CHAPTER VIII
THE ANZA TRAIL
WITH Mission and Presidio established, attention was turned to colonization, the necessity for which was imperative if California was to be held against rival encroachment. But the difficulties of colonization proved not only great, but for a time, seemingly insurmountable.
Colonization meant men and women; it meant live stock, particularly horses, cattle and sheep; it meant agricultural implements, rude though they were in that day; it meant seed for the production of food; in brief, it meant all those things that make for permanence in the settlement of a new land.
Now the only immediately available means by which these essentials could be transported to Monterey, the seat of the new colony, were sailboats of such limited tonnage, so few in number, and of such uncertainty because of scurvy, storms and sailing time consumed, that reliance upon them was speedily seen to be entirely out of the question. As Chapman expressed it, “The ships were too small and frail, and the perils of the sea too great for families of colonists or herds of domestic animals to be sent out in them.”
79
