All the hoopla today about Lewis and Clark-it is not as if the whole West was totally unknown in 1800. Many years ago I visited the Mission Church at Santa Barabara, in California. I recall seeing a copy of a letter written by Father Junipero Sera, to George Washington, congradulating him (Washington) upon his election to the presidency of the US. So, was there some limited communication between Spanish California and the 13 colonies? What was the means? And, why did it take Jefferson so long to survey the west?
General Questions if the forum for questions with factual answers. I’ll move it for you.
Cajun Man - SDMB Moderator
I have no idea what the postal service between California and the U.S. would have looked like in the late eighteenth century. Presumably, letters would have been routed to Mexico City and then out to the world or they could have been sent via visiting ships (New England whalers made re-provisioning stops on the West Coast for years before the land was acquired by the U.S.).
As to Jefferson’s survey, how short did you want the interval between purchase and exploration to be? The Louisiana Purchase was signed in the Spring of 1803 and ratified by the Senate later that Summer or in early Fall, then Congress authorized $2,500 to explore the new territory (the boundaries of which–other than the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico–were not actually known since neither France nor Spain had actually surveyed the land).
Meriwether Lewis spent the winter of 1803-1804 preparing for the three year expedition and started out in the Spring of 1804.
Fur trappers (mostly from Canada) had journeyed through much of the Northern portions of the region, but no European or European descendant had actually mapped the area. Prior to the Purchase, the land was considered to be owned by a foreign nation (France until 1763, Spain until 1800, then France, again with no consideration of the actual inhabitants) so there was no purpose in the U.S. sending official explorers into land that was “owned” by someone else. While the region had been “owned” by Spain, Spain had signed a treaty allowing U.S. settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee free passage on the Mississippi and duty-free shipments out of New Orleans. With the reversion to France, it appeared that that treaty would be abrogated, prompting Jefferson to seek to acquire New Orleans, leading to the diplomatic maneurvering that led to the eventual purchase of the entire area.
I still have not found particulars of mail between (Spanish) California and the new United States. However, nearly all of Europe had postal systems in place by the early seventeenth century and by the end of that century most of them had become government monopolies. I would suspect that (Spanish) Mexico would have used the services of the Spanish post (although the use of direct shipment by private carriers such as the whalers I first mentioned continued for some time).
There must have been some form of communication in Washington’s time with the West Coast, if not further north.
There was a diplomatic dispute during that time between Great Britian and Spain over the Nootka Sound, near present day Vancouver, and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson was involved in the dispute also.
And the U.S. heard from the Spanish about that situation, so there had to be some way for messages to get from all the way above the 49th parallel on the Pacifc over to Philadelphia.
As far as the time between the Louisiana Purchase and the beginning of the L&C expedition, it should be noted that Jefferson told Lewis to start preparations before the purchase was complete.
Beside whalers, the west coast was part of a triangular trade that started about the time of Washington’s administration. Ships from Boston would sail to the northwest coast and trade for beaver pelts. These they would take to China to trade for tea, which they would then bring back to New England. One of these traders, Robert Gray, discovered the mouth of the Columbia in 1792.
Mail was a private trade during much of the New Spain period. The Bourbon reforms put postal service under the Spanish Crown in 1766.
The first Official post offices off the carriage routes and the Mexico-Santa Fe Royal Road were located at Nueva Galicia (Guadalajara), Nuevo León (Monterrey), Antequera (Oaxaca), Zacatecas, Nueva Viscaya (Monclova) and the Californias. [Aside - Mexico is considered to have history’s first postmen, tradesmen dedicated to delivery of valises in designated depositories along predetermined postal routes.]
During this time Spain was also establishing maritime mail routes from Sevilla to Manila, by way of Veracruz-Mexico City-Acapulco. The standard of service was established in the Royal Maritime Mail Ordinance of 1777, decreed by Carlos III, under which outgoing mail from Spain left La Coruña for Havana, Veracruz, Cartagena, Mar del Plata, Valparaiso and Manila.
So… I’d guess that official mail from Upper California went to Santa Fe, then El Paso-Torreón-Zacatecas (or maybe San Antonio-Monclova-San Luis) then Mexico City-Veracruz, then shipped to New York or Philadelphia by way of Havana.
They would send it overland across two deserts rather than just shipping it down the coast? That is interesting.
A Los Angeles to Acapulco searoute does make more sense, although the sources I found only discuss land routes except in the case of intercontinental shipments. This page shows a postmark chain for a letter sent from Havana to Mexico in 1860, via New York to California to Acapulco. Veracruz must’ve been closed that year.
There’s an old joke here about how often kids born near the Port of Veracruz are given the unique biblical name, Usmaíl.
If Father Sera was aware of the American Revolution, and Washington’s accession to the presidency, then he certainly must have known of the whole conflict between England and the US. So, communications between california and the east coast must have been pretty good-I guess the Spanish Post Office was quite well run! Then why was the Pony Express necessary?
It wasn’t really necessary. It was just that a transcontinental letter, prior to the 1860-61 pony express, took 4-6 weeks.
The pony express cut it to 7-12 days. Then, the telegraph put them out of business.
samclem gave the correct answer, but it should also be noted that the Spanish Post would have gone away by 1821, replaced by the Mexican Post to be replaced by the U.S. Post in 1848. The Mexican and U.S. Posts might have been equally as efficient as the Spanish Post, but the Spanish Post was long gone from California by the time the Pony Express began its brief (19 month) existence in 1860.
… and no wonder chain letters didn’t catch on in 1800…
Small point: there didn’t have to be any mail service for a letter from S. California to eventually reach Washington. Letters of that time were often entrusted to individuals to deliver. And the letter was hardly time critical, in this case.
tomndebb touched on the difference between territory that had been travelled, and territory that was well-known. I remember reading that up until the mid 1800s, there were still American maps with huge blank spots in the Nevada / Utah area reading “Great American Desert”. This site has an overview about how protracted http://www.isu.edu/~trinmich/Discoverers.html the “opening” of the West was.
El Mariachi Loco, what were the delivery schedules for any of these routes you mentioned?
Does anybody know if President Washington and Father Sera maintained any correspondence? I don’t recall that the Santa Barbara Mission Archives contain any record of such a communication. In any event, would a dieist-leaning protestant and a spanish priest have much in common? Was Fr. Sera secretly preparing to rebel against Spain?
If he was, Fr. Sera was crazy as a sh*thouse rat. Remember that California had only become a province in 1769, though the Franciscans had established Missions up the coast for 200-some-odd years before that. Spanish settlement had only begun in earnest 20 years before Washington’s presidency.
So, California was nowhere near as settled as the Southern Empire. There were more Indians in California than in any other state (want a cite on that? http://calrepublic.tripod.com/history.html) and almost all of them were hunter gatherers. The Spanish at this time were busy rounding them up to live on & support the Pueblos while watching the English, Russians and all the time ALSO utilizing the Presidio system to control a population easily 100X the settlers size. Cite? There were only circa 4000 Spanish settlers a quarter century later than this time frame.
Bottomline: If you looked at this situation, the guy who said “Lets break away from Spain” would almost certainly be turned in by his neighbors, arrested and imprisoned in the nearest Presidio. It strikes me as unlikely a catholic priest working for Rome Through the Spanish Empire would be THAT guy. (Unless he were a man of extraordinarily rare conscience worried about Indian welfare, & hoped to build an indian republic – seems highly unlikely to me)
Here’s a site explaining why a sea route wasn’t used.
partly_warmer, if you’re interested I can visit the city’s postal musuem later this week and find out.
From the above link, here’s the relevant bit:
A fascinating, site, BTW. Thanks EML. Also, I have found this whole thread one of the most interesting that I’ve seen in GQ lately. My congrats and thanks to all who have contributed. Does anybody here know what the Spanish/Mexicans considered the upper boundary of Alta California and how closely it meshed with the current US boundary?
IIRC, the upper boundary was not clear, which is why the U.S., Britain, and Spain were all arguing about the Oregon Territory.
Spain renounced its claim to any territory north of the 42nd parallel in 1819.
Around that time, that part of California and the Oregon Territory was not exactly teeming with people.
Thanks for the site.
Please don’t bother about the museum, unless you happen to be going there already. The question was just general curiosity after I thinking about the considerable effort French (and other) historians put after the 1950s into seeing history as a whole; I remember studies of the (incredibly long) time it took to ship by land until railways, and how much that warped the “as the crow flies” geography the world has today. My guess was that as painful as European land travel was, Spanish communication overland might have been even worse.
I’ve just been reading “The Junks and Sampans of the Yangtze” (strongly recommended), something like a social/technical history of Chinese inland shipping. The Chinese unit of distance was a “li” (?), which was not how far something was, but how long it took it took to cross. A li across plains was about five times as far as one across mountains, as I recall.
Surfing around a little, I found this site that will make all historian’s mouths water:
http://www.nross.com/search.htm
Hundreds of sets available such as:
"French Voyagers in the Mediterranean, 16th to 18th Centuries
This collection contains … rare works written by French voyagers who travelled to all corners of the Mediterranean, and sometimes beyond… 53 titles on 266 mf
The cost is prohibitive, except for libraries, but there are a few items down to $100, as seen in this page on American history.
I think that Father Sera was a man of great compassion, and was highly offended by the spaniard’s harsh treatment of the California indians-might he have secretly nursed a desire to see them free? If so, who would he logically confide in-would George Washington have been receptive to the spanish friar?
Could the good father have been preparing the way for a republic?
As an aside, I am puzzled as to why the Spanish settlers faced starvation -in California?? With some of the best farming land in the world? California today feeds a large part of this nation-it is hard to see why the settlers found farming so difficult there!