Spanish colonial outpost

For many centuries, the area was occupied by some 5,000 to 10,000 Tongva (Gabrielino) and Chumash Indians who lived in scores of villages and led a relatively stable existence by hunting, fishing, gathering, and trading actively with distant groups. Europeans entered their world in 1542 when a Spanish sea expedition headed by Capt. Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed into Santa Monica Bay. Noticing the smoke rising from Indian fires, he dubbed the place Bahía de los Fumos (“Bay of Smokes”). Nearly two centuries later, royal authorities ordered Capt. Gaspar de Portolá to California to locate suitable sites for Franciscan missions, military forts (presidios), and civilian settlements. The Franciscans, led by Junípero Serra, established 21 missions in California, including two in the Los Angeles area: San Gabriel (1771) and San Fernando (1797).

In the fall of 1781, California Gov. Felipe de Neve and 44 settlers from Sonora and Mazatlán established a pueblo near a river they called Río de Porciúncula, where the Native American village of Yang-na (or Yabit) was located. They called the new settlement El Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles (“The Village of the Queen of the Angels”); the name was later shortened to Los Angeles. The newcomers raised enough food to sustain themselves. The Native Americans, soon ravaged by diseases introduced by the Europeans, fared worse. Spain’s hold over colonial California ended in 1822, and in 1835 the new Mexican government raised the pueblo’s status to that of a city. It also secularized the missions and granted about 50 tracts of land called ranchos. Ignoring legal restrictions against them, white settlers began to make their homes in Los Angeles. During the Mexican-American War (1846–48), southern California was the site of numerous armed skirmishes. When the war ended, California was a province of the United States; in 1850 California joined the union as a state and the city of Los Angeles officially became American. For a brief time Los Angeles was California’s largest settled community, with a population of about 1,500.

The early American era

American Los Angeles, the “Queen of the Cow Counties,” was a rough-and-tumble frontier town. Ethnic conflict flared, particularly in the 1850s. Murder was a daily event, with bandits and vigilantes periodically dominating the scene. In one generation Americans and European immigrants replaced Mexicans in city government. Economic life continued to be shaped by the rancheros until the 1860s, when a severe drought destroyed crops, killed cattle, and undermined the economic viability of the rancheros.

The increasing dominance of whites in Los Angeles, along with economic instability after the American Civil War (1861–65), raised ethnic tensions in the city. Los Angeles earned nationwide notoriety in 1871, when rampaging mobs killed some 20 Chinese residents during an event known as the Chinese Massacre.

At that time the town lacked the ingredients common to most successful big cities. It lay outside the world’s major sea-lanes and had no natural harbour, no major fuel or lumber sources, no railway, and, worst of all, no water supply large enough to sustain a sizable population. It lay more than 20 miles (30 km) inland, along the banks of an unruly river. As late as the 1870s, Los Angeles was isolated from the rest of the country by vast deserts, mountains, and stretches of foreboding frontier territory. Novelist Mary Austin aptly called it “an island on the land.” Yet, in just a little more than a century, this insignificant and remote village would become one of the world’s great metropolises.