Reading Notes W3 The Naming of Santa Ana and Los Angeles (Crespí):Part A

This story was extremely entertaining for me. Just thinking of these men walking through what is now the greater Los Angeles area before it was covered in concrete, cars, and pollution amazes me. How beautiful that area must have looked without our modern day mess we have is almost incomprehensible, which is why I really enjoyed the imagery in this reading. They did a very good job of explaining where they were and what they were looking at, and it was really interesting to see this place I have been to multiple times through the eyes of the first Europeans that made their way up the coast.

I also enjoyed their relationship with Native Americans as they passed through, because both sides seemed to enjoy each others company and admire one another, which is different from most accounts of the interactions between Native Americans and European settlers.

But back to the imagery, which was my main focus while reading this text. Crespí explains: "[We are] continuing our way to the northwest along the skirts of the mountains which we have on the right, to the north, and after traveling a league and a half we came to the banks of a river...[who's] course is from the northeast to the southwest." It seems to me that Crespí and his men were traveling northwest along the skirts of the Santa Ana Mountains, looking north to the San Gabriel Mountains as he came up to the Santa Ana River, which runs from the San Bernardino Mountains southwest to the Pacific Ocean.

Crespí talks about multiple days where there were tremendous earthquakes as well, and how each time there would also be aftershocks for a few hours.

Crespí also details coming across the Los Angeles River and the Arroyo Seco: "...we entered a very spacious valley, well grown with cottonwoods and alders, among which ran a beautiful river from the north-northwest, and then, doubling the point of a steep hill, it went on afterwards to the south. Toward the north-northeast there is another river bed which forms a spacious water-course, but we found it dry."

I found this story to be very interesting because of the great detail in which Crespí describes his surroundings, he did a very good job of painting a beautiful image in my head of the Santa Ana- Los Angeles area before there millions and millions of people congesting the whole place.