History of Santa Barbara, California

The first Europeans to see the area were members of a Spanish expedition led by the Portuguese explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, who sailed through the Channel in 1542, and anchored briefly in the vicinity of Goleta.

[5] Portola's expedition encountered large numbers of exceptionally friendly natives, many of whom lived in Syuxtun,[6] a village just in back of the beach between present-day Chapala and Bath streets.

Indeed, the natives – which the Spaniards dubbed the Canaliños for the "canoes" (actually tomols) they used so skillfully – so irritated their guests with gifts and boisterous music that Portola changed the location of his camp on August 19 so the party could get some rest.

[12] Among these early settlers was José Francisco Ortega, who was an important figure in the Portola expedition and became the recipient of the only Spanish-era land grant in Santa Barbara County, Rancho Nuestra Señora del Refugio, in 1794.

Known as the Cieneguitas chapel, it took the form of an adobe asistencia complete with a tile roof and two bells donated by the King of Spain, and stood from 1803 until the 1890s on a ridge opposite Cuna Drive at what is now 4308 Modoc Road, at the northern edge of Hope Ranch.

Bouchard's raiders landed first at Refugio Canyon on December 5, 1818, where they pillaged and burned the ranch belonging to the Ortega family, killing cattle and slitting the throats of horses.

However, after being alerted by messengers from Monterey, the Presidio dispatched a squadron of cavalry, who caught three stragglers from the ill-disciplined raiding party and dragged them back to Santa Barbara in chains.

Bouchard sailed the remaining twenty miles (32 km) to Santa Barbara a few days later, anchoring off of present-day Milpas Street, and threatened to shell the town unless his men were returned to him.

The town was not as heavily defended as it had seemed to be; the hundreds of cavalrymen Bouchard had seen through his spyglass were but the same few dozen riding in large circles, stopping and changing costumes each time they passed behind a patch of heavy brush.

Overnight the Indians were able to make a getaway north into Mission Canyon and then over the mountains, where they eventually linked up with other unsubdued groups of Native Americans in the southern San Joaquin Valley.

After a battle near San Emigdio Creek in March, and a subsequent three-month pursuit and negotiation, the Indians were recaptured near Buena Vista Lake, and brought back to Santa Barbara.

Principal export commodities were tallow and hides, both of which were carried by California clippers to Boston to the candle- and shoe-making factories in New England, in return for goods purchased by the locals.

A few hides were brought down, which we carried off in the California style.By 1833 the process of secularization at the Missions was completed, and the lands and property were given to soldiers, leading Californios, and occasionally the original Native American owners, with most of the Indians becoming Mexican citizens.

One of the ranches, Rancho La Calera, named after the mission limekiln, was granted by governor Manuel Micheltorena in 1843 to Narciso Fabrigat, the former leader of the Mazatlan volunteers sent after the Bouchard raid.

The Chumash who previously had served the padres in the Mission system became laborers on the ranches, occupying the lowest rung of the social ladder, with the oldest established families – the Ortegas, De la Guerras, and others – at the top.

They proceeded to the Presidio where they ran the Stars and Stripes over the city for the first time; not long afterwards, seeing the town was peaceful, they left, being replaced later by ten cavalrymen from John C. Frémont's army.

In spite of losing many of his horses, mules, and cannon to the treacherous and muddy slopes – and not a one to enemy fire – he reached the foothills on the other side in the vicinity of present-day Tucker's Grove, spent the next several days regrouping, making camp along Mission Creek between Anapamu and Canon Perdido Streets,[13] and then marched into Santa Barbara to capture the Presidio.

Powers was not thrown out of town until a band of angry and well-armed vigilantes from San Luis Obispo rode to Santa Barbara to get rid of him (he eventually came to a bloody end, murdered and hurled into a den of hungry wild boars in the Mexican state of Sonora).

[35][36] In 1859, Richard Henry Dana returned, 24 years after his first visit as a 20-year-old sailor, and described the changes in the town: ...and there lies Santa Barbara on its plain, with its amphitheatre of high hills and distant mountains.

There is the old white Mission with its belfries, and there the town, with its one-story adobe houses, with here and there a two-story wooden house of later build; yet little it is altered – the same repose in the golden sunlight and glorious climate, sheltered by its hills; and then, more remindful than anything else, there roars and tumbles upon the beach the same grand surf of the great Pacific as on the beautiful day when the Pilgrim, after her five months' voyage, dropped her weary anchors here; the same bright blue ocean, and the surf making just the same monotonous, melancholy roar, and the same dreamy town, and gleaming white Mission, as when we beached our boats for the first time.In that same year, 1859, Santa Barbara recorded the highest temperature ever noted on the North American continent, 133 °F (56 °C), a record which was to stand until Death Valley topped it by one degree in 1913.

[37] In the immediately following years, two other weather events had a significant effect on the course of development in Santa Barbara: catastrophic floods during the winter of 1861–62, during which the Goleta Slough, formerly open to deep-water vessels, completely silted up, becoming the marsh it remains to the present day; and the disastrous drought of 1863, which forever ended the Rancho era as the value of rangeland collapsed, cattle died or were sold off, and the large ranches were broken down and sold in smaller parcels for development.

[40] Improvements in the harbor included the building of Stearns Wharf in 1872, which increased the commercial capacity of the port; formerly, ships had to anchor several miles offshore, and load and unload their cargoes by rowing small boats to the shore.

The company was founded in 1878 by the Southern Pacific's "Big Four"—Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins Jr., and Collis Potter Huntington—and its agents had long coveted Thomas Hope's land, envisioning it as the ideal site for a tourist resort.

The American Film Manufacturing Company, founded in Chicago in 1910, formally moved its western Flying A Studios from La Mesa, California to Santa Barbara in August, 1912.

"[55] One of the few voices opposing the unification of architectural style was newspaper publisher and future Senator Thomas Storke, who later changed his mind, saying that his former opposition was due to his belief that such compulsion infringed on the constitutional rights of property owners.

Storke in 1932 created the city's main newspaper for the next 74 years, the Santa Barbara News-Press, by winning a libel suit against his rival Reginald Fernald, and absorbing that publisher's Morning Press into his Daily News.

Centered just south of Cliff Drive near the intersection with Santa Cruz Boulevard, the field sprouted over 100 oil derricks in the early 1930s, occasioning the city's first anti-oil protest, but a local ordinance had already been enacted allowing such development.

The military filled in the Goleta Slough in order to expand the adjacent airport; the U.S. Navy took over the harbor area; and north of Point Conception the Army created Camp Cooke, which was later to become Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Most destructive of all was the 1990 Painted Cave Fire, which incinerated over 500 homes in just several hours during an intense Sundowner wind event, crossing over the freeway to Hope Ranch, and causing over a quarter billion dollars in damage.

[70][71][72] When voters approved a city connection to state water supplies in 1991, parts of Santa Barbara, especially outlying areas, resumed growth, but more slowly than during the boom period of the 1950s and 1960s.