Honey tours the San Francisco Presidio
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
Juan Bautista de Anza (1736-1788) proposed the site of the San Francisco Presidio on March 28, 1776 at what is today a point near the entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge, near Fort Point.
This is about the location seen in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1957 film Vertigo, when Scottie saves Madeleine from the icy waters of the San Francisco Bay.
One hundred and eighty one years before Hitchcock made the film, Anza wrote: “I went to the narrowest opening made by the mouth of the port, where nobody had been before. There I set up a cross, and at its foot I buried under the ground a notice of what I have seen…”[1]
The Anza expedition’s diarist Father Pedro Font wrote in his short diary: “Ascending a small hill, we at once entered upon a very bare mesa of great extent, smooth, and inclining a little toward the port. It must be about half a league wide and somewhat longer, and it keeps getting narrower until it ends right at the white cliff. This mesa affords a most delightful view. Indeed, from it one can see a large part of the harbor, its islands, the mouth of the port, and the sea as far as the eye can reach, even beyond the farallones. The commander selected this mesa as the site of the new settlement and fort which was to be established at this port, for, being elevated, it is so commanding that from it the entrance to the mouth of the port can be defended with musket shots…”[2] Read more
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
