider themselves happy and fortunate that God had chosen them for such an enterprise… …I assured them the help of God and of our patroness, the Most Holy Virgin of Guadalupe, the host which would protect us during the whole journey if we conducted ourselves as good Christians.'"
At the end of the journey they all reached San Francisco with only one death along the way.
"Over the next several days, Anza and his party explored the east side of San Francisco Bay then returned to the presidio at Monterey. He had completed his work. He knew the time had come for him to go home. "Senor Anza finished arranging matters relating to the delivery and the accounts of his expedition and after dinner most of the people whom we had brought came to say goodbye, with not a few tears on account of the love which they had come to feel for us." Friendships forged during the shared hardships of the trail were receding into memory. "I began my return," on April 14, 1776, said Anza, "with Father Fray Pedro Font, seven soldiers of my command…; the commissary who came with the expedition; six muleteers…; two of the three cowboys who came…; and four of my servants."
"The pack train consisted of nineteen loads," said Font, "three of which were for the mission of San Antonio. And in a cage we carried… four cats, two for San Gabriel and two for San Diego, at the request of the fathers, who urgently asked us for them, since they are very welcome there on account of the great abundance of mice..."
The Anza Trail would answer its purpose as a highway for conveying pioneers and supplies from communities in the northwestern provinces through Tubac to settlements and missions in Alta California for five years, long enough for the Spanish to establish firm roots, then the Yuma Indians revolted, shutting down the trail for the remainder of the colonial period."
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