A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester Read Free Book Online

extended their empire of New Spain northward from Mexico into what was eventually to be named California. *
    One of the Spanish expeditions to the northern interior in the lateeighteenth century discovered the magnificence of the mountain: “The view from south to north is beautiful, for its end cannot be seen,” wrote one young army lieutenant. Shortly thereafter priests opened a mission nearby (that of San José, fifty miles to the southwest, the fourteenth of the eventual twenty-one by which the Spaniards intended to conquer, convert, and “missionize” the native peoples). Farmers arrived from Castile to settle on the mountain’s fertile flanks (the town of Concord was founded around this time), and the local governor let it be known that the fields on the lower slopes might be used for winter grazing; and then, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, Spain’s policy of subduing the native peoples of the region and bringing them to God got properly under way—with predictably sour initial results.
    During the spring of 1806 a platoon of Spanish soldiers were sent out from their small adobe fortress, the Presidio, near the Golden Gate, to the northern side of the mountain, their allotted task to hunt down some local Miwok Indians. These natives were members of a group the Spaniards liked to call the Carquinez—said to be a local expression meaning “trader”—and the soldiers were supposed to welcome them into the civilizing embrace of Madrid as well as Rome (the Spanish, of course, were not in the Americas simply to proselytize on behalf of the papacy). The Miwok were having none of this, however, and after running for some days eventually stood their ground in what was then a thicket of willow and bay laurel trees, at a spot that today is near an airport for the suburb of Pacheco. To frighten or intimidate the Spaniards, the Miwok sent out a medicine man so weirdly dressed and made up as to persuade the Europeans that the Indians were under the spell of the very devil himself. “An unknown personage, decorated with the most extraordinary plumage and making divers movements, suddenly appeared,” wrote one trooper, clearly terrified. He and his colleagues promptly took flight, the Indians escaped north across the Sacramento River (the narrows where they did so remain the CarquinezStrait to this day, with two important toll bridges the expensive scourge of commuters), and the returning soldiers reported to their commander back at the Presidio that they had lost the natives in what they in consequence christened “the thicket of the devil”— Monte del Diablo .
    Later cartographers assumed that the word monte —which in this context meant “thicket”—actually identified a mountain, although had the soldiers wanted to describe a mountain they would probably have used the less ambiguous montaña . But, in any case, the later mapmakers mistakenly co-opted the name to describe the peak itself—and the error has endured for the better part of two centuries, memorialized in a pile of rock two-thirds of a mile high and now perhaps the best-known wrongly described mountain in the Bay Area. In 1865 the new California legislature tried to change the name to the memorably unromantic Coal Hill; unsurprisingly, in a state for which romance would eventually become a byword, the attempt failed.
    Bret Harte, the Albany Yankee who went out west to write about the miners and the Chinese and other exotica of the Gold Rush days (and who would hire Mark Twain and later write in collaboration with him), added spice to the legend with a famous short story. He had come to know the mountain well. His first job after leaving Brooklyn in 1854 was as tutor to the sons of a local farmer, and his fascination with and support for the Indians and Mexicans—which would later render him highly unpopular with the less racially sensitive of the white Californian