In September, 1806, Ensign Gabriel Moraga, great Indian fighter and the most enterprising of the soldier explorers of his day, left Mission San Juan Bautista with a party of fifteen, crossed direct to the San Joaquin River which he had named nu an earlier visit, striking the river near the northern line of Fresno County. Turning north, he discovered and named the Mariposa River and he found what he regarded as a fairly good site near the present city of Merced. Continuing north, he crossed three other rivers which he named, and then came upon the Tuolumne tribe of Indians — the first recorded mention of them.
At a large stream which some previous expedition possibly commanded by him had named, Moraga turned back on October 4, dividing his party by sending one section along the eastern side of the valley and skirting the Sierra foothills, while the other wended its way further westward. At any rate Moraga observed the entire valley to its southern limit more thoroughly than it had ever before come under human scrutiny. As the result of these expeditions. President Tapis, who had succeeded Lasmen as head of the missions, reported four or five good sites discovered, but that a new presidio would have to be provided to protect them.
In 1807 Moraga made another journey to the San Joaquin Valley with a party of seventy-five, going as far as the foothills of the Sierras, and in 1810 two more. On the first he started out from the Mission San Jose and returned via San Juan Bautista: on the other he revisited the Merced country in quest of runaways, captured thirty and brought back a few hostiles.
The accompanying padres said that they found the Indians generally tractable and well disposed. In the Tulare country many children were presented for baptism, but as no assurance was forthcoming that they would be reared in the faith the padres declined to administer the sacrament. They baptized however many old and sick people, who were in immediate danger of death, and remained with some of these until the end.
Moraga is admittedly foremost in the early exploration visits to the interior of California, but there is one other — Padre Francisco Garces — to share honors for an intrepid undertaking. By this time eight missions had been founded, three more projected along the coast and Padre Serra had had his heart's desire gratified in the mission at San Francisco dedicated to St. Francis, patron saint of his priestly order. Padre Garces was of the Portola first land expedition from Sonora in Mexico to Monterey in California in 1774, and one of the most remarkable of missionary explorers of the southwest. He was located at a frontier mission near the Apache country border, exposed to all the dangers from those daring marauders. He was left behind at Yuma "to teach religion" to the Indians until Anza's return from his second land expedition, in 1775-76, with settlers from the Colorado with which to found the San Francisco mission.
Without following up the itinerary, suffice it to say that, when ready in February to begin one of the longest and most dangerous journeys undertaken by him, it was with the hope of opening another route north of that which Anza had trailed across the inhospitable desert and more direct from the Colorado to the Mission of San Luis Obispo, or as far north as Monterey, if fortune favored.
On this journey he discovered the Mojave River at its sink and reached San Gabriel mission in March, crossing the San Bernardino mountains. In the Tulare valley he came upon Indians differing from any before met with in that they lived in enclosed camps, each family in its own house, walled, tule roofed and with nightly guard stationed at each house. These Indians aided him to cross the Kern River near the present site of Bakersfield. A five days northward journey brought him to White River, where, having no more presents for distribution and being dependent upon strange tribes for food, he turned back reluctantly, having reached the latitude of Tulare Lake, though he did not behold it as he was probably not far from the base of the mountains and much farther east.
To paraphrase Z. S. Eldredge's History of California: He was now in that great interior valley toward which the gold hunters of the world turned so eagerly three-quarters of a century later. Lightly concealed in the beds of the mountain streams farther north, lay more gold than Cortez had wrung from Mexico or Pizarro from Peru . . . and succeeding generations would find in the soil of the valley itself a far more permanent source of wealth. He had opened the way thither alone, unhelped by a single fellow being of his kind or kindred, he had explored it, braving the unknown dangers of the wilderness, the heat and thirst of the desert, the rush of mountain torrents, the ferocity of wild beasts, and the treachery of savages. He had reduced himself so nearly to the level of the savage that he was able to live as he lived, feed as he fed, on the vilest food, sleeping as he slept, in his filthy and vermin haunted camps, and exposing his life constantly to his treacherous impulses. And it all availed nothing!
On rejoining his Indian companions who had refused to proceed farther with him among the unknown tribes, Garces set out by return route more to the east than the one by which he had come. He probably crossed the mountains at the Tehachapi pass, following the present day route of the Southern Pacific railroad to the neighborhood of Mojave, and thence made direct for the Colorado and Yuma country and following the Gila arrived at San Xavier del Bac in September.
In this long tour he was accompanied only by Indians, his one associate companion, Estavan Tarabel, a runaway San Gabriel mission neophyte, who had proven a failure as a guide on Anza's first Sonora-Monterey overland expedition. The Indians acted as interpreters but when they failed him Garces had recourse to the sign language. To arouse interest in his story of religion he exhibited his pictorial banner. He also relied upon his compass which never failed to interest and delight the Indian, and his cross, rosary and missal. In his rewritten diary, he furnished much information which should have been of moment to the authorities, "but it was not for the reason that they did not use it."
CHAPTER V
The unexplored interior, or that central portion that was at all known to the Californians, was named the Tulares, or the Tulare country, because of the immense tule swamps formed in the depression or slough between Tulare Lake and the great bend of the San Joaquin, and above it by the Kern and other small bodies of water from the streams from the Sierras on the east and south. This slough carried the surplus waters of lake and upper part of valley off into the rivers in flood seasons. The valley was dry under foot in summer and autumn seasons and in drouth periods. Around the lakes and sloughs for miles, along almost the full length of the San Joaquin and the lower half of the Sacramento and over a large territory of low ground about their mouths, extensive tule covered swamp lands formed, salty where affected by ocean tides but fresh or brackish where not.
The tule swamps, apparently one immense tract to the eye, were at intervals visited by the Spaniards and the Californians in pursuit of deserting Indians, and horse and cattle thieves. That region now embraced in Fresno, Kings and Tulare counties was inhabited by a warlike band of horse riding Indians, who not infrequently descended upon missions and ranches to run off stock and particularly mustangs, the Indian having a great fondness for horseflesh as an article of diet. The renegades piloted their wilder brothers on the forays and raids. These Tulareans were never subdued by the Spaniards, and the Tulares became in time a rendezvous for the runaway neophytes of the missions. They were also resorted to by horse thieves from New Mexico and elsewhere, and by Spanish and American adventurers to buy horses. John C. Fremont, concerning whom Senator Nesmith of Oregon once said that he had the credit with some people of having found everything west of the Rockies, had no moral scruples on his 1846 expedition to buy 187 horses from these Tulareans, despite the warning of John A. Sutter that he would receive stolen animals. A hunting knife and a handful of beads bought a horse.
Many were the expeditions sent to the Tulares. The first of which there is record was in 1773, when Pedro Fages with a few soldiers sallied out from San Luis Obispo across the Coast Range to the vicinity of Tulare Lake in pursuit of runaways. He was the first white man to look upon the great interior valley.
This Fages was a brave soldier, an undaunted