The Journal of San Diego History Vol. 53

San Diego
History
T he Jou r n a l of
Volume 53 Summer 20 07 Number 3 • The Journal of San Diego History

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Front Cover: ZLAC’s clubhouse around 1908. From left to right: Elsa Wentscher
Marston, Juliet Newkirk, Grace Gould Klauber, Edith Cole McFarland, and Brooke
Frevert Miller. ©SDHS #85:15353.
Back Cover: Thursday Morning Rowers in the ZLAC barge, April 7, 1973. Bow
to stern: Mary Jessop, Ellen Roche, Annette Frank, Margaret Redelings, Judy
Browne, Betty Sullivan, Nancy Leydecker, Suzanne Leibmann, and Mary Maddox
Grandell (coxswain). ©SDHS, UT #88:K7006-3, Union-Tribune Collection.
Cover Design: Allen Wynar

The Jour nal of
San Diego
History
Volume 53 Summer 2007 number 3
Iris H. W. Engstrand
Molly McClain
Editors
COLIN FISHER
Associate Editor
THEODORE STRATHMAN
david miller
Review Editors
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DAVID J. WEBER
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ii
CONTENTS
Volume 53 summer 2007 number 3
ARTICLES
ZLAC Rowing Club, 1892-2007
Molly McClain
89
Coming Out Gay, Coming Out Christian:

The Beginnings of GLBT Christianity in San Diego, 1970-1979
Joshua Grace, Christopher Rhamey, Megan Dukett,
Kaylin Gill, Ricky Bell
117
“La Mojonera” and the Marking of California’s

U.S. -Mexico Boundary Line, 1849-1851
Charles W. Hughes
126
The Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation

148
Museum Review: San Diego Natural History Museum

Dead Sea Scrolls
151
BOOK REVIEWS
155
iii
iv
ZLAC Rowing Club, 1892-2007
Molly McClain
In 1992, ZLAC Rowing Club celebrated its 100th anniversary with a gala at
the U.S. Grant Hotel and the publication of a history written by Helen Wetzell
Wallace. This year, the club will commemorate another special occasion—the 75th
anniversary of its clubhouse on Mission Bay. Designed by architect Lilian J. Rice,
the clubhouse provides a visual reminder that America’s oldest women’s rowing
club works to preserve its past and to encourage future interest in the sport.
ZLAC was founded in 1892 by Lena Polhamus Crouse, the daughter of Captain
ZLAC’s first barge was launched on August 3, 1895, from the landing float adjacent to the Point Loma Ferry
landing. Courtesy of ZLAC Rowing Club, Ltd.
Albert A. Polhamus, a pilot on the California coast and captain of the tug Santa
Fe. She persuaded her sisters, Caroline and Agnes, and their friend Zulette Lamb
to form a rowing club. Rowing was more than a popular sport; it was also a way
to get around San Diego Bay, albeit in a butcher boat. Inspired by their male
counterparts, the girls chose ranks—“Captain,” “First Officer,” etc.—and used
the first letters of their names to form the acronym ZLAC. In 1894, the San Diego
Rowing Club (SDRC) loaned them a six-oared barge that had been dug up from the
bottom of the bay. Shortly thereafter, ZLAC commissioned an eight-oared barge
from Fred Carter, the architect and designer of the famous Herreschoff yachts,
raising money from families and friends.
Dr. Molly McClain is Associate Professor and Chair, History Department, University of San Diego. A
ninth-generation San Diegan, she edits The Journal of San Diego History with Dr. Iris Engstrand.
89
The Journal of San Diego History
On August 7, 1895, members of Crew I raced on Salt Water Day. Courtesy of ZLAC Rowing Club, Ltd.
The new barge and its female rowers caught the eye of officers and men on
Navy ships anchored in the harbor. Lena Crouse recalled, “As we rowed back and
forth past these Navy boats, the order was ‘eyes in the boat.’…The girls didn’t need
to rubber around at the men—the men did all the rubbering.”1 In 1896, officers of
the USS Monterey presented them with a pennant, a black Navy tie embroidered
ZLAC, that now hangs in the clubhouse.
The San Diego Historical Society’s new exhibit, “Places of Promise,” will
include ZLAC’s first barge along with photographs and memorabilia donated by
club members. ZLAC I was built in Charlie Langell’s workshop at the foot of G
Street and launched
on August 3, 1894,
from the landing float
at the foot of H Street,
now Market Street. It
is 38 feet long and 52
inches wide amidship,
planked with Port
Orford cedar and
covered with cotton
canvas. Originally
painted white, it now
has fiberglass siding.
It retains its original
sliding leather seats,
an innovation that
became popular with
Members of Crew I, 1900. Standing, left to right: Zulette Lamb, Agnes East Coast colleges
Polhamus, Florence Roper, Carolyn Polhamus. Seated: Jean Grow, Grace
Slocum, Lena Polhamus, Ethel Dyer. The ZLAC uniform consisted of a black and universities in
ankle-length woolen skirt with rows of yellow braid sewn around the hemline, the 1870s. Sliding
collars, and cuffs of the middy blouse. Courtesy of ZLAC Rowing Club, Ltd. seats allowed rowers
90
ZLAC Rowing Club
to increase the length of their

stroke and to use the power of
the legs, arms, and back. ZLAC
I was donated to the Society
and moved into the Casa de
Balboa in August 1989.2
At the turn of the century,
many women’s rowing clubs
and collegiate teams were
established in an effort to
improve physical fitness and
to compete in a sport made
popular by men. Wellesley
College in Massachusetts In 1902, ZLAC relocated its clubhouse from the foot of Fifth
founded the oldest surviving Street to the Paulson’s wharf at the foot of H St. (now Market
women’s rowing program in Street). Commercial wharves can be seen in the background, 1915.
©SDHS #89:17617-2.
1875. Cambridge University’s
Newnham College founded a women’s collegiate “boating society” in 1893 while
Cornell University started a competitive women’s crew program in 1896.3
In San Diego, ZLAC inspired the creation of many rowing clubs for high school-
aged girls. Russ High School, later San Diego High School, sponsored teams such
as the Nereids (1895), the Mariners (1898), and the White Caps (1900). In 1895, ZLAC
competed in rowing and swimming events with the Waterbabies, L’Esperance, the
Columbias (1894), the Gondoliers, and La Feluca (1894), and the Nereids crew. Other
teams included the La Sienas (1899), the Oceanids (1901), the Las Corarias (1901),
ZLAC’s clubhouse was decorated with paper lanterns, bamboo stems, and nautical memorabilia. Over one door
hung a banner with the words, “Should auld acquaintance be forgot and days of auld Lang Syne.” Over another
hung a banner for the White Caps, a high school crew that joined ZLAC in 1901 to become Crew II. ©SDHS
89:17552-3
91
In the late 1920s, ZLAC purchased land on Mission Bay in Pacific Beach and planned to build a new clubhouse.
This view of Pacific Beach, looking south from Mount Soledad, shows Mission Beach (upper right) and Crown
Point (upper left) with Point Loma in the distance, 1928. ©SDHS #8328.
the Olympia (1897), the Nautilus (1904), the Twilight Maids (1904), and the YWCA
(1912). Women’s collegiate rowing began with the formation of the Rowing Club of
State Normal School of San Diego in 1898. Women formed four crews—the Sylphs,
the Dog-Watch, the Sobre las Olas, and the Asparas—to compete in local regattas.
SDRC provided quarters for many of the women’s teams, including locker rooms,
showers, and equipment storage.4
Crouse recalled that she and her sisters rowed for fun and adventure:
Our boyfriends would go out in their boats, rowing or sailing,

and in the summertime would not come back for days, sometimes
weeks. When they did return, they would tell us what fun they
had had camping on some beach. They made it sound like a great
adventure. What fun it would be for ZLACs to have
such an adventure. We thought about it a great
deal. I personally dreamed of it day and night. We
could row, sail and swim as well as the boys. Why
couldn’t we do as they did? The answer was always
the same. We were girls, and girls just didn’t do
such things.5
SDRC’s Henry H. Palmer joined Crouse and her friends

on their early escapades. A Princeton University-educated
rower and swimmer, Palmer had come to San Diego to
recover his health. He helped ZLAC to acquire its first
barge, taught the crew to row, attended parties, and
chaperoned the young women when they took holiday Woodblock print showing
the ZLAC boathouse, 1907,
outings to Rancho Guajome, San Luis Rey Mission, El Cajon signed by Leda Klauber.
valley, and San Miguel Mountain. Crouse described him as Courtesy of ZLAC Rowing
ZLAC’s best friend, “a perfect gentleman in every respect, Club, Ltd.
92
ZLAC Rowing Club
and our families trusted him and knew no harm could befall us while he was in
the boat.”6
In 1899, ZLAC stored its barge on Paulsen’s wharf, located at the foot of H
Street. They built a branch wharf and a clubhouse there in 1902. Twenty years later,
membership had expanded considerably. The clubhouse became crowded rather
than cozy and rowers found themselves “in much the position of the Old Woman
in the Shoe, without being able to solve the problem by her whimsical expedient.”7
In the 1920s, ZLAC began to search for a new home “close to deep and quiet
water, not crowded, with plenty of room, and not bumped by commercial
activities.”8 After the opening of the Panama Canal in 1915, commercial and
naval shipping had increased dramatically, causing rowers and owners of small
watercraft to feel unwelcome on the bay.9
ZLAC considered two locations—La Playa and Mission Bay—before deciding
on the latter. In December 1926, the club purchased two waterfront lots at Dawes
Street in Pacific Beach for five thousand dollars. Crouse nearly cried when she
first saw the lots: “there was nothing but water…I stood at the edge of the lake for
a long time wondering how we ever got into such a tangle” and whether or not
the club could get its money back.10 On low tide, however, the lots turned into
marshland that could be dredged and drained. Lena Winn, a member of the club’s
board of directors, “urged the girls to go out and see it. She asked them to realize
that while we bought only two lots they were double in size of the ordinary lot and
therefore equal to four, that the property was accessible both by the water and by
Pacific Avenue [Pacific Beach Drive], and that Pacific Avenue is expected to become
Lilian J. Rice (1888-1938) supervised the development of Rancho Santa Fe before starting her own architectural
practice. This 1923 photo shows Rice, left, in front of the Inn at Rancho Santa Fe, accompanied by Norma
McLean, Virginia Smith, and Bertha Kreuziger. ©SDHS #2611-5.
93
a business street. She

urged that they call it their
building site.”11
In the late 1920s, Pacific
Beach consisted of scattered
farms and pasture land.
Garnet Street was a dirt
road leading to an unsteady
Crystal Pier (1927), built by
a local real estate developer.
Braemar, an estate owned
by Frederick Tudor and
Sarah Emma Jessop Scripps,
covered several acres at the
northwest corner of Mission Rice’s plans for the ZLAC clubhouse won an award from the American
Bay. The Number 16 street Institute of Architects in June 1933. ©SDHS, AD #1014-010 F3-D13.
car line, opened in 1924 and connected downtown San Diego with Ocean Beach,
Mission Beach, and La Jolla.12 People traveled to the Mission Beach Amusement
Center (1925) to ride the Giant Dipper Roller Coaster or to take a dip in the Plunge,
at that time the largest salt water pool in the world.
The club’s new lots, located at the eastern edge of the Scripps’ estate, needed
to be improved before building could begin. Lilian Rice, a member of Crew IV
and president of ZLAC from 1915 to 1916, inspected the property in early January
1930. She recommended the construction of a sea wall, located fifty feet beyond
the club’s property line.13 By November 1931, engineers had filled the lots and
completed the curbs, culverts, flood gate, and sea wall. The Crescent Beach
Improvement Club planned a sandy beach to stretch from Crown Point to Dawes
Street. Thomas Osborn Scripps, who lived next to his parents, offered to continue
it past the Braemar property; he also contributed money for the improvement of
Dawes Street.14
ZLAC chose Rice to design their new clubhouse. In 1931, the Building
Committee submitted the following recommendation:
1. That Miss Lillian [sic] Rice be engaged as the architect for the new clubhouse.
2. That the ‘Monterey’ style of architecture (of board and batten) be selected
as it is considered the most suitable, attractive, and economical type of
construction for the club house.
3. That the proposed building be considered the first unit of a larger building
to be constructed at some future date.
4. That Miss Rice, the architect, be instructed to proceed immediately with the
drawing of plans which will incorporate as many of the features suggested
by the various committees as possible and still be thoroughly compatible
with this committee’s desire to keep the building cost within reasonable
bounds.15
In 1932, Rice was a well-respected architect with her own practice. She had
received her degree in architecture from University of California at Berkeley
in 1910 and, in 1931, became one of the few female members of the American
94
ZLAC Rowing Club
The north side of the clubhouse, ca. 1935. The new building included a large hall, kitchen, dressing rooms,
showers, and a boathouse. ©SDHS #OP12909-1.
Institute of Architecture. She had worked part time in the architectural office of
Hazel Waterman and taught mechanical drawing and descriptive geometry at
San Diego High School and San Diego State Teachers College. In 1922, architects
Richard Requa and Herbert Jackson hired her to supervise the initial development
of Rancho Santa Fe, one of the first planned communities in California. She
designed the school, library, civic center, La Morada (now the Inn) and a number
of residential structures in a Spanish Revival style. Sam W. Hamill, FAIA, worked
as a junior draftsman in Rice’s
Rancho Santa Fe office in
1923. He wrote, “The thing I
remember most about Miss
Rice was the wholesome,
sympathetic and sensitive
understanding she brought to
student, employee or client. Her
residential designs, the major
portion of her work, seemed to
reflect the personality and life-
style of the client. Miss Rice was
devoid of the autocratic ego so
common to gifted designers.”16
The interior of the clubhouse reflected an Arts & Crafts aesthetic
According to Elinor Frazer, one
with its large fireplace, exposed rafters, and unadorned redwood of her students and later friends,
walls, ND. ©SDHS #79:3. Rice was inspirational:
95
This view of the clubhouse from Mission Bay shows the attached boathouse, left, and the dock. The barges were
moved from the boathouse to the water on rails. Courtesy of ZLAC Rowing Club, Ltd.
She’d drive down Highland Avenue on her way to her parents’

home in National City in a great white roadster with the top down
and her scarf flying in the breeze…She wasn’t really pretty, but she
was blonde and attractive and you could tell immediately she was
a person of character. I would dream, ‘Oh, to be an architect!’ She
always looked like she’d stepped out of a bandbox. She dressed for
each occasion, but in the office almost always wore a long, simple,
shirt type of dress made of striped silk.17
Rice’s plans for the clubhouse, presented on March 26, 1932, showed a modest
structure with single-wall construction, an attached boathouse, a fireplace, kitchen,
hall, and dressing rooms. The redwood walls were left unfinished. Perhaps she
derived inspiration from her Rancho Santa Fe Garden Club (1926), which also
used exposed structural finish wood. According to Hamill, the ZLAC clubhouse
was noted for its “sensitive treatment of wood exposed as structural and finish
material, achieving architectural forms developed on the Pacific coast and in the
Pacific northwest.” He suggested that the building “showed much the same feeling
developed in the San Francisco bay region of William Wilson Wurste, FAIA, who
was also a graduate of Berkeley.”18
After the groundbreaking in May 1932, Rice visited the construction site
almost daily. The Diamond Construction Company raised the clubhouse while
the Campbell Machine Company built the marine ways, wharf, and float. Several
times a week, Georgie Hardy Wright and her friend Kate Sessions came to plan
the landscaping. Sessions, who owned a nursery in Pacific Beach, provided the
club with shrubs and trees, including several leptospermum, or tea-trees, native to
Australia and New Zealand.
The interior of the clubhouse reflected an Arts & Crafts aesthetic with its large
96
ZLAC Rowing Club
fireplace and exposed rafters. The hall was decorated with rattan furniture that
included “6 Philippine chairs,” a large sofa, wooden benches, tile coffee tables,
and light fixtures designed by artist Gilbert Rose that were intended to have a
“seaweedy effect.”19
In order to raise money for the new clubhouse, ZLAC held fundraisers during
annual May garden fetes at the Braemer estate. From 1928-1933, the Scripps opened
their exotic gardens to the public, offering tea, dancing, and puppet shows for
children. An orchestra played on the tennis court while ZLAC members gave
guided tours of the grounds. The Scripps permitted the club to sell home-made
candies, hooked rugs, hand-made pillows, and other items. Sensitive to the
economic hardships caused by the Depression, the hosts decided in 1930 that
no charge would be made for tea, dancing, or cakes. Nevertheless, the club still
managed to show a net profit of $1,138 in 1931.20
Sarah Emma Jessop Scripps became an honorary member of ZLAC and,
with the help of her gardener, designed a small garden on the north side of the
clubhouse. A dry-stone wall with an inset bench curved around a fishpond. She
added a small statue of an Indian maiden from the studio of Donal Hord. On her
death in September 1954, ZLAC remembered “the patio with its lawn and pool
and flowers” as “a lasting monument to her labors and love for us.”21 The following
year, Braemar was sold to Vernon Taylor and Clinton McKinnon for the Catamaran
Resort Hotel.22
Lena Polhamus Crouse remained involved in the club until her death in 1957.
Rowers describe her as an extraordinary person, “She was just something very,
very special.”23 She attended Stanford University for one year (1893-94) before
returning to San Diego as a teacher. Virginia Anne Grady described her as “very
rigid, of course, she’d been a school teacher,” but a wonderful story-teller and
“a marvelous person to know.”24 She married Warren Sefton Crouse in 1902 and
raised a daughter, Harriet. In 1918, she was elected to the San Diego City and High
Two barges race on Salt Water Day, 1938. Courtesy of ZLAC Rowing Club, Ltd.
97
School Board of Education before going

back to college in 1922. After the death
of her husband, she rented a house
in Mission Beach and, according to
one member, “always supervised the
construction of each home on Mission
Bay—we had to row over and take a
look.”25
Crouse taught new members to row.
“She ruled with an iron hand,” Mary
Lovelly Gault recalled, “If she didn’t like
you, she didn’t like you. That person
wasn’t around very long because they
couldn’t take her.” Still, Gault described
her as “wonderful.” She would organize
rowing parties on Friday afternoons.
“She’d take us out in the barge, and
Crew III celebrated its 50th Anniversary on October we’d row…she made you row until you
23, 1951. It included former members of the Mariners, couldn’t stop. I can remember I could
a high school crew that joined ZLAC in 1901. Left
to right: Frances Henking, Alice Shaw McCoy, and hardly catch my breath.” Once in a
Brooke Frevert Miller. ©SDHS, UT #84:29424-1, while, they would row over to Crown
Union-Tribune Collection. Point with their picnic baskets and have
dinner on the beach. After supper, “we’d
all sit around the fire…and she’d tell us all these different stories.” She added, “it’s
too bad somebody didn’t record these.”26
The mud flats of Mission Bay made
rowing a challenge. ZLACs had to time
their activities with the tide-tables so that
there would be enough water to get back to
the dock. Dorothy Rock recalled pushing
the boat over the mud flats, “And it was oh,
jeez.”27 Gault described how she and a friend
would take a rowboat out “on the mud flats
and we’d buy potato chips. She and I’d sit
in the boat out there in the mud flats eating
potato chips with nothing to drink, you
know. Anyway, we’d have to push off in that
oozy mud.” Sometimes they dug up clams
and left them in the rowboat for the seagulls
to eat.28
Social activities took the place of sport for
members unwilling to brave the mud. The
club held luncheons, theatricals, Salt Water
Day activities and the annual Christmas Zulette Lamb Barber, one of the original
Tea.29 Their caretaker, a small, carefully founders of ZLAC, June 10, 1955. She and the
Polhamus sisters—Lena, Agnes, and Caroline—
dressed Englishman with tidy habits, used the first letters of their names to create
“wanted to serve tea every afternoon to “ZLAC.” ©SDHS, UT #84:425-1, Union-
anybody that came,” Gault recalled, “He’d Tribune Collection.
98
ZLAC Rowing Club
Salt Water Day, July 25, 1954. ©SDHS, UT #84:29438-1, Union-Tribune Collection.
wear his stiffly starched jacket and he’d serve tea.”30

In the 1930s, ZLAC members became increasingly concerned to appear as
refined sportswomen, not competitors. Athleticism had come to be considered
unattractive, even unfeminine, despite growing numbers of women involved in
sport. In a 1932 Vanity Fair article, reporter Paul Gallico mocked Mildred (“Babe”)
Didrikson, one of the greatest female athletes of her generation, by describing her
as a “Muscle Moll” who would never find a husband.31 According to one historian,
such remarks reflected a general fear that men “might be challenged or even
displaced in governance of basic social order.”32 It also was a sign of the public’s
disdain for working-class women in sport. When eleven ZLAC collegiate rowers
were hired to portray Swiss boarding school girls in a Hollywood movie, Eight
Girls in a Boat (1934), Crouse was concerned that they look like “ladies.” Katherine
Pendleton Barley recalled,
She said that she wanted us to be ladies and be very proud of

who we were and where we came from and we must go dressed
properly. We all went and spent more money than we made to get
a few clothes to wear up on the train. I’m sure nobody cared, but at
any rate we had fun.33
During World War II, ZLAC opened its clubhouse to injured servicemen who
were convalescing at the Naval Hospital. Members held tea dances under the
strict supervision of Crouse. According to one member, she was “the task master
out there. She carried a broom, carried the regular old-fashioned broom, and if
she saw something she didn’t like, she’d tap on the shoulder. She was watching
so that nothing ever happened out there.”34 Nevertheless, many ZLACs met their
future husbands at those dances. In 1946, the club founded its first newsletter,
Eight Oars, to communicate with members who had moved away from San Diego
99
during the war. The club also

hired Lillian Scott (“Polly”) and
Stephen H. (“Bud”) Neal to serve as
resident managers. Bud worked as
a salesman for ABC Brewery and
later the Servette Company. Polly
cared for the clubhouse, grounds,
and generations of ZLAC women.
They retired in 1997.
During the 1940s and 1950s,
the club developed strategies
to preserve a homogenous
membership in terms of socio-
cultural and economic conditions.
Lists of members read like a
“Who’s Who” of prominent San
Diego families and included
the wives of Navy officers.35 In
order to ensure social continuity,
the club encouraged “legacies,”
new members whose mothers or
grandmothers had rowed with New subjuniors pose on the clubhouse stairs, September 10,
ZLAC. They also engaged in a 1954. ©SDHS, UT #84:29439-1, Union-Tribune Collection.
highly selective admissions process.
Gene Nelson Gray became a member through the efforts of her mother-in-law,
despite the fact that she did not row. She and her husband, however, played bridge.
“After about the third meeting I became pretty casual,” she said, “it was like, I’m
being accepted by family because that was what Crew VIII was.”36 Mariella “Mary
Agnes” Benton joined because “three of my husband’s relatives were members so
there was no doubt that I would become a member.” She added, “I never did get
involved in rowing.”37 Sally Lyons, a member since 1936, said, “It still means a great
deal to have the daughters of our friends and granddaughters of our friends as
members.”38
Members, traditionally divided into age-specific crews, held bridge parties,
terrace luncheons, fashion shows, dinners and dances. Gray particularly enjoyed
the June luncheon where there was a competition to see “how many people
would come and fill tables for Crew X or Crew XI” or others. The oldest group of
women, Crew VI, would claim victory, saying “we all came,” referring to the seven
surviving members. Notices of ZLAC events appeared in the San Diego Union and
the Tribune. Gray recalled, “Eileen Jackson would write a column for the paper
in the society news and that was it, society news, and you would look for your
name and you would look for your family’s name.” She said, “When you look back
on it, it seems rather shallow, the things we did, because they really didn’t make
anything great for human beings…but they were fun for us.” She worried that
current members neglected activities such as the Christmas Tea, for attendance
“isn’t nearly what it used to be.”39 Benton, who served as President of ZLAC in
1964, noted that the club “used to get a lot of publicity in those days.”40
In the 1960s, members began to question the exclusivity of the club. The civil
100
ZLAC Rowing Club
rights movement, which would transform American society, drew attention to

race, class, and gender inequalities. In 1966, Marjorie N. Breitenbach drew up a list
of queries in advance of the club’s 75th anniversary. She asked, “Who is a typical
ZLAC? Housewife, career girl? Socially ambitious or unambitious? Conservative
or liberal? Educational level? Broad-scale interests or a little provincial?” She
continued, “Do you believe that ZLAC attracts, or tends to discourage, potential
or actual community leaders?” Finally, “ZLAC has a highly selective membership
process. Do the other 4,999,400 [sic] residents of San Diego realize that they are
excluded?”41
Slowly, ZLAC began to shed its image of white gloves and tea parties in favor
of a less polite, more competitive, demeanor. At the same time, rowing began to
spread beyond East Coast prep schools and Ivy League campuses to include people
from a variety of different social backgrounds. Brian Ford, a coach at Miss Porter’s
School in Farmington, Connecticut, remarked, “Rowing may have preppy cachet,
but it’s a hard-nosed sport and you can’t be soft.”42
Rowing became easier with the construction of Mission Bay Aquatic Park.
Between 1945 and 1962, the Army Corps of Engineers dredged Mission Bay and
constructed jetties, peninsulas and islands. Dredging started in 1946 at Gleason
Point, now Bahia Point. By 1956, the entire area west of Ingraham Street would be
cleared. Grady, who moved to Mission Bay in 1955, recalled that “those dredges
would go on all night long—bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.”43 In 1959, engineers
used dredged materials to extend Santa Clara Point and to create Fiesta Island.44
The development of Mission Bay, however, created potential problems for the
club. In 1959, ZLAC President Mary Veed Walt told members that the Crescent
Beach Development Association’s fifty-year water lease was due to expire in
seventeen years. In 1976, the beach would become public property “to be used
as the city sees fit.” Street ends belonging to the city “may be used as launching
sites for boats unless, after the lease expires, a highway is built along the beach.”
Meanwhile, R-4 zoning would cause private homes to give way to multiple
dwellings “and taxes will go higher.”45 The club considered moving from Dawes
Street to El Carmel Point, next to the Mission Bay Yacht Club. However, they
decided to stay put, hoping that Army Corps of Engineers and the Crescent Beach
Development Association would permit them to build a boathouse on concrete
pilings in the bay.
In 1960, the club asked architect Sim Bruce Richards to draw up plans for a
new boathouse. Richards, a highly-regarded architect, had trained with Frank
Lloyd Wright as a Taliesin Fellow between 1934 and 1935. In San Diego, he built
dozens of homes in Mission Hills, Point Loma, and La Jolla. He also designed the
nearby Mission Bay Aquatic Center (1960). The building committee felt comfortable
working with him as he was “a great admirer of the work of Lillian [sic] Rice,
who designed the present clubhouse, and has previously remodeled other of her
projects.”46 Moreover, he was known for his use of natural materials, particularly
redwood and cedar. An exhibition of his work noted that he did not see houses
as man-made objects that should be separated from the landscape: “He thought
people were already separated from nature to a dangerous degree. We need an
architecture to return us to the earth. His houses became part of the natural land
as much as the rocks and the trees.”47
Richards worked with George Saunders, structural engineer, and Jack Liebman,
101
ZLAC’s new boathouse and pier, right, were designed by Sim Bruce Richards in 1962. Photo by Joe Diamond,
1963. Courtesy of ZLAC Rowing Club, Ltd.
consulting engineer, to design a U-shaped boathouse over the bay. ZLAC President
Janet Ayers told the membership that:
The men have considered the minutest details, including safety

for our members and boats. The motors to let the boats into the
water will be finger-tip controlled, so that when a button is released
everything stops, eliminating any danger. Truly we are living in a
push-button age—and the total launching time will be approximately
three minutes! The boat house is to be U-shaped, supported on
concrete pilings, which are more attractive then metal, and do not
deteriorate with weather, age or tides. The building will be open at
the south end, and protected from vandals with wire gates which
lock on the inside.48
Crescent Beach Development

Association, however, refused
to permit the construction of
a structure that would block
neighbors’ views of the water. The
club decided, instead, to build a
boathouse on the vacant lot east of
the clubhouse. In 1962, Richards
drew up the plans for a 2,500 square
foot structure with 8 foot ceilings.
The result was a striking example
of American organicism. According
to one architectural historian,
the building combined “modern
aesthetics and abstraction with
a strong sensibility of place and
tectonics.”49 Although the structure
was modern, Richards paid
attention to local building traditions
and construction techniques.
The editors of Architectural Digest Joe Diamond, Lois Doane, and Jean Chestnut slide the barge
recognized his award-winning out to the water on concrete pathways, October 10, 1962.
design. Richards also remodeled ©SDHS, UT #85:7020, Union-Tribune Collection.
102
ZLAC Rowing Club
Thursday Morning Rowers in the ZLAC barge, April 7, 1973. Bow to stern: Mary Jessop, Ellen Roche, Annette
Frank, Margaret Redelings, Judy Browne, Betty Sullivan, Nancy Leydecker, Suzanne Leibmann, and Mary
Maddox Grandell (coxswain). ©SDHS, UT #88:K7006-3, Union-Tribune Collection.
the existing boathouse into a second meeting room, the “Trophy Room,” with
kitchen facilities and an upstairs apartment for the Neals. Saunders and Liebman,
meanwhile, created a pier and float. ZLAC celebrated the opening of the new
boathouse on October 14, 1962.50
The 1960s marked the beginning of new era for rowing. At the 1960 Olympic
Games in Rome, the U.S. men’s eight-oared crew suffered its first defeat in Olympic
Juniors scull on Mission Bay, April 1975. Bow to stern: Alice Lee, Anne Benton Chuter, Shelly Shaner, Patty
Mallory, and Stacey Melhorn (coxswain). ©SDHS, UT #88:L9949, Union-Tribune Collection.
103
history to the West

German team. Americans
attributed the success of
both German and Soviet
teams to childhood
training and advanced
oar and shell design.
Cold War politics spurred
athletic competition
and rowers founded
hundreds of clubs and
organizations, including
the U.S. National
Women’s Rowing Juniors in eight-oared shell, June 26, 1975. ©SDHS, UT #88:M1263-1A,
Association (1964) and the Union-Tribune Collection.
National Rowing Foundation (1966).
The introduction of fiberglass racing shells also encouraged competition. In
1959, the club met with representatives of SDRC to decide “whether this new type
boat would be feasible for our use.”51 They ordered two 4-oared rowing shells,
two penyans, and three small rowboats. SDRC housed the shells until the new
boathouse could be built, trained coxswains, and showed rowers how to use and
care for the new shells. Dimaris Howe Michalek remembered, “we had to keep
them at the old Rowing Club which is now the Chart House. We went down there
and rowed, usually on weekends.”52
In 1964, ZLAC organized its first competitive crew coached by Patty Stose
Wyatt and Suzanne Liebman. The club hosted lunches to promote the West
Coast Invitational Regatta, inviting the mayor and the presidents of University
of California at San Diego (UCSD), San Diego State University (SDSU), and the
University of San Diego (USD). Wyatt helped start the San Diego Crew Classic
in 1974, the first major competition of the spring season for collegiate crews, and
served as the regatta’s first general chairperson. She also served as the chairperson
of rowing and canoeing at the 1984 Olympic at Lake Casitas. Michalek recalled that
Wyatt was “the one we all looked up to in my era.”53 Another important member
was Debbie Ayars De Angelis who became vice president and, later, president of
the National Women’s Rowing Association (NWRA).
During the 1970s and 1980s, the Mission Bay Aquatic Center supported
the activities of many teams, including ZLAC. It operated as a joint venture of
SDSU’s Associated Students and UCSD’s Physical Education Department with
contributions from USD, ZLAC, and Friends of Rowing. Collegiate teams and
ZLAC juniors rowed from the Del Beekley Rowing Center administered by the
Mission Bay Rowing Association. At this time, ZLAC raced four-oared shells
with names that reminded members of their history, Zulette, Agnes, Mariners, and
Whitecaps.54
Juniors raced in the San Diego State College Invitational Regatta, the Western
Intercollegiate Rowing Championships, the San Diego Crew Classic, the Long
Beach Western Regional Regatta, the U.S. Women’s Rowing Championships, the
Women’s Southwest Regionals, the Lake Merritt Invitational, and other regattas. In
1974, juniors Carolyn Patten, Jackie Stitt, Cathy Thaxton Tippett, Elizabeth Neeper
104
ZLAC Rowing Club
Olympic Silver Medalists, Women’s quadruple sculls with coxswain, August 4, 1984, XXIII Olympiad. Left to
right: Anne Marden, Lisa Rhode, Joan Lind, Ginny Gilder, and Kelly Rickon Mitchell, a coxswain from ZLAC.
Courtesy of ZLAC Rowing Club, Ltd.
McIntyre, and Nancy Gausewitz Berner won the gold medal and the national
championship at the National Women’s Rowing Association event in Oakland.
Patten went on to become the first varsity female coxswain at the University of
Washington, Seattle. Tippett rowed on three U.S. Olympic teams, 1976, 1980, and
1984. She also participated in nine national teams competing in Europe between
1974 and 1984. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, ZLAC had two women who
became National Team coxswains: Kelly Rickon Mitchell and Lynn Silliman.
In 1981, ZLAC’s Sherry Ryan and Sara Vafis were the first U.S. Junior Women
ever to qualify for the World Finals. Ryan later made the U.S. Junior National
Rowing Team. Rickon Mitchell and her crew of four won silver medals at the 1984
Olympics in Lucerne.55
In 1976, the club was threatened with the loss of their pier and the disruption of
their rowing program when the beach and shoreline around Mission Bay became
city-owned property. The City of San Diego notified local residents, including
ZLAC, that they would have to demolish their piers. At the time, twenty-eight
private docks extended into the bay. In a speech before the Park and Recreation
Board, Mary Barnise argued that ZLAC’s pier served the public. She explained
that the club had shared its facilities with the Mission Bay Rowing Club and the
Associated Rowing Club since 1963. She added,
We hope you all know of our active leadership and participation

in the Regattas and Crew Classics on Mission Bay. Our members have
also been active in West Coast and National Regattas. Needless to
say – WE WANT TO KEEP ROWING – Our pier is necessary – each 4
oar shell is approx[imately] 40 feet long and quite heavy. We have the
launching equipment needed and our pier was built as a rowing pier.56
105
In 1984, San Diego Parks and Recreation announced that 270,000 square yards of bottom sand would be dredged
from Sail Bay and deposited on shore to create a public boardwalk on the beach, San Diego Union, November 8,
1984. Courtesy of ZLAC Rowing Club, Ltd.
The club got a brief reprieve when San Diego’s Park and Recreation Board
recommended that the ZLAC pier be leased to a community rowing group, later
the ZLAC Pier Association.57 For eight years, it became city-owned property
and a public rowing pier. The club paid a monthly rental fee to the city; it also
maintained the pier and provided liability insurance.58
In 1986, however, ZLAC had to remove its pier and float. The “Master Plan for
the Improvement of Sail Bay,” approved in 1977, required all piers to be removed so
that the bay could be dredged and a public walkway constructed. Workers pulled
up the bulkhead, cement, bricks, palm trees and one pine tree. Milly Conard
recalled, “Of course, we knew when bought that property…that there was a time
limit on having it a private shore. That was the only place in the whole city, I guess,
that had a private beach…But it was a blow when it happened. And to lose the
pier and to lose our big boats, that was the hardest part.”59 No longer able to get
the heavy wooden barges to the water, the club donated ZLAC I to the San Diego
Historical Society and housed ZLAC II with the Kettenburg Boat Works. The latter,
built in 1910, now resides in the club’s parking lot.
The club also lost its privacy with the construction of a ten-foot wide walkway
along its property line. In 1990, the walkway extended along the perimeter of
Sail Bay and connected a plaza at Verona Court with five “nodes” containing
raised planters and concrete benches. In the June issue of Eight Oars, Joann White
explained,
106
ZLAC Rowing Club
In 1990, a public boardwalk with benches was built in front of the clubhouse. It is used by walkers, bicycle riders,
skateboarders and others, 2007. Author’s collection.
The beach in front of ZLAC is now covered with 5,200 square feet
of concrete beginning at the west end of Dawes Street and ending
near the east side of the clubhouse…Our node is adorned with two
wide and boxy seating areas, called benches or bancos, in an L shape
as well as a single banco. At the end of Dawes Street are two raised
planters which are yet to be planted, two more bancos and six Bollard
lights cunningly placed to trip up any sailor who tries to carry his
surfboard to the shore. The promised drinking fountain has not
materialized. Probably scratched from the master plan after someone
poured Redi-crete into the one at Verona Court.60
Older members remarked on the growing urbanization of the area. Jesse

Thomas recalled, “The changes I saw mainly were the high rises and the
apartments, and the parking. It was very difficult to get parking. And if you go to
the beach it seemed like a Dana Point. There were groups that seemed to take the
whole area and you felt like you were a stranger there now compared to before.”61
As development changed the skyline around Mission Bay, the club became
aware of the environmental consequences of population growth. Members of the
Thursday Morning Rowers took up bird watching and poured over Peterson’s Field
Guide in order to identify surf scoters, blue herons, king fishers, snowy egrets and
other wildlife. They took up the endangered brown pelican as their mascot and
regularly counted the pelicans on the dock at Mission Bay Yacht Club.62 The club
also became concerned about contaminated water. In 1980, organizers canceled the
San Diego Crew Classic after storm-damaged pipelines poured 13.5 million gallons
of raw sewage down the San Diego River into Pacific Ocean. Over two hundred
signs posted around bay warned: “Danger – Contaminated water. Keep out.”63 Sea
World also contributed to poor water quality, releasing up to 9.36 million gallons of
wastewater a day into Mission Bay in 2000.64
107
In 1984, President Pam Palisoul and the Board of Directors expanded the junior rowing program and hired a
rowing director. Members of the 1983-84 Board, standing, left to right: Anne Lindsay, Jennifer Errickson, Ellen
Davis, Alice Peschel, Kak Barley, Anne Pyle, and Lettie Sullivan. Seated, left to right: Nina Anderson, Debbie
Goddard, Mary Virginia Gault, Helen Wallace, and Pam Palisoul. Courtesy of ZLAC Rowing Club, Ltd.
In the early 1980s, the club considered their role in training competitive
rowers. Few members knew much about ZLAC’s relationship to Mission Bay
Rowing Association (MBRA). Lettie Sullivan wrote in 1981, “I, for one, was very
uninformed. I knew MBRA was on Santa Clara Point; some of our shells were over
there; some of our girls were rowing out of that boathouse instead of our own,
and it was costing ZLAC some money. Why?” She went on to explain that the club
did not have the facilities or equipment to train junior competitive rowers. If it
New juniors pose in front of the clubhouse, 1985. Courtesy of ZLAC Rowing, Ltd.
108
ZLAC Rowing Club
ZLAC juniors participate in a mixed-sex “Learn to Row” on the old barge, 1988. Courtesy ZLAC Rowing Club, Ltd.
wanted to “just get out of MBRA and bring rowing back home,” as some members
suggested, it would have to acquire additional
equipment, enlarge the boathouse, and hire a
coach and rigger, among other things.
ZLAC took a preliminary step towards
establishing its own junior rowing program
with its establishment of the ZLAC Young
Women’s Rowing Association in 1984. It was
intended to draw young women from all over
San Diego into the sport and to give the club
a new tax status. Three years later, however,
it was dissolved. The club still needed the
organizational leadership, facilities, and
equipment that such a program required.65
Competitive rowing at the masters level
began in 1986. Michalek convinced a group
of ZLACs from Crew XI, all over the age of
twenty-seven, to put together a boat. At the
same time, her twin sister Susan Barnes began
rowing with a group in Seattle coached by
Dick Erickson. Together, they convinced the
San Diego Crew Classic to allow the two
groups to race against one another.66 After In 1990, ZLAC won first prize in the Audi
Women’s Masters Eight, Age 33+, at the San
that, masters women competed in the U.S. Diego Crew Classic. Pictured are Nancy
Women’s Rowing Championships, the Head Durham and Kathy Spiegel. Courtesy of
of the Charles, the Women’s Henley Regatta, ZLAC Rowing Club, Ltd.
109
In 2000, the boathouse was expanded for a second time to make room for offices and exercise facilities. Author’s collection.
and other races. In 1986, the crew won a silver medal at the Masters Nationals
in Seattle. In 1991, Sue Brickson and Martha Conn won two gold medals in the
Federation Internationale des Societes d’Aviron (FISA) Masters Regatta. They also
took an open-water double on the thirty-two mile “Catalina to Marina del Rey
Crossing” in 1996.67
A new boathouse would be key to ZLAC’s development as a rowing club.
Athletic Chair Pat Kilkenny told members in 1989,
It is now time to look to the future if we want to be visible for

another 100 years and to be active in the rowing community as it is
today, to become self sufficient again as Mrs. Crouse did in 1895. We
then need an addition to the boathouse to have room in the future
for an eight and perhaps a double, so we can have a good strong
competitive and recreational program.68
That year, ZLAC acquired its first eight-oared racing shell. A year later, the
boathouse was extended by 22 feet to accommodate racks and boats. According to
one member, “We knew the space was desperately needed when it was put to use
before the construction was even completed!”69
By the late 1990s, members agreed that the boathouse was still too small.
They hired architect Scott Bernet to modify and expand the structure to 3,000
square feet with 13.5 foot ceilings, allowing for the storage of many eight-foot
racing shells. A second story provided additional space for offices, lockers, and an
exercise room. A large balcony overlooked Sail Bay. The new boathouse, dedicated
in 2000, was named in memory of Dr. P. H. Dickinson. His widow, Ruth Dickinson,
provided a generous donation while his daughter and ZLAC member, Nancy
Dickinson Floodberg, oversaw construction.70
By 2002, the club had changed dramatically. Ann Wallace noted that “where
juniors and a few crew members were once the only regular rowers, we now have
110
ZLAC Rowing Club
Masters Rowers, 2004. Adult women continue to row for recreation and competition. Courtesy of ZLAC
Rowing Club, Ltd.
several crews—many of whom will be off to the Head of the Charles regatta—
certainly fulfilling the ideals of our founders.”71
Title IX of Educational Amendments of 1972, the first comprehensive federal
law to prohibit sex discrimination against students and employees of educational
institutions, was a boon to ZLAC. High-school aged girls and their parents
realized that rowing could help them win athletic scholarships to prestigious
universities. In 2005, more than 50 girls between the ages of 14 and 18 rowed in
ZLAC’s juniors program.72
Rowing also became more popular at the masters level. According to a 2002
Wall Street Journal article, the two fastest-growing competitive categories at the
Head of the Charles are high-school rowers and masters women, mostly in their
late 40s and 50s. Fred Schoch, organizer of the three-mile race on the Charles River
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that adult women “see their daughters going
down to the boathouse and signing up for crew” and “they say, ‘I want to do that,
too.’” USRowing’s Margot Shuster remarked, “We see clubs that start with three
or four masters rowers and end up with so many they have to turn them away.”
When the organization sponsored a Learn-to-Row day in May 2001, more than
6,000 people showed up, most of them aged 40 or older.73
In 2003, ZLAC created a coached masters program in order to draw in new
members and to “encourage many of our members to get back on the water.”74
Carolyn Thomasson returned to rowing after forty years, taking part in the
Southwest Regional Masters Regatta in July 2004. Each year, masters rowers raise
money for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and participate in the
“Row for the Cure.” In 2005, one crew transformed the Polly Neal shell into the
“Pink Cadillac” by adding fins and raced as the “Pink Ladies” with pink hair, pink
bandanas, and rhinestone glasses.75
Social activities continue to be an important part of club life. Each year, ZLAC
hosts a dinner for participants in the San Diego Crew Classic. It also holds award
111
banquets for its junior and master rowers. Masters rowers who complete more
than fifty days of rowing in two calendar years receive the “Order of the Brown
Pelican” while juniors get “The Sandpiper Award.” On Salt Water Day, ZLAC
christens new boats such as the Ellen Scripps Davis and the Kesinger. Fundraisers
include wine tasting events, an Oktoberfest, and a Very Merry Craft Bazaar.
Members also gather at the clubhouse for special events. Sally Lyons noted, “ZLAC
has meant a great deal to me…All big occasions have been celebrated here: our
fortieth anniversary, our fiftieth anniversary, my eightieth birthday, my husband’s
memorial service. My children learned to swim at ZLAC.”76
ZLAC also works to extend the benefits of rowing to girls and women from
all social backgrounds. Every year, the club offers educational programs for both
juniors and masters. It also participates in USRowing’s annual “Learn-to-Row”
day, offering the public tours of the boathouse and erg room and providing a
history of the clubhouse and club.77 In 2005, ZLAC president Nancy Perry wrote,
For over 100 years the club has addressed difficult issues, adapted
to the needs of the younger generations but at all times honoring the
older members and the wonderful tradition of the club. I would like
to believe that we were continuing to adapt our club to the needs of
our members—who span eight generations.78
Members remain upbeat about the future of ZLAC. Michalek remarked,
One thing I must say is that they are still here. They have survived
two World Wars and they’ve survived all kinds of depressions and
recessions and whatever, they still have their property. They are
still debt-free. They are still on Mission Bay. They are still turning
out good athletes. It is still one of the best support groups and
networking groups that I belong to.79
The San Diego Historical Society’s new exhibit, “Places of Promise,” will feature ZLAC’s barge, “ZLAC I,” built
in 1895 by Fred Carter, well-known on the East Coast as the architect and designer of the famous Herreschoff
yachts. @SDHS.
112
ZLAC Rowing Club
NOTES
1. Helen Wetzell Wallace, A History of the ZLAC Rowing Club (San Diego: private printing, [1992]),
36. See also Helen Wallace, “The ZLAC Rowing Club,” The Journal of San Diego History (JSDH) 6, no. 4
(1960): 97-100.
2. San Diego Historical Society, Curatorial Collection Files, “ZLAC Barge”; “No Easy Ride for
Antique Barge,” Los Angeles Times, August 26, 1989.
3. Thomas E. Weil, “A Brief Time-Line of Rowing,” Friends of Rowing History, http://www.
rowinghistory.net/Time%20Line/Time%20Line.htm (accessed March 22, 2007); Karen J. Jackson, “The
Development of Women’s Rowing in Southern California” (master’s thesis, California State University,
Long Beach, 1997), 6.
4. Jackson, “The Development of Women’s Rowing in Southern California,” 46-58 passim.
5. Wallace, A History of the ZLAC Rowing Club, 14-15.
6. Ibid., 22, 31.
7. ZLAC Rowing Club…By-Laws, House Rules, List of Members, January 1, 1922 (San Diego: private
printing, [1922]).
9. Members of the ZLAC Rowing Club interviewed by Ruth V. Held, March 30, 31, and April 8, 1992,
SDHS Oral History, 5.
10. Wallace, A History of the ZLAC Rowing Club, 51-52. Crouse compared and contrasted the properties
at Mission Bay and La Playa and a special meeting held on December 13, 1926. Property at La Playa
was rejected by the club as too expensive. According to club records, “The majority by the vote of the
crews stood for Mission Bay as an investment if not as a permanent place for the clubhouse. The lots
at Mission Bay cost $5,000 and were 100 feet on the water front and 200 feet deep and were situated on
the corner of Dawes and Pacific. The lots at La Playa max 175 x 150 and the cost $10,000 but this was
not on the water front.” They purchased Lots 14 and 15 of the Southern Title Guarantee Company’s
subdivision of Pueblo Lot 1801, map 1864, filed October 20, 1925. Minutes, ZLAC Board of Directors,
1921-29, 110-111.
11. Ibid., 115. In 1930 and 1931, the club again considered purchasing property at La Playa offered for
sale by Mrs. Harold Augier as the State of California was “expected to file suit to quiet title to the tide
lands in Mission Bay and so jeopardize the tide lands lease held by the club from the state.” Minutes,
ZLAC Board of Directors, 1929-1931, 61. In 1941, ZLAC purchased an additional lot adjoining the
clubhouse for $2,500. Minutes, ZLAC Board of Directors, June 10, 1941.
12. The Number 16 line was closed in 1940. Zelma Bays Locker, “Remember Old Number Sixteen?
Recollections of the La Jolla Street Car Line,” JSDH 23, no. 4 (1977).
13. On January 10, 1930, the club met with Lilian Rice who had “visited the new clubhouse site at
Braemar previous to the meeting to inspect the paving and drainage conditions. On motion, it was
decided that while the club might find it advisable to use 100 (one hundred) feet of leased tide lands it
was decided to ask the Pacific Beach Improvement Club to co-operate with the Zlacs to place the sea
wall 50 (fifty) feet beyond the Rowing Club’s property line and to ask the other property owners to
conform with a contour of proper curve to meet that outer line.” Minutes, ZLAC Board of Directors,
1929-1931, 19-20.
14. Minutes, Board of Directors, 1929-1931, 19-20, 97, 106-107. Tom Allen was the engineer in charge of
the project. He later worked with Glenn Rick on the development of Mission Bay Park. Ed Gabrielson,
“Mission Bay Aquatic Park: The History of Planning and Land Acquisition,” JSDH 48, no. 1 (2002), 38-
47 passim.
15. Minutes, ZLAC Board of Directors, 1929-1931, insert, 114.
16. “Lilian Rice,” SDHS Biographical Files.
17. San Diego Union, March 2, 1986, F-6.
18. “Lilian Rice,” SDHS Biographical Files.
19. Wallace, A History of the ZLAC Rowing Club, 57-58, 69
113
20. Minutes, ZLAC Board of Directors, 1929-1931, 28, 97.

21. Eight Oars, September 1954.
22. Braemar, a Tudor Revival house (1906), was razed in 1959 to make way for the Catamaran Resort
Hotel. The dining room, added in 1920, was preserved for use as the Catamaran Wedding Chapel.
In 1985, the Pacific Beach Town Council, with the help of Vernon Taylor and Erma Taylor O’Brien,
moved the structure to a vacant lot at Grand and Bayard Avenues. It then was moved to Navy-owned
property along Rose Creek and renamed “Rose Creek Cottage.” In October 1986, it was moved once
again to 2525 Garnet Avenue, http://www.rosecreekcottage.net/history.html (accessed March 25,
2007).
23. Virginia Anne Lynch Grady, interviewed by Dimaris Michalek, September 19, 2005, SDHS Oral
History.
24. Ibid.
25. Wallace, A History of the ZLAC Rowing Club, 35-38 passim.
26. Mary Virginia Lovelly Gault, interviewed by Dimaris Michalek, September 12, 2005, SDHS Oral
History.
27. Dorothy Rock, interviewed by Dimaris Michalek, September 16, 2005, SDHS Oral History.
History.
29. Wallace, A History of ZLAC Rowing Club, 90-95 passim.
History.
31. Susan E. Cayleff, Babe: The Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1995), 86, 92-93.
32. Donald J. Mrozek, “The ‘Amazon’ and the American ‘Lady’: Sexual Fears of Women as Athletes,”
in From ‘Fair Sex’ to Feminism: Sport and the Socialization of Women in the Industrial and Post-Industrial
Eras, ed. J. A. Mangan and Roberta J. Park (London: Frank Cass and Co., Ltd., 1987), 286. See also Susan
K. Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sports (New York: The
Free Press, 1994), 4, 215.
33. Katherine Pendleton Barley, interviewed by Lou Hassan, September 28, 2005, SDHS Oral
History; Wallace, A History of the ZLAC Rowing Club, 84-89. The film, shot in part on location at Lake
Arrowhead, starred Dorothy Wilson and Douglass Montgomery. It was directed by Richard Wallace.
Paramount Studio leased racing shells from the University of California, Berkeley, and hired a
coaches. For the first time, ZLAC members rowed in an eight-oared shell instead of a barge.
History.
35. Minutes, ZLAC Board of Directors, 1929-1931, passim; Minutes, ZLAC Board of Directors, 1946-
1966, passim.
36. Gene Nelson Gray, interviewed by Dimaris Michalek, September 29, 2005, SDHS Oral History.
37. Mariella “Mary Agnes” Benton, interviewed by Ginny Rodriguez, March 15, 2006, SDHS Oral
History. Her mother-in-law, Hazel C. Benton, and sister-in-law, Betty Benton Bellon, were members of
ZLAC as was her husband’s aunt, Mary Benton Fraiser.
38. Sally Lyons, interviewed by Ginny Rodriguez, August 30, 2005, SDHS Oral History.
39. Ibid.
40. Mariella “Mary Agnes” Benton, interviewed by Ginny Rodriguez, March 15, 2006, SDHS Oral
History.
41. “ZLAC Rowing Club,” Document File, SDHS. In 1960, the city of San Diego had a population
of 573,224 while the county had a population of 1,033,011. http://www.sandiegohistory.org/links/
sandiegopopulation.htm (accessed March 29, 2007).
42. “Backtalk; All Sugar and Competitive Spice,” New York Times, May 17, 1998.
114
ZLAC Rowing Club
43. Virginia Anne Lynch Grady, interviewed by Dimaris Michalek, September 19, 2005, SDHS Oral History.
44. Gabrielson, “Mission Bay Aquatic Park,” 38-47 passim.
45. “A Message from Your President,” Eight Oars, May 1959.
46. “Sim Bruce Richards, AIA (1908-1983),” Modern San Diego, http://www.modernsandiego.com/
SimBruceRichards.html (accessed March 26, 2007); “Some Possibilities and Problems with Future
Needs of ZLAC Rowing Club,” September 12, 1960; Minutes, ZLAC Board of Directors, September 5,
1961. They also decided that his previous works “denote a feeling and insight where fine treatment of
various woods is desired.”
47. “Richards Left His Mark on San Diego Architecture,” Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1984. See also
Phyllis van Doren, “Sim Bruce Richards: The Sensuous Environment,” San Diego Home and Garden
(April, 1984).
48. “President’s Message,” Eight Oars, May 1961. In 1961, the club contributed $3,500 towards dredging
the north end of Mission Bay.
49. S. M. Can Bilsel, interviewed by author, March 26, 2007.
50. “Past President’s Message,” Eight Oars, April 1962.
51. Wallace, A History of the ZLAC Rowing Club, 106.
SDHS Oral History.
53. Ibid. Founders of the San Diego Crew Classic included Patty Wyatt, Joe Jessop Sr., Andy
Borthwick, Glenn Rick, Del Beekley, Al Bernardini, A. Wharton Coggeshall, Annette Frank, Mary Ann
Mabel Hazard, Richard Jessop, General Victor Krulak, Fred Sharp and Donald Waters. Erin Kelley,
“History of the San Diego Crew Classic,” http://www.crewclassic.org/History_text.htm (accessed
April 12, 2007).
SDHS Oral History.
56. “Mrs. Anthony Barnise, Past President, ZLAC Rowing Club, to Park and Recreation Board
– March 16, 1976,” ZLAC Pier Association, Inc., Minute Book, 1979.
57. The ZLAC Pier Association’s articles of incorporation were filed with the State on January 28, 1977.
58. A member noted that “there was much adverse publicity and outcry from the public…regarding
the encroachment of private facilities on a public beach.” ZLAC hired Paul Peterson “to negotiate with
the city about retaining our dock and getting it included in the master plan for Sail Bay.” However,
their pier was not included in the “Master Plan for the Improvement of Sail Bay,” approved by the
Council on November 2, 1977. The plan called for an enlarged sand beach and landscaped walkway
extending from Verona Court to Moorland Drive. At the apex of the bay, a wooden boardwalk would
be built in front of nine private homes between West and East Briarfield drives. “History of ZLAC Pier
Association,” ZLAC Pier Association, Inc., Minute Book, 1979; “Sail Bay Beach Project Seen Ready by
’86,” San Diego Union, November 8, 1984.
59. Minutes, ZLAC Board of Directors, April 6, 1976; Eight Oars, December 1986; Members of the ZLAC
Rowing Club interviewed by Ruth V. Held, March 30, 31, and April 8, 1992, SDHS Oral History.
60. Joann White, “Sail Bay Improvements Phase III, Or a Word about the Pedestrian Nodes for Those
Who Have Not Seen Them,” Eight Oars, June 1990.
61. Jesse E. Thomas, interviewed by Ginny Rodriguez, April 10, 2006, SDHS Oral History.
63. “No Swimming or Boating as Sewage Pollutes Bay,” Associated Press, April 7, 1980.
64. “Regional Water Board Approves Sea World Wastewater Discharge Permit,” Associated Press,
April 13, 2000. Many new rowers get vaccinated against Hepatitis A & B in the event that their boat
capsizes into polluted water.
115
66. Eight Oars, April 2002.

67. Wallace, 183-184; Eight Oars, November-December, 1996.
68. Eight Oars, July 1989.
69. House Report, May 1990-April 1991; Architect Peter Rodi helped the club plan the expansion
in 1986 while Jim Nickoloff prepared drawings to submit for permits in 1989. Eight Oars, January-
February, 1986; Minutes, ZLAC Board of Directors, September 5, 1989.
70. Laurie Wright, “P. H. Dickinson Boathouse, National Rowing Day, June 10, 2006,” ZLAC Rowing
Club files.
71. Eight Oars, November 2002.
72. Ibid; Eight Oars, November 2005.
73. Bill Richards, “Paddle Pushers: Landlubbers who never so much as crossed a millpond are taking
up competitive rowing,” Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2002.
74. Eight Oars, November 2003.
75. ZLAC Masters Scrapbook, 2004-06; Eight Oars, November 2005.
76. Sally Lyons, interviewed by Ginny Rodriguez, August 30, 2005, SDHS Oral History.
77. For more information, see ZLAC’s website, http://www.zlac.org (accessed March 29, 2007).
78. Eight Oars, October 2005. In 2006, ZLAC was acknowledged as the oldest women’s rowing club in
the world by the Rowing Museum in Henley, England. ZLAC is now part of a five-year display about
the history of rowing at that museum.
SDHS Oral History.
116
Coming Out Gay, Coming Out Christian:
The Beginnings of GLBT Christianity in San Diego,

1970-1979
Joshua Grace, Christopher Rhamey
Megan Dukett, Kaylin Gill, Ricky Bell
Winner of the James S. Copley Library Award
Can a person be a practicing homosexual and a Christian at the same time?

Before the late 1960s, the integration of these seemingly contradictory terms was
uncommon. By 1979, however, the concept of a homosexual Christian produced
San Diego’s first coalition of gay religious groups, Ministries United for Gay
Understanding. For gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) individuals
making a claim on the Christian identity, this represented a significant paradigm
shift that allowed the gay community to produce its own concept of the
relationship between homosexuality and Christianity: fully gay, fully Christian.
This paper shows how certain members of San Diego’s GLBT community began
to define themselves as both gay and Christian between 1970 and 1979. In the
early years, GLBT Christianity developed in the Metropolitan Community Church
(MCC), which appealed primarily to the homosexual community, and in Dignity,
an organization of gay Catholics that did not have the sanction of the Roman
Catholic Church. After 1975, Integrity, an organization of gay Episcopalians, and a
group called Lutherans Concerned worked to be accepted as integral parts of their
mainstream churches. By 1979, these four groups, through the Ministries United
for Gay Understanding, asked San Diegans to accept that they could be both gay
and Christian.
This paper emphasizes four themes. First, the institutional movement was
founded on the premise that practicing homosexuals could be fully Christian.
Second, the movement went from trying to create separate gay spiritual
institutions to arguing for inclusion within mainstream denominations. MCC
and Dignity are examples of gay faith communities willing to create gay spaces
separate from mainstream Christianity. Integrity and Lutherans Concerned,
meanwhile, sought to work within established denominations. Third, MCC and
Dignity led GLBT Christians’ outreach to the San Diego community. Fourth,
gay Christians in San Diego contributed to the national movement of GLBT
Christianity. Given San Francisco’s reputation as a center of gay culture, few people
realize that Southern California, especially Los Angeles and San Diego, were early
catalysts both theologically and institutionally for GLBT Christians.
Josh Grace, Kaylin Gill, Megan Dukett, and Ricky Bell are graduates of Point Loma Nazarene Univer-
sity. Josh Grace is a Fulbright Scholar studying in Tanzania, while Megan Dukett works with the park
services at the Capistrano Mission. Kaylin Gill is seeking a multiple subject credential in San Diego;
Ricky Bell is currently working in the San Diego area. Christopher Rhamey is currently a senior looking
to graduate next spring from Point Loma Nazarene University. They would all like to thank Dr. Dwayne
Little for his dedication and hard work.
117
The homosexual rights movement developed between 1945 and the passing
of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s. Historians have identified events of
the post-World War II era as crucial to the creation of a sustained movement.
For example, Allan Berube and John D’ Emilio identified war mobilization and
post-war politics as important factors in a group “awakening” as they allowed
gay men and women to interact in new ways, even as they became targets of
institutionalized discrimination by the military and government.1 Reports on
sexual behavior published by Alfred C. Kinsey in 1948 and 1953 also stimulated a
powerful change of consciousness within the GLBT community. Kinsey suggested
that a higher percentage of males and females engaged in homosexual acts than
society previously accepted. He argued that homosexuality was not a disease of
the select few, but a sexual preference of many Americans. Many churches and
church leaders immediately challenged the Kinsey Reports.2 Billy Graham stated,
“It is impossible to estimate the damage it will do to the already deteriorating
morals of America.” His view was supported by the head of the Union Theological
Seminary who saw Kinsey’s report as “a prevailing degradation in American
morality approximating the worst decadence of the Roman Empire.”3 Nevertheless,
Kinsey’s reports changed “the nature of public discussion of sexuality as well
as society’s perception of its own behavior.”4 While their validity continues to be
challenged, the reports made sexuality a topic in public discourse.
In the wake of 1960s legislation protecting the legal rights of African Americans
and women, many gays and lesbians took hope and began to create organizations,
institutions, and communities for themselves.5 While the more confrontational
gay liberation movement looked to overthrow patriarchy, advocates of the gay
civil rights movement attempted to transform existing patriarchal institutions
and neighborhoods. In San Diego, the emergence of the Hillcrest neighborhood as
a gay “haven and home” typified national trends of what Michael Dillinger calls
“gay-motivated positive gentrification,” or more simply “the investment of the gay
community in itself.” Dillinger describes how the gay and lesbian community
transformed Hillcrest from a run-down neighborhood of an “aged population” into
the center of gay culture and vitality.6 Similarly, some GLBT community members
sought to extend this transforming concept into the Christian sphere. By 1979, four
well-established GLBT Christian groups were promoting gay Christianity to the
San Diego public.7
The confluence of homosexuality and Christianity in San Diego began
in April 1970 when the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) created an
environment for gays and lesbians to integrate their sexuality and faith. Led by
Reverend Troy Perry and Howard Williams, this extension of the Los Angeles
home church opened in Hillcrest and encompassed parishioners from diverse
Christian traditions.8 Since orthodox theology had been used to condemn their
sexuality, MCC used a new theology to affirm homosexuality as a gift from God.
Locally, it was the first church of this kind and provided the foundation on which
GLBT organizations could create gay, Christian spaces in San Diego. Both MCC’s
theology and warm, accepting fellowship were important in grounding the
concept of GLBT Christianity for the local gay community.
MCC San Diego adopted a dual-purposed gay theology, or what Perry called
“liberal evangelical” theology.9 First, it attempted to discredit the so-called
“clobber passages” in the Bible used to condemn homosexuality. “Clobber
118
Coming Out Gay, Coming Out Christian
passages” was a term used within the gay Christian community to describe the
verses that argue that homosexual acts are sinful. Perry pointed to the misuse of
scripture against minority groups throughout history: “I knew the church had
held biblical interpretations–sometimes for centuries–that it later came to see as
misinterpretations. Sadly, this happened with the biblical justification of slavery,
the oppression of women, and acceptance of racism. In each of these cases, the
Church came to admit that centuries of biblical interpretation were in error.”10
MCC recast the “clobber passages” with new meanings. The church argued that
Sodom and Gomorrah were not destroyed because they tolerated homosexuality,
but because they had a widespread distain for social justice. In addition, Perry
reinterpreted the sexual prohibitions listed in the Apostle Paul’s letters when he
said, “I do believe that the apostle Paul, according to the original Greek of Romans
1:26-28, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and 1 Timothy 1:9-10, condemned temple prostitutes–
both male and female–and pederasts. But he did not condemn homosexual persons
per se. On the other hand, he probably wasn’t even aware of the possibility of
loving, committed same-sex relationships.”11 In short, MCC rejected the literal
interpretations of the scriptures commonly used to attack homosexuality as sinful,
saying that they were based on a misreading of the original languages and cultural
ignorance of early Christianity.12
Gay positive theology argued that homosexuality was not a detriment to the
Christian identity but, instead, a gift from God. The MCC community contended
that Jesus and many of the disciples chose alternate and possibly gay-affirming
lifestyles. For example, they used Jesus’s description of eunuchs “being born” to
argue that Christ did not expect everyone to create a heterosexual union. Perry
also used Galatians to contend that fear of God, not “respect of persons,” defined
the Christian life.13 This attitude asserted that, far from being a detriment to
Christianity, GLBT Christians could be instrumental in fulfilling Jesus’ Great
Commission. Perry stated: “God is using you to do His will. It says in the Bible,
God’s people are peculiar and there is no one more peculiar than us.”14 Instead
of accepting the traditional view that homosexual acts were sinful, MCC told its
parishioners and the gay community how their current lifestyle could be used for
the glory of God.
Gay positive theology became the foundation of an environment that pulled
GLBT Christians into new spaces. Original members of MCC often felt that they
had been pushed out of mainstream churches. Now, they were pulled into a
community that celebrated the confluence of the homosexual Christian. More
than a faith community, MCC created a space that allowed GLBT Christians to
identify with other gays and “come out” safely.15 As Pat McAaron, an early MCC
parishioner states, “With MCC I found comfort, friendship, in a time of great
adjustment for me. Through my experience at MCC I knew more people within
the gay community.”16 MCC was, above all, a place where GLBT Christians were
pulled and pushed to safely explore a homosexual version of Christianity outside
popular traditions. In this respect, it did not differ from other MCC sister churches
across the nation and world.17
Many of the gay and lesbian organizations in San Diego had their roots in
the MCC community. Historian Frank Nobiletti suggested that San Diego “had a
powerful ‘Gay Church’…with strong leadership that offered stability, open arms to
the community at large, and a physical base, even in the early days.” He pointed
119
out, “The Prodigal newsletter, published biweekly by the MCC, was San Diego’s first
regularly published gay publication. In gay communities where isolation had been
the hallmark, the importance of this institution cannot be over estimated. It went
far beyond church news, covering the whole emerging community and became a
springboard for other publications.”18 MCC San Diego, the third MCC congregation
to be organized in California, combined a Christian evangelical purpose with
openness to become the early center of gay social, cultural, and political activities.19
The early success of MCC San Diego led to the creation of Dignity, a gay,
Catholic group. Patrick Nidorf formed the organization in 1969 as a venue for
members to openly discuss sexuality and faith. Although the group quickly
moved to Los Angeles to meet greater demand, many gay Catholics remained
in San Diego.20 McArron, a Catholic expelled from a seminary following
accusations, attended MCC. He stated, “When I attended MCC it had a Catholic
feel to it. I believe that was due to the early church leadership having a Catholic
background.”21 In 1972, McArron was informed about a Dignity advertisement in
the National Catholic Reporter (NPR). He wrote the organization and visited with the
president of Dignity in Los Angeles: “I informed him that I knew of no one in San
Diego who was gay and Catholic. After assuring me that he would take care of that
minor detail, I returned to San Diego all fired up and filled with enthusiasm.”22
On May 30, 1972, the San Diego chapter of Dignity had its first meeting with an
attendance of twelve, including two former nuns, and soon began to hold masses
at Old Town’s Cardijn Center.23
Could one be a practicing homosexual and Roman Catholic at the same
time? McArron believed that MCC had demonstrated the ability to integrate
homosexuality and Christianity. It would be a challenge to integrate
homosexuality and Catholicism, particularly given the fact that the Roman
Catholic Church continued to oppose such practices as birth control. Yet this was
the chasm Dignity sought to bridge, at least in theory.24 Its mission statement read:
“We work for the development of sexual theology leading to the reform of its
teachings and practices regarding human sexuality, and for the acceptance of gay,
lesbian, bisexual and transgender peoples as full and equal members of the one
Christ.”25 Unlike MCC, which detached itself from established traditions, Dignity
sought to reform the Catholic Church from within.
Members of Dignity gradually came to realize that their reform efforts would
have little effect. Their mission statement was rejected by the Roman Catholic
Church and, in 1975, the Vatican produced a “Declaration on Certain Questions
Concerning Sexual Ethics.” It stated: “At the present time there are those
who…have begun to judge indulgently, and even excuse completely, homosexual
relations between certain people. This they do in opposition to the constant
teaching of the Magisterium and to the moral sense of the Christian people.”26
Nevertheless, members of Dignity felt a need to maintain a bond to the institution
that had defined their faith for millennia. By 1979, Dignity, like its predecessor
MCC, was not a reforming organization but a community of gay Catholics who
affirmed the possibility of integrating their traditional faith with homosexuality.
In the end, Dignity did not reform the institutional church but, like MCC,
attempted to create new spiritual homes for gay Christians. Dignity San Diego
established communities where Catholics could be openly gay and re-establish
their “dignity.”27 McArron explained, “Initially, Dignity was organized to
120
bring gays and lesbians in communication and open discussion to help create
a community.”28 The organization sought to relieve the loneliness often felt by
GLBT Catholics and to “reinforce their sense of self-acceptance and dignity
and encourage full participation in the life of the Church and society.”29 Social
psychologists Donileen R. Loseke and James C. Cavendish suggested that Dignity was
more a “support group” for sexually marginalized Catholics than a reformation.30
While MCC was content to create a new environment detached from
mainstream influences, Dignity tacitly sought and needed a relationship with
its mother church. Catholic parishioners relied upon the Church to receive the
Eucharist, last rites and other blessings. Off-duty priests, known as chaplains,
visited Dignity meetings and served the Eucharist regularly through the year and
less frequently during the summer. McAaron explained: “Why am I doing this?
If we, the GLBT community, walk away from the R[oman] C[atholic] C[hurch]
we feel we would lose credibility. We want to remain with the identity of a RCC
organization.”31 According to some, it was more complicated to be a gay Catholic
than to be a GLBT Christian. MCC leader David Farell attempted to describe
Dignity members’ relationship to the Catholic Church: “You know, I really love my
mother. She doesn’t know me real well. And I know she’d be freaked out by some
aspects of my life. But I could never simply reject her . . . It’s like my relationship
with the church. I have to live with her and she has to live with me.”32
In the 1970s, Integrity and Lutherans Concerned began working for the
normalization of homosexuality within mainstream denominations. Integrity, an
affiliate of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, was founded
in 1975 by Louie Crew in San Francisco. Lutherans Concerned, an organization
within the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) was formed in 1978.33
These groups differed from MCC and Dignity because they sought to include
homosexual Christians within their churches without any distinction. They
sought nothing less than the removal of the qualifier homosexual from the term
homosexual Christian. Locally, the chapters remained very small.34
Integrity and Lutherans Concerned expanded the agenda of the GLBT Christian
movement. It was no longer enough to create independent gay spaces; GLBT
Christians now wanted to reform existing mainstream denominations. One
unnamed Lutherans Concerned member stated that their goal was to remove
the taboo status of homosexual from GLBT Christianity: “…We are trying to
change the attitude toward the homosexual as someone utterly different from the
heterosexual.”35 By the late 1970s, the reform language focused on the possibility
of gay, or rather openly gay, leadership in mainstream denominations. Notable
discussions followed the ordination of an openly lesbian priest, Ellen Barrett, in
New York in 1977. During the visit of Integrity’s President John Lawrence to San
Diego in 1979, Episcopalians began to talk about the possibility of openly gay
priests. Although Lutherans Concerned and Integrity forced their denominations
to clarify their policies toward these issues, immediate reform did not occur and
has not occurred to the present.
In 1979, MCC, Dignity, Integrity, and Lutherans Concerned worked together to
create the Ministries United for Gay Understanding. In addition to ministering to
their own members on issues such as harassment of gays, the coalition worked to
promote public understanding of GLBT Christianity through meetings – including
a local GLBT ecumenical council in 1979 – and radio and television shows. While
121
the addition of Integrity and Lutherans Concerned brought GLBT concepts

of Christianity to mainstream denominations, it was the groups who created
uniquely gay spaces, MCC and Dignity, who led the coalition’s outreach to the
public.36 The nominal reception was cold. MCC’s efforts to broadcast on Christian
television and radio met with cancellations, forcing them into legal battles over
breach of contract. Two developments at this time began to distract attention from
the “gay Christian” cause. Increasingly the issues of homosexual rights were being
folded into the larger civil rights movement. Meanwhile, the conservative backlash
against homosexual rights led by popular singer Anita Bryant and the Religious
Right reached its zenith.37
By 1979, the confluence of homosexuality and the Christian faith in San Diego
was firmly rooted. Beginning as a conceptual issue in the late 1960s, the idea of gay
Christianity moved from creating gay spaces at MCC and Dignity to arguing for
normalization in established churches by Integrity and Lutherans Concerned. The
early movement then culminated in a united front to promote gay understanding
among members of the public.38 How much did this movement accomplish?
Not only did both MCC and Integrity open new local chapters in 1979 and 1980
respectively but, even more important, these GLBT Christian institutions survived
a conservative backlash during the 1980s and the loss of many members to AIDS.
The formative years of the GLBT Christian movements discussed in this
paper are important and raise other significant issues. All four of the groups
studied, or their related successors, are still active in 2007, and they have variously
struggled and succeeded. There have been problems of leadership, difficulties
finding places of worship, political opposition, and theological controversy. Some
churches’ opposition is as firm as ever; others continue to work on policies of
inclusion. Much remains to be studied. There are other gay Christian and Jewish
organizations, gays who remained within their churches, and varying policies of
churches regarding gay membership and leadership. It is clear from this research
that the interactions of gays with their churches, and of the churches with their gay
members, have and will continue to play pivotal roles in a movement important in
San Diego, the nation, and the world.
NOTES
1. Allan Berube, Coming out Under Fire: the History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New
York: Free Press, 1990); John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: the Making of the Homosexual
Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
2. For a good discussion of mainline churches, homosexuality and the response to this report
see, Melissa M. Wilcox, “Of Markets and Missions: the Early History of the Universal Fellowship
of Metropolitan Community Churches,” Religion and American Culture 11, no. 1 (2001), 92-95. An
article that deals with more recent issues is James K. Wellman Jr., “Introduction: The Debate Over
Homosexual Ordination: Subcultural Identity Theory in American Religious Organizations,” Review of
Religious Research 41, no. 2 (1999): 184-206.
3. Cited in Neil Miller, Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present (Advocate
Books: New York, 2005), 278-79.
4. William Cochran, Frederick Mosteller and John Tukey, “Statistical Problems of the Kinsey
Report,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 48, no. 264 (1953): 673-715. “Our own opinion is
that KPM are engaged in a complex program of researching involving many problems of measurement
122
and sampling, for some of which there appear at present to be no satisfactory solutions. While much
remains to be done, our overall impression of their work to date is favorable” (674). See also Erdman
Palmore, “Published Reactions to the Kinsey Report,” in Social Forces 31, no. 2 (1952), 165, 167, 172; Vern
L. Bullough, “Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Report: Historical and Lasting Contributions,” Journal
of Sex Research 35, no. 2 (1998): 127-31; Roy A. Burkhart, “Church Can Answer the Kinsey Report,”
The Christian Century, 65 (September 15, 1978), 942-943. For a good report on how certain Christian
institutions responded with social science research, see Joseph K. Folsom, “Kinsey’s Challenge to
Ethics and Religion,” Social Problems 1, no. 4 (1954): 164-168. It is interesting that a constant theme is
the contestation of theological norms using biblical exegesis and social science data; both sides of this
social movement were concerned with using their centers of learning–especially Midwestern colleges
for gay Lutherans–to assert their views.
5. Wilcox, “Of Markets and Missions,” 88-89. Founder Troy Perry’s frequent references to Martin
Luther King Jr. are particularly important. For the influence of civil liberties on American attitudes
toward homosexuality, see Jeni Loftus, “America’s Liberalization in Attitudes toward Homosexuality,
1973 to 1998,” American Sociological Review, 66, no. 5 (2001), 12-13; Alan S. Yang, “Trends: Attitudes
Toward Homosexuality,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 61, no. 3 (1997), 5.
6. Michael E. Dillinger, “Hillcrest: From Haven to Home,” The Journal of San Diego History 46, no. 4
(2000): 144-163.
7. Wilcox describes the factors that led to GLBT Christianity and the reasons for its longevity. Like
other authors and the subjects of our interviews, Wilcox emphasizes the civil rights aspect of the GLBT
Christian movement. Many of her conclusions are beyond the scope of this study, but similar research
is needed for both San Diego and Los Angeles GLBT Christian organizations. Wilcox, “Of Markets and
Missions,” 83-108 passim.
8. Lee Bowman, interviewed by Kaylin Raigoza and Christopher Rhamey, written transcripts,
San Diego, CA, February 16, 2006. In the late 1960s, a number of GLBT Christians began a series of
Bible studies in the home of Rev. Ed Hansen, pastor of Chollas View United Methodist Church. After
learning of MCC Los Angeles, Howard Williams of the Hillcrest group asked Perry to meet with them.
For several months Perry commuted from Los Angeles to San Diego until a formal MCC church could
be organized. The institutional commencement of MCC San Diego was preceded by a weekend revival
led by Perry in early March, 1970.
9. Wilcox, “Of Markets and Missions,” 89.
10. Troy Perry, “Metropolitan Community Church Announces Theological Breakthrough,” Scouting
for All: Committed to Scouting, Open to Diversity, www.scoutingforall.org/aaic/2002042501.shtml
(accessed April 2006).
11. Perry, “Metropolitan Community Church Announces Theological Breakthrough.” See also W.
Bernard Lokenbill, “Observations on the Corporate Culture of a Gay and Lesbian Congregation,”
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37, no. 3 (1998), 444; “Gays and the Gospel: An Interview with
Troy Perry,” Christian Century 113, no. 27 (1996), 897.
12. For a study on the role of scripture in gay Christian identity integration, see Eric M. Rodriguez
and Suzanne C. Ouellette, “Gay and Lesbian Christians: Homosexual and Religious Identity
Integration in the Members and Participants of a Gay-Positive Church,” Journal for the Scientific Study of
Religion 39, no. 3 (2000): 333-342.
13. Perry, “Metropolitan Community Church Announces Theological Breakthrough.”
14. Rita Gillmon, “Area Church’s Ministry Includes Homosexuals,” San Diego Union, May 13, 1978, B3.
15. Interviewed members often equated their treatment in mainstream churches with Stonewall
Riots in San Francisco. The push factors are the theme in an informative a San Diego Union article that
focuses mostly on obstacles as well as the gay perspective in ‘choosing’ or not choosing to be gay. Rita
Gillmon, “Area Church’s Ministry Includes Homosexuals,” San Diego Union, May 13, 1978, B3. During
our interviews, however, we noticed that the push factors were equally or more important than
the pull factors, that is, the gay community and the possibility of a gay Christian, in creating GLBT
Christianity. This is also the theme of Rodriguez’s and Ouellette’s research on individual integration
of gay Christians. The push and pull factors of the early MCC are described in Wilcox, “Of Markets
and Missions,” 98-100.
16. Pat McAaron, interviewed by Megan Dukett, written transcript, San Diego, CA, April 31, 2006.
123
17. Rodriguez and Ouellette, “Gay and Lesbian Christians,” 333-342 passim. It was somewhat ironic
that a Christian church became as a focal point for gay activities as “the Church” was often accused of
oppressing homosexuals.
18. Frank Nobiletti, “The Radical Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Life in San Diego: 1970-1975,”
conference paper presented in a graduate seminar at University of California, San Diego, March, 1990,
version 3, 13, 16. Nobiletti is currently the president of the Lambda Archives and an adjunct professor
at San Diego State University. The Lambda Archives is a rich source of GLBT information, with a
special emphasis on the San Diego area, http://www.lambdaarchives.org/. The Greek letter “Lambda”
was chosen because it signifies unity under oppression and is often used as a GLBT symbol.
19. Although MCC became one of the most significant organizations within the homosexual
community, MCC did not consider itself a “gay church.” According to the Prodigal newsletter, a name
taken from the parable of the prodigal son, “MCC is not a gay church…This is what MCC is about.
MCC opens its doors to all! MCC rejects none! To date, the group feeling most rejected, and flocking
to MCC’s doors are the gays,” The Prodigal, 2, no. 24 (1971). The Prodigal was published as an organ of
Christian outreach to the Homophile Community by the Metropolitan Community Church of San
Diego, California. It was chartered on June 7, 1970 and edited by John Wild, Jr.
20. Dignity USA: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Catholics, “Highlights of Dignity USA’s
History, 1969-Present,” www.dignityusa.org/archives/history.html (accessed April 17, 2006). Until the
late 1970s, Dignity had no home. Patrick Nidorf resided in San Diego through 1970 but meetings took
place in Los Angeles. An advertisement in the Los Angeles Free Press preceding the first official meeting
states: “Join Dignity, a Catholic group of intelligent gay men and women. We share successful ways of
bringing dignity into our lives. Honest talk/sensitivity/sincere people. Applicants screened. Write: Fr.
Pat, Box 4486, N. Park St., San Diego, CA 92104.” The first Dignity newsletter, written by Nidorf and
issued one month after the above advertisement, shows that the men needed rides to meetings in the
Los Angeles area. Dignity 1, no. 1 (1970), www.dignityusa.org/archives/FirstNewsletter.pdf (accessed
May 10, 2007).
21. Pat McArron, interviewed by Megan Dukett, April 31, 2006. It is thought that Dignity founder
Nidorf left for Los Angeles due to a lack of interest locally, leaving MCC to lay the foundation for GLBT
Christianity. However, MCC’s founding members remember a number of Catholics in leadership.
This problem leads the authors to wonder about the cohesion of the gay, Christian community at
this time. It is certainly easy to imagine a movement that grows outward from the center, MCC, and
there is certainly some evidence to support this. But there is evidence that points to a less linear
growth, helping to explain why MCC, rather than Dignity, attracted gay Catholics in San Diego. Later,
this helps clarify the confusion between Integrity’s original founding in 1975 and the unconnected
Integrity organization in 1980.
22. Dignity USA, “Highlights of Dignity USA’s History,” www.dignityusa.org/archives/history.html
(accessed May 10, 2007).
23. Jeannette De Wyze, “Does the Lord Love Homosexuals?” The Reader 8, no. 32 (1978), 8. The church
bureaucracy notified Dignity they needed to have the blessing of the diocese and the directors of the
Cardijn Center’s directors to continue meetings. Dignity countered by threatening to post the names
of all gay priests in the area. Nothing more was said of the issue.
24. The distinction between practicing and non-practicing homosexuality is important in the Catholic
Church. Homosexuality itself is not a sin, but the practice of it is. De Wyze, “Does the Lord Love
Homosexuals?” 8; Donileen R. Loseke and James C. Cavendish, “Producing Institutional Selves:
Rhetorically Constructing the Dignity of Sexually Marginalized Catholics,” Social Psychology Quarterly
64, no. 4 (2001): 347-362. Especially interesting is the interstitial location of GLBT Catholics in their own
traditions and GLBT Christianity. They are outsiders in Catholic tradition, but because they value their
Catholic roots, they may also be uncomfortable in places like MCC. This is discussed by Loseke and
Cavendish. However, the authors do not account for the Catholic background suggested by McAaron
nor do they show the common link between Dignity and Integrity after the mid-1970s. The latter could
have been helpful in arguing that GLBT Christians from similar traditions identify strongly with each
other. Evidence from San Diego suggests that GLBT Catholics were not necessarily dissatisfied with
MCC but that they were not numerous.
25. Dignity USA, “Statement of Position and Purpose,” http://www.dignityusa.org/purpose.html
(April 13, 2006)
26. “Declaration for the Doctrine of the Faith: Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,”
124
www.ewtn.com/library/CURIA/CDFCERTN.HTM (accessed April 14, 2006). A copy of Dignity’s

reaction to the Vatican’s statements can be found on The Voice of Integrity, http://www.integrityusa.
org/voice/1976/February1976.htm. It is summed up by this excerpt: “The present Vatican document,
while urging a ‘sensit ive pastoral approach to the homosexual,’ does little more than repeat the
traditional, unenlightened condemnation of homosexual expression, based on the presupposition
that human sexuality is God-given and moral only in heterosexual marriage for the purpose of
procreation. Such a narrow understanding of human sexuality has been seriously challenged by
a large number of American Catholic theologians who recognize the broader purpose of human
sexuality as an expression of unselfish love bet ween two people, as a responsible communication of
their love and shared life.”
27. De Wyze, “Does the Lord Love Homosexuals?” 1.
28. Pat McAaron, interviewed by Megan Dukett, written transcript, San Diego, CA, April 31, 2006.
29. Dignity USA, “Statement of Position and Purpose.”
30. Loseke and Cavendish, “Producing Institutional Selves,” 350.
31. Pat McArron, interviewed by Megan Dukett, written transcript, San Diego, CA, April 31, 2006.
32. De Wyze, “Does the Lord Love Homosexuals?” 8.
33. 1978 is the first recorded or remembered date of Lutherans Concerned in San Diego. It comes
from an article on MCC in The San Diego Reader. Kenneth Marks at the Lutherans Concerned Archive
directed the authors to Lutherans Concerned’s The Gay Lutheran (1974-80), a newsletter printed in
Los Angeles. Editors sometimes referred to California members but most likely meant the large
organization of gay Lutherans in Los Angeles and San Francisco. There is no mention of San Diego.
The number of Lutherans Concerned organizations grew from four in 1975 to eleven in 1977,
flourishing in cities where there were Lutheran colleges or seminaries, neither of which San Diego
possessed.
34. Integrity’s existence prior to 1980 is not remembered by current leadership. It seldom reported any
activity to the national body’s journal (The Voice of Integrity), and it also contributed little monetarily to
the national organization. Yet in May 1976, the local Integrity chapter was recognized by San Diego’s
bishop, Rev. Robert M. Wolterstorff, and given permission to convene meetings without Eucharist. In
addition, local newspapers included information on Lutherans Concerned when reporting on MCC
and Dignity in the 1970s.
35. Rita Gillmon, “Gay Church Disputes Broadcast Cancellation,” San Diego Union, June 26, 1979, B1.
36. “Coalition Will Meet,” San Diego Union, June 16, 1979, A-12; Gilmon, “Gay Church Disputes
Broadcast Cancellation”; “He Has the Last Word,” San Diego Union, 30 April 1980, D-1. There is also
evidence of institutional cooperation between Dignity and Integrity. A notice reads, “Gay Christian
Workshop in San Diego. Dignity and Integrity are joint sponsoring a workshop on ‘Homosexuality and
the Church Today’ with Fr. Tom Oddo as the keynote speaker, on Friday, 18th June. For information,
contact Dr. Lazenby at our SD chapter, listed on our back page,” Integrity: Gay Episcopal Christian
Forum, 2, no. 8 (1976), http://www.integrityusa.org/voice/1976/JuneJuly1976.htm (accessed May 10,
2007).
37. De Wyze, “Does the Lord Love Homosexuals?”; Rita Gillmon, “Gay’s Ministry Role Is Studied,”
San Diego Union, September 1, 1979, B3.
38. Although there were differences among these groups in terms of beliefs and desires, there seems
to be ample evidence to call the front “united” during this time period. As an excerpt from The Voice of
Integrity attests: “In a Winter issue of The Gay Christian, the Rev. Troy Perry, founder of the Universal
Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, the religious group with a special outreach to the
Gay community, affirmed his personal interest in continuing to confront the established churches: 
‘The time has come when we must be vocal in our demands for equality in the established Church. 
We must refuse to be put off by some unconcerned denominational officer whose only concern is not
to rock the boat in the area of social justice for fear of losing his or her safe position.  We must attack
the complacent attitude of those who, if they are not for us, must be considered against us.’ The MCC
founder has been most supportive of INTEGRITY from the beginning and published material in Forum
No. 2.  Likewise, INTEGRITY remains constitutionally committed to ecumenical action in the Gay
community,” Integrity: Gay Episcopal Forum 1, no. 9 (1975), http://www.integrityusa.org/voice/1975/
August1975.htm (accessed May 10, 2007).
125
“La Mojonera” and the Marking of California’s

U.S.-Mexico Boundary Line, 1849-1851
Charles W. Hughes
Winner of the Marc Tarasuck Award
On a bluff overlooking the “Arroyo de Tia Juana” several hundred feet up from
the shoreline of the Pacific Ocean, a boundary monument—La Mojonera—has
marked the start of the 1,952 mile line separating Mexico and the United States
for the last 156 years. Captain Edmund L. F. Hardcastle, of the U.S. Topographical
Engineers, and Ricardo Ramírez, a zoologist and botanist attached to the Mexican
Boundary Commission, dedicated it on July 14, 1851.1 Today it is one of 276
monuments marking the boundary line running between El Paso, Texas, and the
Pacific coast.
John Russell Bartlett’s 1852 drawing of the Monument at the Initial Point on the Pacific from Bartlett’s Personal
Narrative of Exploration and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora and Chihuahua (1854).
©SDHS, OP#17134.
Charles W. Hughes is a local historian currently studying the history of California’s U.S. Mexico border.
He gratefully acknowledges the research assistance provided by the staffs of the Oceanside and San
Diego public libraries, San Diego State University Library, and the National Archives.
126
U.S.-Mexico Boundary Line
Topographical sketch of the southernmost point of the port of San Diego as surveyed by the Mexican Commission.
José Salazar Ilarregui, Datos de los trabajos astronómicos y topograficos… por la Comissión de Límites
Mexicana en la línea que divide esta República de la de los Estados-Unidos (1850). Courtesy of San Diego
State University, Special Collections.
La Mojonera, or Western Land Boundary Monument No. 258, is threatened

by the U.S. government’s plans to build multiple border fences. In 2005 Home
Land Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suspended environmental regulations
protecting historic resources to allow work on the fences to proceed. In response,
Save Our Heritage Organization placed the monument on its list of San Diego’s ten
most endangered historic sites. Even though it was placed on the National Register
of Historic Places in 1974, the monument’s future remains uncertain.
This article reviews the events associated with the running and marking of
California’s U.S.-Mexico boundary line between June 1849 and July 1851. It fills
a gap in the historiography by telling the story of the individuals who drew the
line and by describing the activities of the boundary commission during the first
two years of its operation.2 Finally, it reaffirms the historical significance, both
regionally and bi-nationally, of Monument No. 258.
On February 2, 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war between
the United States and Mexico and created a boundary line separating the two
countries. The treaty compelled Mexico to relinquish 1.2 million miles of its
northern frontier, over half its territory, to the United States for fifteen million
dollars. Today this territory comprises the states of California, Arizona, New
Mexico and parts of Texas, Nevada, Colorado and Utah.3 The new boundary line
extended three leagues into the Gulf of Mexico from the mouth of the Rio Grande
River, known in Mexico as the Rio del Norte, or, River of the North. The boundary
proceeded up the center of this river’s deepest channel to a point where it met the
southern boundary of New Mexico north of the City of El Paso del Norte (today
Cuidad Juárez). At this point, the line turned west and traveled overland to the
western limits of New Mexico and then north until it intersected with the Gila
River. Following the Gila to the center of its junction with the Colorado River,
the boundary continued in a straight line along the division of Upper and Lower
California to the Pacific Ocean.4
Treaty negotiators discussed at length the point where the proposed boundary
127
line should terminate on the Pacific Coast. During the colonial period, Spanish
officials had located Alta California’s southern boundary approximately fourteen
miles south of the present line. In 1772, after the founding of settlements in San
Diego and Monterey, officials decreed the separation of the two Californias. On
August 19, 1773 Father Francisco Palóu erected, under authority granted by the
Council of the Indies, a large cross to mark the boundary line separating the two
territories, approximately five leagues north of the Rio Guadalupe and the site
of Mission of San Miguel. This was the first inter-California boundary, and in
the years that followed, although this line shifted several times prior to 1846, it
remained in the same general locality.5
Treaty negotiators on the part of Mexico initially contended that the port of San
Diego was not part of Alta California and sought a boundary line north of San
Diego in order to retain both a port for the northern region of Baja California and
a land bridge between the peninsula and mainland Mexico. They were concerned
by the Americans’ belief in manifest destiny and their desire for expansion,
particularly as some U.S. politicians were calling for the acquisition of all of
Mexico.6
Both sides recognized that
the port of San Diego had great
value. A warm water port, offering
secure anchorage and a mild year-
round climate, San Diego became
a center for the hide and tallow
trade and whaling activities in the
years before the war with Mexico.7
William H. Emory, a topographical
engineer attached to the military
forces seizing the town in 1846,
solidified U.S. interests in the port
when he offered this assessment
in his official report: “At present
San Diego is, all things considered,
perhaps one of the best harbors on
the coast from Callâo to Puget’s
Sound, with the single exception,
that of San Francisco.”8
At one point during
treaty negotiations, the U.S.
representative discussed setting
the boundary line one marine
league north of the port of San
Diego or, possibly, dividing the
port in two with Mexico retaining
the southern half and unrestricted
access to the harbor entrance. Once
it became clear that San Diego In 1848, General Pedro García Conde became head of the
always belonged as part of Alta commission to survey the new boundary between Mexico and
California, the U.S. representative the United States. ©SDHS #9852:1.
128
sought a boundary that

ceded the port to the United
States, based on a clearly
defined boundary that
would prevent any future
disputes.
Ultimately, directions
provided by the treaty
were less than consistent
offering two different
guidelines for establishing
the California boundary.
The treaty initially stated
that the boundary should
follow “the division line
between Upper and Lower
California to the Pacific.”
In a subsequent paragraph,
the treaty declared “in order
to preclude all difficulty in
tracing upon the ground
the limit separating Upper
and Lower California, it is José Salazar Ylarregui, an engineer and astronomer, was appointed
Surveyor for the 1849 Mexican Commission. Courtesy of the Nettie
agreed that the said limit Lee Benson Latin American Collection, The University of Texas at
shall consist of a straight line Austin.
drawn from the middle of
the Rio Gila, where it unites with the Colorado, to a point on the coast of the Pacific
Ocean, distant one marine league due south of the southernmost point of the port
of San Diego, according to the plan of said port made in the year 1782 by Don Juan
Pantoja . . .”9
The treaty further specified the appointment of a commission to demarcate “a
boundary line with due precision, upon authoritative maps, and to establish upon
the ground landmarks which shall show the limits of both republics.” The treaty
required each country to appoint a commissioner and surveyor to supervise the
marking of the line, and the decisions agreed upon by them were to become part of
the treaty. One year from the final ratification by both countries, the treaty called
for the commission to meet in San Diego to begin its survey work.10
On July 4, 1848 President James K. Polk issued a proclamation announcing
the signing of the treaty. Six months earlier, on January 24, in California James
Marshall discovered gold on the American River near Sutter’s Fort. By the end
of the year the news had spread to the east coast and around the world—setting
off the gold rush of 1849. Thousands of people rushed to California to earn
their fortunes. The flood of immigrants severely impacted the progress of the
joint boundary commission as prices for livestock, supplies and other resources
skyrocketed. With everyone rushing to the gold fields, labor shortages were
widespread throughout the territory making it hard to hire and retain workers to
complete the boundary survey.11
After considering two other candidates, on January 14, 1849, President Polk
129
Major William H. Emory served as Chief Astronomer to the U.S. Commission and was appointed acting
Commissioner in January 1850. Courtesy of the National Archives, Washington D.C.
selected John B. Weller, a former Ohio Congressman, Mexican War veteran and
unsuccessful candidate for governor, to serve as the U.S. commissioner. Andrew
Gray, a surveyor who had worked on the boundary line between Texas and the
United States, accepted the position of U.S. Surveyor. The president appointed
Emory to serve as the chief astronomer, head of the Commission’s Topographical
Scientific Corps, and commanding officer of the military escort.12
130
In March, the Mexican government appointed General Pedro García Conde, a

well-respected army officer and engineer with political and diplomatic experience,
to serve as its commissioner. José Salazar Ylarregui, a twenty-five year-old civilian
engineer and graduate of El Colegio de Minería in Mexico City, agreed to serve as
surveyor and astronomer for the Mexican commission.13
In addition to running and marking the boundary line, each commissioner
received instructions regarding the gathering of geographical and other useful
information about the territory on either side of the line. Mexican officials
recognized the need for information about the geography and Indians tribes of the
frontier as critical for the defense of their northern borders. Congressional leaders
wanted scientific duties included as part of the commission’s responsibilities,
resulting in the selection of appointees with knowledge of zoology, botany and
natural history. They viewed this type of information as beneficial to promoting
the future settlement of the region.14
U.S. officials wanted their commissioners to identify any feasible routes for a
transcontinental railroad, canal, or wagon road. A southern route was viewed by
many as the most practical way to provide year round travel across the country.
They viewed this route as crucial to binding the country together, strengthening
the political union between the east and west coasts, and taking full advantage of
economic opportunities presented by the gold deposits in California.15
Both commissioners experienced delays getting to San Diego by the time
specified by the treaty. The overwhelming number of immigrants headed to the
California gold fields caused the problem. Traveling from New Orleans via the
Isthmus of Panama, the American commission was stranded along with several
thousand immigrants for almost two months in Panama before securing passage
north to San Diego. The overcrowded conditions forced Weller to divide his
commission into several groups for the voyage north. Weller, Gray, and Emory,
along with several other members, arrived in San Diego on June 1 while the rest of
their group arrived in the weeks that followed.16
García Conde and his commission departed Mexico City on April 18, traveling
overland to San Blas, Nayarit, for passage north. Upon reaching San Blas, Conde
learned from the American Consul that a steamer was not expected to stop in port.
García Conde decided to embark on the British frigate Caroline in hopes of reaching
San Diego before the appointed deadline. The frigate, however, experienced delays
due to “natural accidents seldom known in the navigation of the Pacific coasts”
and did not arrive in San Diego until July 3, over a month past the deadline.17
After enjoying a festive July 4 celebration, the two commissions held their
first meeting on July 6. Officials presented their credentials and adopted plans
for starting the survey. The two commissioners agreed to have their engineers
operate independently and meet periodically to compare their work and finalize
the results. They endorsed Gray and Salazar Ylarregui’s plans to begin work by
determining locations for the three geographical points needed to draw the line:
the southernmost point of the port, the initial point on the Pacific coast and the
eastern point at the junction of the Gila and Colorado rivers.18
Both commissions generally utilized the same methods for surveying and
marking the line, establishing astronomical observations at different points along
the line to determine the latitude and longitude of their positions. The emphasis
of their surveying strategies was where their approaches varied. The Americans
131
focused on astronomical determinations while the Mexicans used triangulation,

topographical mapping and only some astronomical observations. Emory believed
that the location of the line depended upon astronomy. While triangulation
was the most accurate, the time and expense required by this method made it
impractical.19
Previous studies of the Mexico-U.S. boundary survey have portrayed the role
of the Mexican commission members strictly as advisory or secondary to the
American surveyors who performed all of the significant work. These conclusions
are primarily based on statements made by Emory in his published report of
the boundary commission work. As a result, the contributions of the Mexican
engineers have been largely ignored by historians.20
In recent years the availability of Mexican documents and a more thorough
review of U.S. materials have caused a re-examination of the issue. These newer
studies give little credence to arguments regarding the secondary role of Mexican
engineers in conducting the boundary surveys, showing them to have little
merit. Scholars have concluded, “Mexican engineers executed operations clearly
independent of the United States activity, and produced results that were as
necessary to the completion of the boundary as the work of the Americans.”21
The joint boundary commission experienced problems that repeatedly impaired
their progress, including the gold rush economy, partisan politics, insufficient
funding, personal rivalries and the rugged environment. Issues involving
the American members of the commission during the California phase of the
boundary survey were the most difficult to resolve.
At the request of the Polk Administration, Congress passed legislation
providing for the organization of the American commission and appropriated
$50,000 to defray the expenses of running and marking the new boundary line
with Mexico but failed to authorize salaries for the commissioner or surveyor. In
the elections of 1848, the Whigs gained control of the House of Representatives and
attempted to nullify Polk’s actions. By a strictly partisan vote, the House passed
two amendments requiring the appointment of a commissioner from among the
members of the Topographical Corps and prohibiting the payment of salaries
for any officers of the commission whose appointment was made without the
authority of law. The Democratic controlled Senate rejected these amendments
stalemating additional funding for the American commission until the new
Congress convened in 1850.22
Even before Weller and his staff arrived in San Diego, rumors were
circulating regarding his impending dismissal as boundary commissioner.
Polk had appointed him six weeks before his term of office expired. The Whig
administration of Zachary Taylor considered him an eleventh-hour appointee
and, under the rules of patronage, sought to replace him with one of their
own. The appointment of Thomas Ewing, Weller’s archrival from Ohio, as the
administration’s Secretary of the Interior served to intensify the fires of partisan
politics. Ewing sought to discredit Weller and to frustrate any ambitions he may
have entertained of returning to Ohio politics, where he still enjoyed popular
support among voters.23
The incoming Taylor Administration, maneuvering to build political support
for its programs, offered appointments to lucrative government positions to
family members of several congressional leaders. In June Secretary of State John
132
Clayton notified John C. Fremont, the western explorer and son-in-law of Senator
Thomas Hart Benton, of his appointment by President Taylor as the U.S. boundary
commissioner. Clayton instructed Fremont to hold Weller’s letter of dismissal
until he was ready to assume the position. He justified the dismissal on grounds
of mismanagement of commission affairs and failure to file required expenditure
reports. Emory, upon learning of the Fremont appointment, submitted his letter
of resignation, considering the action as rebuke by the new administration of his
conduct at Fremont’s recent court martial trial.24
Prior to his departure for California, Weller withdrew $33,325 from the
Treasury Department to cover expenses for purchasing equipment, surveying
instruments, supplies and travel to California. The runaway inflation caused by
the gold rush quickly exhausted those funds. In August 1849 Weller left San Diego
and traveled north in search of additional financing, but San Francisco merchants,
aware of the rumors regarding his dismissal, would not honor his drafts.
In Monterey the news of his dismissal had already arrived before him, and
General Bennett Riley, the military governor of California, declined to advance any
funds to Weller for the commission. After receiving a similar request from Emory,
Riley did authorize $3,000 to provide “subsistence” to the commission’s military
personnel and employees. Riley told Emory that it afforded him “great pleasure to
arrange any thing that will facilitate your operations.”
At this point Weller met with Fremont who acknowledged the news of the
appointment but did not deliver to the commissioner his formal letter of dismissal.
After receiving a full accounting of the commission’s affairs, Fremont prevailed
upon Weller to return to San Diego and continue to discharge his duties until he
was prepared to formally assume the position. Fremont agreed to negotiate in
San Francisco Weller’s drafts for $10,000 to allow the commission to maintain its
operations.25
While Weller was away up north, the work of the joint commission proceeded
in San Diego. Emory and Salazar Ylarregui established their camps with
observatories south of the port and started taking astronomical readings to
determine the latitude and longitude of the initial point. The surveyors initiated
work mapping the port of San Diego to determine its southernmost point.26
Prior to beginning the survey, there was some discussion about how the port
of San Diego should be defined for purposes of drawing the boundary line.
García Conde raised the issue unofficially, contending that the port consisted
only of the ship landing area near Ballast Point and not the entire bay as shown
on Pantoja map. Weller disagreed and indicated that if the Mexican commissioner
pursued the issue, he would insist on locating the line further to the south at the
former boundary between Upper and Lower California, as called for in the treaty.
Neither commissioner raised this issue during the formal proceedings of the joint
boundary commission.27
In the more than sixty years since Pantoja drew his map, the configuration of
the shoreline for the port had changed significantly. Gray reasoned that part of the
change in appearance was due to differences in the seasons of the year between
Pantoja’s survey and theirs. After much debate and compromises by both sides,
the surveyors agreed that they had to identify the southernmost point based on
features presented in the map and not on the 1849 landscape. They were able to
locate a physical feature on the western shore of the port “a range of bluffs,” that
133
they could identify as a point

on Pantoja’s map. Using the
scale shown on the map, they
measured off the distance
to the southernmost point,
which they then transferred
to the configuration of the
shoreline in 1849. As a result
of their work, both surveyors
prepared maps of the harbor
depicting the southernmost
point as specified by the
treaty.28
Next, they determined the
distance of one marine league
from the spot designated
as the southernmost point
of the port. The surveyors
needed to agree on the
distance encompassed by
one marine league, which
was a unit of measurement
Captain Edmund L. F. Hardcastle, a topographical engineer, oversaw unfamiliar to Americans.
the placement of monuments along the boundary line. Of all the In 1849 there were no
officials associated with marking the California boundary, Hardcastle
had the distinction of being the only one who worked on the drawing
international standards
of the line from the beginning (June 1849) to the end (July 1851). for units of measurements.
Courtesy of the Maryland State Archives. García Conde had received
specific instructions from
his government regarding this measurement, which subsequently guided Salazar
Ylarregui in his dealings with Gray. The surveyors decided to use the distance of
5,564.6 meters based on a publication printed in France in 1839 by Louis Benjamin
Francoeur, a professor at the University of Paris.29
While the survey of the port was proceeding, Emory and Weller sent out
two American survey teams to begin extending the line east. Lieutenant Amiel
Whipple, one of two West Point graduates and topographical engineers assigned
to assist Emory, traveled to the junction of the Gila and Colorado rivers to
determine the latitude and longitude of the point where the line would terminate
at its eastern end. Lieutenant Cave J. Couts, a native of Tennessee and a Mexican
War veteran, led the military escort accompanying Whipple’s party. The sour
relationship between Whipple and Couts—and the hardships they experienced
assisting hundreds of destitute emigrants bound for the gold fields—has been well
documented in published accounts of their work.30
Lieutenant Edmund L. F. Hardcastle, the other topographical engineer,
commanded a second party with orders to make a reconnaissance in the direction
of the Gila River to “select elevated points by which the extremities of the line
could be connected in longitude by flashes of gun powder.” Emory instructed
Hardcastle to use the opportunity to collect any information of the country that
may be deemed useful to the government.31 The rugged, desolate environment
134
Topographical sketch of the southernmost point of the port of San Diego as surveyed by the U.S. Commission. U.S.
Senate Executive Document No. 34 (1850), U.S. Government Publication Serial No. 558. Courtesy of the San
Diego Historical Society.
presented severe hardships, and at times “almost insurmountable obstacles,” to the

joint commission as it conducted its work.32
During October, Emory sought to determine the relative longitude of the
boundary by simultaneous observations of flashes of gunpowder and rockets
from five elevated sites along the 141-mile line, recording time differences at each
location. In addition to the observatories at both ends of the line, stations were set
up at “Cerro Colorado, Los Piños and Mount Wiccarnon.” Fog coming up from
the Gulf of California obstructed the view across the southern part of the desert.
The experiment was abandoned after failing to complete all observations on five
successive nights, compelling the commission to revert to astronomical methods
for determining the longitude.33
Weller returned to San Diego on the October steamer as the surveyors located
the initial point on the Pacific Coast marking the beginning of the boundary
line. On October 8 the joint commission met near the southernmost point of the
port of San Diego to hear the reports and examine the work of the surveyors.
The commission met again on October 10 and “after a careful examination of the
ground, and the surveys made by the respective parties, the initial point in the
boundary was finally fixed and determined.” During these deliberations, Salazar
Ylarregui’s initial recommendation for the location of the initial point was rejected
and a compromise site selected.
135
The joint commission ordered that a hermetically sealed bottle enclosing a

sworn statement, in both Spanish and English, declaring “that the demarcation
of boundary between the United States and Mexican Republic shall commence at
this point, all in conformity with the 5th Article of the Treaty signed at the City of
Guadalupe Hidalgo on the 2nd of February 1848” be buried. The initial point of
the boundary as agreed upon is in north latitude 32° 31’ 59”.58 and the longitude
of 7 hours 48 minutes 21.10 west of Greenwich. In the presence of witnesses, a
temporary post was set in place to mark the spot until a permanent monument
could be arranged.34
The Illustrated London News reporting on the occasion noted “during these
ceremonies the countenances of the Mexican Commissioners exhibited a
remarkable degree of gravity: they did not forget that they were affixing the last
seal to the treaty for the dismemberment of their Republic.”35
With the initial point of the boundary identified, the Mexican surveyors joined
their American counterparts in focusing their efforts on locating the eastern
terminus of the line. The Mexican Commission, having fewer surveyors than the
Americans, lagged behind in their surveying at times. It included five engineer/
scientists while the American contingent consisted of twenty-six members between
engineers and their assistants. The Americans were able to staff four field parties
while the Mexicans could sustain no more than two at a time since they did not
receive the support needed to match the efforts of the Americans.36
The issue nagging the American force was providing daily subsistence and
materials for their personnel since funding from Washington D.C. was not
forthcoming. The task of supplying the men in the field proved challenging. While
on his reconnaissance in the mountains, Hardcastle sent a letter to Emory on a
Wednesday hoping that it would reach him by Thursday. He needed additional
supplies sent out by Friday in order to reach him by Sunday, the day on which the
men’s rations would run out.37
In addition to a smaller staff, the Mexican Commission experienced setbacks
from the beginning. Prior to departing for California, the commission ordered
scientific instruments from Europe to run the boundary line. The instruments
were inspected prior to shipping to confirm their quality, but when they arrived
it was discovered that someone had exchanged them for instruments of inferior
quality. The Mexican commission was forced to borrow instruments from the
Colegio Militar and Colegio de Minería, some of which were of poorer quality
than the ones received from Europe. As Salazar Ylarregui explained “the hand
of fate, which touches whatever is Mexican, reached out to the instruments in
Paris.” Emory’s criticism of the Mexican instruments used in the California survey
was confirmed by Salazar Ylarregui, who did not hesitate to complain about his
instruments. However, instruments for topographical surveying and mapping
were never faulted; it was the instruments used for astronomical readings that
were of poor quality. 38
The Mexican Commission’s late arrival in San Diego left them at a disadvantage
since the Americans had already been in the field for over a month. Losses
occurring in the field resulted in additional delays. The Mexican Commission was
forced to wait before sending a field team to the Gila and Colorado rivers when
its military escort failed to arrive. Indian attacks, desertions, and stolen livestock
delayed the arrival of their escort in San Diego.39
136
Following the dedication of the initial point, Weller directed Gray to take his
survey party to the junction of the Gila and Colorado rivers to survey the eastern
terminus of the line. Gray’s party traveled up the Tia Juana River Valley to Tecate
and through several valleys crossing over the mountains to the main emigrant
trail near Carrizo Creek. At the base of the mountains Gray encountered a group
of emigrants led by James C. Collier, the newly appointed Collector of Customs for
the Port of San Francisco by the Taylor Administration.
The Collier party had left Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in May. After traveling
overland via Santa Fe, their animals were near exhaustion and the party was
reduced to half rations. Gray was uncertain the party could make it to San Diego
on its own and decided to guide it back over the same trail he had just used. He
directed his assistant, John Forester, to continue on to the Gila and Colorado to
complete the survey. .
Upon Gray’s return to San Diego, Weller was irate with him for abandoning
his assignment. Gray, for his part, explained that he “would not send my assistant
back to guide the party because I wished to be there myself, in case of any accident
or obstacle occurred, it being the first time that I believed its ascent had ever been
attempted with packs, . . .” Gray believed he had pioneered a new trail across
the mountains, a trail that had been known to local residents for years.40 In a
group with other commission members, Weller belittled the idea that Gray had
discovered a new shorter trail, and in the altercation that followed, Weller suffered
a gunshot wound to his thigh. Reports about the incident indicated that both men
had been drinking when the jesting escalated.41
Weller refused to allow Gray to undertake a second trip to the junction of the
Gila and Colorado rivers to finalize the work. Instead, he directed Emory to have
Whipple meet with Salazar Ylarregui to reach an agreement as to the point where
the middle of the Rio Gila united with the Colorado. Weller, who was confined to
his sick bed, also did not travel to the site. Salazar Ylarregui protested to García
Conde, who was at the site expecting to meet Weller, about the substituting
of Whipple. He believed that it was a violation of the treaty since neither the
American commissioner nor surveyor would be present to verify the eastern point
of the line.42
García Conde overruled Ylarregui, ordering him to meet with Whipple to verify
the work. Following the signing, Ylarregui, who was growing increasingly critical
of García Conde’s handling of the commission’s affairs, remained at the Gila and
Colorado for another month completing his own survey of the point where the two
rivers merged. García Conde later complained to his government about Weller’s
frequent absences from the commission.43
By December 1849 with the two ends of the boundary line identified, all that
remained was the drawing of the azimuth line to connect the two ends and the
placement of monuments. Weller suspended the work of the American commission
due to dwindling funds and made another trip to San Francisco to confer with
Fremont. He learned upon his arrival that Fremont had announced his resignation
from the boundary commission, a position he never occupied, to seek election as
California’s first U.S. Senator. Weller’s personal property and funds were seized
in legal actions by San Francisco bankers after the Treasury Department, upon
instructions from Clayton, refused to honor boundary commission drafts.44
In Washington responsibility for overseeing the boundary commission was
137
transferred to Ewing and the newly created Department of the Interior. The
Secretary of War denied Emory’s letter of resignation fearing that it would set a
bad precedent allowing an officer to quit his post in the field because of a personal
dispute with a superior. Upon learning of Fremont’s resignation, Ewing sent
another series of letters firing Weller a second time and appointing Emory to serve
as the acting commissioner until a permanent one was appointed.45
During all of these events Weller had received only one communication from
Clayton in March advising him that his salary could not be paid until Congress
passed the necessary legislation. Despite all that had happened to him, Weller
refused to abandon his post until formally discharged and returned to San Diego
to finish the work on the California boundary. 46
At the January 28 commission meeting, García Conde raised the issue of the
boundary line at the mouth of the Gila River trying again to gain a foothold
for Mexico in the port of San Diego. He stated that at the time the treaty was
negotiated, the American representative offered to cede three leagues of land on
the Pacific, commencing at the Ranchería de las Choyas, in exchange for a small
portion of territory on the right side of the Colorado River. Treaty negotiators,
relying on the maps that were available, assumed that the Colorado River ran
directly south after the junction with the Gila River. They did not realize that the
Colorado turned in a northwesterly direction before turning south, leaving both
banks of the river on the American side of the line for several miles. Due to a
chance of nature, the new boundary line complied with the terms of the treaty but
did not conform to the intent of those who concluded them.
García Conde wanted the matter left for future negotiations between their
respective governments. However, Weller could not accede to the request of the
Mexican commissioner. The treaty extended to the commissioners the authority
and responsibility for running the boundary line; and decisions agreed upon by
them were incorporated as part of the treaty. He stated, “it is expected that we
will execute this duty and settle the question forever.” Weller admitted that the
maps available to treaty negotiators were probably incorrect. He contended that
the lack of accurate knowledge of the region’s geography had hurt both countries,
especially the U.S. since the survey was not placing the boundary in its original
location as specified in the first paragraph in Article V of the treaty. García Conde
commented afterwards that their decision met the legal intent of the treaty but not
its spirit. He later came under severe criticism for his handling of the survey and
conceding too much land in California.47
The following day the joint commission convened to discuss the placement of
monuments to mark the boundary line between the Pacific and Gila River. Since
the commission believed that a large portion of land bordering the boundary
would never be “settled” or “cultivated,” members agreed that seven monuments
were “considered amply sufficient” to mark the line. It directed the setting of “one
monument at the initial point on the Pacific, one on the spot of land agreed upon
near the mouth of the Gila River, one on the left bank of the Colorado where the
line crosses that river, [and] one upon the desert, as near as practicable where the
line crosses New River.”48
The remaining three monuments were to be placed “at such points on the
intervening mountains as may be most visible and of greatest interest.” This action
was later modified by the commission to require the placement of one of the three
138
Monument No. 1 on the Pacific. The inscription reads: “Initial point of boundary between the United States and
Mexico, established by the Joint Commission 10th October, A.D. 1849, agreeably to the treaty dated at the City of
Guadalupe Hidalgo February 2, A.D. 1848. John B. Weller, U.S. Commissioner. Andrew B. Gray, U.S. Surveyor.”
©SDHS #OP 12794.
139
intermediate monuments on the road leading from San Diego to Lower California
where it crossed the line. Since Emory had already begun to mark the azimuth
of the line east from the Pacific for approximately thirty miles, he and Salazar
Ylarregui were authorized to designate the precise point for the placement of this
monument.49
At a subsequent meeting, the commission gave specific instructions as to
the construction of the monuments. For the initial point on the Pacific, the joint
commission specified a white marble monument having a 3-foot square base with
a pyramid or obelisk set atop, 9 feet in height or thereabout, costing no more than
$1,500. The commission also stipulated the text of the inscription to be included,
requesting that the monument be placed on a mound above the surface of the
earth resulting in an overall height of approximately 14 feet. Directions for the
monument to be erected near the mouth of the Gila River included construction
of white marble, smaller dimensions, similar inscription, and costs not to
exceed $500. The specifications for the other five monuments called for cast iron
construction, not to exceed 400 lbs. in weight, with inscriptions similar to the
others.50
Additionally, the commission appointed two surveyors, one from each country,
to oversee the construction of the monuments and supervise their placement
on the line. These surveyors were to file minutes of their proceedings at the
conclusion of their work. The commissioners appointed Captain Hardcastle and
Francisco Jiménez, the First Engineer of the Mexican Commission, to supervise the
work of placing the monuments on the line.51
At its February 15 meeting the commission agreed that it was not practical
to mark the line from California east of the Gila River because of the gold rush
and its inflationary economy. The commission agreed to adjourn and reconvene
in El Paso on the first Monday of November 1850. Two days after this meeting,
Emory received Secretary Ewing’s letter of December 19 appointing him acting
commissioner. He delivered to Weller his official notification discharging him as
boundary commissioner.52
By the end of January, with all funds exhausted, General Riley interceded
again on behalf of the U.S. commission authorizing Emory an additional $5,000 to
sustain the operations of his command. When funds promised by the Secretary
of the Interior did not arrive by summer, Emory negotiated a loan from Port
Collector Collier in San Francisco. Upon his return to Washington in October 1850,
Emory listed debts and loans exceeding $15,000 for the commission. Congress had
recently approved $185,000 in funding to continue the survey work and, through
the new boundary commissioner, John Russell Bartlett, Emory resolved the
financial distress of the California survey.53
Following adjournment of the boundary commission, Jiménez and Hardcastle
conferred to plan a course of action for completing their assignment. They decided
to have the monuments manufactured in the United States and signed orders for
their construction. Hardcastle accepted responsibility for overseeing this process.
They agreed to have the monuments shipped to San Diego by sea where they
would transport them to their permanent locations. Lastly they agreed to meet
in San Diego on January 1, 1851 to complete their work; if one of them could not
return, their appointed representative was authorized to act on their country’s
behalf. At some point following this meeting, Hardcastle and Emory had second
140
thoughts about the commission’s plans for placing a marble monument at the
Gila River, given the problems of transporting it across the mountains and desert.
Emory approved changing the plans to have the monument made of cast iron.54
In April, Hardcastle submitted an order to E. & G. W. Blunt of New York for the
manufacture of monuments including plans and specifications for their design. He
advised the company that the instructions are “not intended to be strictly adhered
to, as they merely indicate general dimensions leaving to the architect the more
proper arrangement of the proportions.” He provided instructions for cast iron
monuments and suggested that the plans for the monuments follow those made at
the Boston foundry for the northeastern boundary as a guide. Finally, he wanted
the monument for the Gila River manufactured one-third larger than the other
five.55
By May 1850 the joint boundary commission ceased its operations in San Diego.
Only Hardcastle and five assistants remained to help with running the line. Emory
wanted the boundary secured “beyond all cavil,” or trivial objections, and directed
the construction of stone, or cairn, monuments along the line. These monuments
were 12 feet at the base and 12 feet high and composed of stones and earth. After
overseeing this work eastward from the Pacific Coast over settled areas of the line
for over thirty miles, Emory turned the work over to Hardcastle. Salazar Ylarregui
paid the initial cost of this work, and Emory, unwilling to leave the debt unpaid,
borrowed the funds to pay the U.S. share prior to the departure of the Mexican
commission. Hardcastle labored through the summer and fall surveying the
topography and placing cairns along the line.56
In January 1850 Jiménez failed to return as planned and it wasn’t until March 18
when Ricardo Ramírez arrived to serve in his place as Mexico’s representative for
finishing the work that remained. The cast iron monuments were recently received
and awaiting placement on the line. Hardcastle and Ramírez decided to travel to
the Gila and Colorado to set the two most easterly monuments first before turning
westward across the desert to place monuments in the vicinity of the Emigrant
Trail and New River. After this they intended to return to San Diego to set the
monuments at the initial point and on the road to Lower California before running
the line eastward until completed. They agreed to place the final monument on the
road between Rancho Otay and Rancho Jesús María where it crossed the line. They
spent the next three months finishing the marking of the line and setting these
monuments in place as they had planned.57
At times this work proved toilsome as Hardcastle and Ramírez and the men
working with them endured severe hardships completing their tasks. In a letter
to Emory, Hardcastle described their efforts to place the monument at New River
after being unable to take sightings at night from fires on Signal Mountain to
determine a fixed point for prolonging the line:
The only method remaining that presented itself was to produce

the line continuously, and this I determined to undertake despite
the many and serious obstacles that opposed. Accordingly I fitted
out and started with a party of 5 persons–myself, Ingraham and
three men–with two pack mules. The first two days we progressed
slowly, at the end of the second day we were not more than 13 miles
distant from the Colorado; but we pressed onward, notwithstanding
141
the discouraging difficulties–the almost impassable hills of drifting

sands and the intense heat–that presented themselves…Considering
the distance, the heavy sand – sometimes disposed in hills,
sometimes in hillocks–the entire absence of water and the scorching
rays of the sun pouring down upon and reflected from the glittering
sands–some idea may be formed of the trial to physical strength and
endurance to which a party, compelled to move slowly and in a direct
line over this desert, is subjected.58
By mid-June Hardcastle and Ramírez worked to extend the line from Mount
Tecate to New River, connecting the line coming from the Pacific to the one
heading west from the Gila and Colorado. They had to take a couple of extra days
to realign the boundary since the line from the Pacific reached New River 1,864
feet south of the monument they had recently placed. They had anticipated this
problem and agreed to move the monuments at New River and the Emigrant Trail
to conform to the line coming from the Pacific. Hardcastle described the line from
the east as an approximation since they had used an instrument of poor quality
to complete that part of the survey. As he explained, this was the only instrument
light enough to carry on the “waste of deep and plodding sand.”59
The marble monument for the initial point on the Pacific was the last to arrive.
The Daily Alta California, on March 14, 1851, reported the arrival in San Francisco of
the topsail schooner Helena carrying the monument for the U.S.-Mexico boundary
line. The monument was shipped down to San Diego the next month aboard the
schooner Annette. It consisted of four separate pieces and weighed over eight
tons. Hardcastle believed that the design of the monument was a big mistake and
complained frequently to Emory about it. On one occasion he wrote “what a great
mistake it was to have a marble monument of such dimension—one piece alone
weighs 5 tons and is so unwieldy that it will be difficult to get here and more
difficult afterwards to put in position.”60
Upon the monument’s arrival in San Diego, military personnel transported the
pieces down to south end of the port on a flat-bottom barge before transferring
them to gun carriages for delivery to the bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The
monument was installed on a masonry foundation six feet square on top and
extending three feet below the earth’s surface to prevent settling. Once this work
was completed Hardcastle held a ceremony and picnic, on July 14, at the site to
dedicate the monument and celebrate the completion of the California boundary
line. News reports about the dedication called it a “splendid marble monument.”61
Except for a brief two-week period in 1894, this monument has stood on the
line for 156 years identifying the beginning of the boundary shared by Mexico
and the United States. Its history is closely associated with the Mexican American
War and its aftermath. It is the starting point of the southwestern boundary of
the United States, a boundary that in 1848 completed the country’s westward
continental expansion. The Gadsden Treaty of 1853 resulted in a modification of
the California boundary line at its eastern terminus and during those negotiations
issues regarding the port of San Diego were never revisited. In an irony of history,
the line marks the northern border of Mexico that resulted in the loss of over
half its territory, while it added land to Baja California. La Mojonera is part of the
rich historical heritage shared by the two countries and the San Diego/Tijuana
142
transborder region. Its historical importance to that heritage clearly justifies its
value and continued preservation.62
One last note, on February 19, 1852, John Russell Bartlett, Weller’s successor as
boundary commissioner, visited San Diego and took the opportunity to visit the
boundary line and see the new monument. He noted that the “monument stands
directly opposite the Coronado Islands, and is seen from a great distance on land
as well as by vessels at sea. On the table-land around and south of it, grows a
large number of the beautiful agave.” During his brief stay Bartlett made a pencil
drawing of the landmark, which is the oldest known image of the monument that
is available today.63
NOTES
1. On the Mexican side of the border, the monument is popularly known as “La Mojonera” or “The
Landmark.” Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, “Border Field Park’s Disrepair is Sadly Symbolic, San Diego
Union-Tribune, June 28, 2003, page E-2. For the official name, see National Register of Historic Places
Inventory–Nomination Form, September 6, 1974, State Office of Historic Preservation, Sacramento,
CA. The official length of the boundary line, according to the International Boundary and Water
Commission, is 1,952 miles, excluding maritime boundaries, running from the Pacific Ocean to the
Gulf of Mexico. Paula Rebert, La Gran Línea, Mapping the United States—Mexico Boundary, 1849-1857
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 12. For the dedication of the monument, see “Minutes of
the Meeting between Captain Edmund L. F. Hardcastle of the United States and Ricardo Ramírez
of Mexico for the Purpose of Locating the Monuments Marking the Boundary between the Two
Countries,” July 14, 1851, Henderson Collection, MSA SC 501, Folder 59, Maryland State Archives,
Annapolis, Maryland (hereafter Hardcastle & Ramírez Minutes) and the San Diego Herald, July 24,
1851, 2. The number of monuments cited for marking the boundary line is based on email information
received by the author from the IBWC, Realty Branch, January 30, 2007.
2. The two most authoritative studies to date on the drawing of the boundary line are Rebert, La
Gran Línea, and Joseph Richard Werne, The Imaginary Line: A History of the United States and Mexican
Boundary Survey, 1848-1857 (College Station: Texas Christian University, 2007). A partial list of
standard studies includes William H. Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West, 1803-1863
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 153-208; Carl Irving Wheat, Mapping the American West,
1540-1861. Vol. 3 From the Mexican War to the Boundary Surveys, 1846-1854 (San Francisco: Institute of
Historical Cartography, 1959), 204-246; Odie B. Faulk, Too Far North . . . Too Far South (Los Angeles:
Westernlore Press, 1967); Robert V. Hine, Bartlett’s West; Drawing the Mexican Boundary (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1968); Leon C. Metz, Border: The U.S.-Mexico Line (El Paso, TX: Mangan Books,
1989), 3-116; Dawn Hall, ed., Drawing the Borderline: Artist-Explorers on the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey,
preface by Robert V. Hine (Albuquerque: Albuquerque Museum, 1996); L. David Norris, James C.
Milligan and Odie B. Faulk, William H. Emory: Soldier-Scientist (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1998), 65-172; Lewis B. Lesley, “The International Boundary Survey From San Diego to the Gila River,
1849-1850,” California Historical Society Quarterly 9, no. 1 (1930): 3-15; For studies providing some
discussion of monuments, see Lenard E. Brown, “Survey of the United States Mexico Boundary,
1849-1855: Background Study,” (Washington: National Park Service, 1969), 148-171; Michael Dear,
“Monuments, Manifest Destiny, and Mexico,” Prologue 37 (Summer 2005): 32-41. Articles related to the
history of the boundary commission that appeared in The Journal of San Diego History (hereafter JSDH)
include Thomas L. Scharf, “Amiel Weeks Whipple and the Boundary Survey in Southern California,”
JSDH 19, no. 3 (1973): 18-31; Thomas L. Scharf, ed., “Pages from the Diary of Cave Johnson Couts: San
Diego in the Spring and Summer of 1849,” JSDH 26, no. 2 (1976): 9-19; Raymond Starr, ed., “Emigrants
and Indians: Selections From C. J. Couts’ Military Correspondence, 1849,” JSDH 29, no. 3 (1983): 165-84;
Jorge A. Vargas, “The Pantoja Map of 1782 and the Port of San Diego: Some Answers Regarding the
International Boundary in the San Diego-Tijuana Region,” JSDH 46, nos. 2-3 (2000): 118-27. A view of
the monument at sunset overlooking the Pacific Ocean appeared on the cover of the July 1968 issue of
JSDH. Articles in newspapers and magazines include Rita Larkin, “Whatever Became of Our Obelisk?
New Hope for an Old Tourist Mecca,” San Diego & Point Magazine 17 (April, 1965): 100-101, 117; “Initial
Point of Boundary Began Era of Peace for U.S., Mexico,” San Diego Union, September 19, 1971, G1-2;
143
Dorothy Loomis, “Politics, as always, got’n the way as the survey was made of the border,” San Diego
Union, September 17, 1961, A46; “Border Monument 100 Years Old,” Southern California Rancher 16 (July
1951), 15; John A. Ryan, “Bloodshed, Hate, War Located Present Little Known Monument,” Imperial
Beach News, July 9, 1959; “Lonely Monument on the Border,” Westways 50 (June 1958): 14-15.
3. Rebert, La Gran Línea, 1-2.
4. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (Norman:
University of Oklahoma, 1990), 187-88.
5. Charles E. Chapman, A History of California: The Spanish Period (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1921), 368; George W. Hendry, “Francisco Palóu’s Boundary Marker: A Record of the
Discovery of the First Boundary between Upper and Lower California,” California Historical Society
Quarterly 5 (December 1926): 320-27. Fray Francisco Palóu, Historical Memoirs of New California, ed.
Herbert Eugene Bolton (1926; New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), 300-302, 305.
6. Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America: Documents 122-150, 1846-1852,
ed. Hunter Miller (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937), 5:315-38; Vargas, “The Pantoja
Map of 1782 and the Port of San Diego,” 120; Oscar J. Martinez, “Surveying and Marking the U.S.-
Mexico Boundary: The Mexican Perspective,” in Hall, Drawing the Borderline, 13-22; Richard J. Werne,
“Pedro García Conde: El Trazado De Límites Con Estados Unidos Desde El Punto De Vista Mexicano,
1848-1853,” Historia Mexicana 36 (Julio-Septiembre, 1986): 113-29; Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and
Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation, (New York: Alfred A. Knopft, 1963), 107-49.
7. Norman A. Graebner, Empire on the Pacific: A Study in American Continental Expansion (1955; reprint
ed., Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, Inc., 1983), 1-21, 59-69, 219-24.
8. Norris, William H. Emory: Soldier-Scientist, 61; William H. Emory, Lieutenant Emory Reports: A
Reprint of Lieutenant W.H. Emory’s Notes of a Military Reconnaissance, introduction & notes by Ross
Calvin (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1951; paperback edition, 1968), 176. Calloa is
the port at Lima, Peru.
9. Treaties and Other International Acts, 315-38; Griswold, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 187-88;
George P. Hammond, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: February Second 1848 (Berkeley: The Friends
of the Bancroft Library, 1949): 73-75.
10. Griswold del Castillo, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 187-88.
11. Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997), 1-31; William H. Emory, “Report of the United States and
Mexican Boundary Survey: Made Under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior,” House Executive
Document 135, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 3-4 (hereafter HED 135).
12. Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West, 158; Norris, William H. Emory: Soldier-Scientist,
61-62.
13. Paula Rebert, “Trabajos Desconocidos, Ingenieros Olvidados: Unknown Works and Forgotten
Engineers of the Mexican Boundary Commission,” in Mapping and Empire: Soldier-Engineers on the
Southwest Frontier, ed. Dennis Reinhartz and Gerald D. Saxon (Austin: University of Texas, 2005),
161; Harry P. Hewitt, “The Mexican Boundary Survey Team: Pedro García in California,” Western
Historical Quarterly 21 (May 1990), 176-77; Luz Maria O. Tamayo Perez and José Omar Moncada Maya,
“José Salazar Ilarregui,” Geographers Biobibliographical Studies, ed. Patrick H. Armstrong and Geoffrey
J. Martin (New York: Continuum, 2004), 23:116-25. The spelling of Salazar Ylarregui does vary in the
numerous sources reviewed. The format adopted in the text is the spelling used by Werne and Rebert.
14. Hewitt, “The Mexican Boundary Survey Team,” 176-177.
15. James Buchann to John Weller, January 24 and February 13, 1849, in The Works of James Buchann:
Comprising his Speeches, State Papers, and Private Correspondence, ed. John Bassett Moore (New York:
Antiquarian Press, LTD., 1960), 8:293-94, 322-26; Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American
West, 206-11; Joseph Ellison, California and the Nation, 1850-1869: A Study of the Relations of a Frontier
Community with the Federal Government (New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), 136-43.
16. Congressional Globe, 31st Congress, 2nd Session, 81-82; Hiram H. Robinson to The Cincinnati
Enquirer, April 12, May 26, and June 21, 1849. Robinson served as the Secretary to the Boundary
Commission from February to November 1849. At the same time he was a correspondent and held an
interest in The Cincinnati Enquirer. See Sidney Cohen, “Biographical Data on the Librarians of the Ohio
144
State Library, 1817-1960,” (master’s thesis, Kent State University, 1961), 36-37.
17. Journal of the Joint Commission, July 7, 1849, Senate Executive Document 119, 32nd Congress, 1st
Session (hereafter SED 119), 57.
18. Ibid, 58-59; Rebert, “Trabajos Desconocidos, Ingenieros Olvidados,” 160; Norris, William H. Emory:
Soldier-Scientist, 73-75. For accounts of the 1849 4th of July celebration, see John B. Goodman, “Forty-
Niners’ Independence Celebration,” San Diego Historical Society Quarterly 1 (July 1955): 29-31; Starr,
“Pages from the Diary of Cave Johnson Couts,” 14-15; Hiram H. Robinson to The Cincinnati Enquirer,
September 18, 1849.
19. Rebert, La Gran Línea, 27; William H. Emory, Notes on the Survey of the Boundary Line between Mexico
and the United States (Cincinnati: Morgan & Overend, 1851), 3-18.
20. In his report, Emory stated “in this operation I looked for little or no aid from the Mexican
commission, for although composed of well educated and scientific men, their instruments were
radically defective. Our determinations, after being re-observed and re-computed by the Mexican
commission, were received by them without correction.” HED 135, 5. Some of the standard studies
citing the limited role of the Mexican engineers include Brown, Survey of the United States Mexico
Boundary, 1849-1855, 6; Lesley, “The International Boundary Survey from San Diego to the Gila River,
1849-1850,” 9; Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West, 160-61; Faulk, Too Far North…Too Far
South, 22, 30-31. Ed Scott, a San Diego historian, is frequently cited regarding the limited contribution
made by the Mexican Boundary Commission. Ed Scott, San Diego County Soldier-Pioneers, 1846-1866
(National City, CA: Crest Printing Co.), 21.
21. Rebert, “Trabajos Desconocidos, Ingenieros Olvidados,” 156-57; Rebert, La Gran Línea, 34-40;
Hewitt, “The Mexican Boundary Survey Team,” 171-96.
22. J. Fred Rippy, The United States and Mexico (1931; reprint, New York, AMS Press, 1971), 106-09;
Lesley, “International Boundary Survey,” 3-6; Joseph Richard Werne, “Partisan Politics and the
Mexican Boundary Survey,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 90 (1987): 329-46.
23. Werne, “Partisan Politics and the Mexican Boundary Survey,” 329-46; Goetzmann, Army
Exploration in the American West, 163-67; Weller’s critics accused him of departing Cincinnati in haste
for the Pacific coast to get beyond the reach of the new administration and avoid being recalled. In
Congressional debates, California Senator, William M. Gwin, pointed out that Weller had an interview
with President-Elect Taylor prior to his departure. Taylor expressed no objections to Weller’s plans for
getting the survey underway. Congressional Globe, 31st Congress, 2nd Session, 82.
24. Elbert B. Smith, The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor & Millard Fillmore (Lawrence, KN: University
Press of Kansas, 1988), 54-66; Clayton to Fremont, June 20, 1849; Clayton to Weller, June 26, 1849; and
Clayton to Fremont, June 28, 1849; C. L. Weller to Clayton, July 20, 1849; Emory to Clayton, September
15, 1849 in Report of the Secretary of the Interior . . ., 31st Congress, 1st Session, 1850, Senate Executive
Document 34 (Serial 558), 1:9-11, 28-29 (hereafter SED 34); Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American
West, 163-167; Werne, The Imaginary Line, 50.
25. Letter - S. Pleasonton to Ewing, 28 December 1849, SED 119, p. 2; Letter - E.R.S. Canby to Emory,
25 September 1849, Records of the 10th Military Department, 1846-1851, National Archives Microfilm
Publication 210, Roll 1, Letters Sent, Volume 6, pp.177-78; Congressional Globe, 31st Congress, 2nd Session,
1850, pp. 78-84.
26. Rebert, La Gran Línea, 60. Emory’s Camp Riley was named after the senior military officer in
California, General Bennett Riley. There were a number of other camps established by the members
of the boundary commission over the two years it took to complete the California boundary. Weller
set up his headquarters near the site Punto de los Muertos on the future site of New Town. Gray and
Salazar established their camps near a fresh water creek south of Emory’s camp on the road to Lower
California. Gray named his camp “Rough and Ready” and Salazar called his “el primero campo.”
Captain Hayden and the infantry’s located their camp east of Gray’s. The Dragoons set up camp
further south on the Arroyo de Tia Juana east of the road to Lower California. In September Gray
relocated his camp closer to the initial point on the Arroyo de Tia Juana. See Gray’s plan of the port
of San Diego, “Topographical Sketch Southernmost Point of the Port of San Diego,” SED34, 1:55; José
Salazar Ylarregui, Datos de los trabajos astronómicos y topograficos, dispuestos en forma de diario, practicados
durante el año de 1849 y principios de 1850 por la Comissión de Límites Mexicana en la línea que divide esta
República de la de los Estados-Unidos (Mexico City: Imprenta de Juan R. Navarro, 1850), 15 and map;
History of San Diego County, ed. Carl H. Heilbron (San Diego: The San Diego Press Club, 1936), 80.
145
27. John S. Robb to St. Louis Weekly Reveille, July 9, 1849 in John Francis McDermott, ed., “Gold Fever:
The Letters of ‘Solitaire,’ Goldrush Correspondent of ’49,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin 5 (July
1949), 317; Vargas, “The Pantoja Map of 1782 and the Port of San Diego,” 122-23.
28. Rebert, La Gran Línea, 60-64; Hewitt, “The Mexican Boundary Survey Team: Pedro García in
California,” 182-85; A.B. Gray to John R. Bartlett, July 25, 1851, SED 119, 283.
29. Ibid.
30. Norris, William H. Emory: Soldier-Scientist, 75; A. W. Whipple, The Whipple Report: Journal of an
Expedition from San Diego, California to the Rio Colorado, from Sept. 11 to Dec. 11, 1849, ed. E. I. Edwards
(Los Angles: Westernlore Press, 1961). This report was also published as a government document,
“Report of Lieutenant Whipple’s Expedition,” 31st Congress, 2nd Session, 1851, Senate Executive
Document 19 (Serial 589); William McPherson, ed., From San Diego to the Colorado in 1849: The Journal
and Maps of Cave J. Couts (Los Angeles: Arthur M. Ellis, 1932). Emory and Riley strongly supported
efforts to aid those gold rush emigrants in distress after crossing the desert. Canby to Emory,
November 1, 1849, Records of the 10th Military Department, Microcopy 210, Roll 1, 6:217.
31. Norris, William H. Emory: Soldier-Scientist, 77.
32. HED 135, 4.
33. Emory, Notes on the Survey of the Boundary Line, 9; John Walton Caughey, “Rocket Men of the
Mexican Border,” Westways, 41 (July 1949): 12-13.
34. Journal of the Joint Boundary Commission, October 8, October 10, 1849, SED 119, 58-59; Rebert, La
Gran Línea, 64.
35. London Illustrated News, January 5, 1850, 5-6.
36. Hewitt, “The Mexican Boundary Survey Team,” 181.
37. Norris, William H. Emory: Soldier-Scientist, 77-78.
38. Rebert, La Gran Línea, 34-39; Rebert, “Trabajos Desconocidos, Ingenieros Olvidados,” 161.
39. Hewitt, “The Mexican Boundary Survey Team,” 181-82, 186; McPherson, From San Diego to the
Colorado in 1849, 27-28.
40. “Pioneering the Carrizo: The Narrative of A.B. Gray,” in Gold Rush Desert Trails to San Diego and Los
Angeles in 1849, ed. George M. Ellis, Brand Book No. 9 (San Diego: San Diego Corral of the Westerners,
1995), 109-111; Lesley, “The International Boundary Survey,” 10-11; Norris, “William H. Emory: Soldier-
Scientist,” 89-91; Weller to Clayton, November 3, 1849, Gray to Clayton, November 17, 1849; Gray to
Weller, November 7, 1849, Weller to Gray, November 8, 1849, Gray to Weller, November 4, November
14, 1849, SED 34, 1:31-32 & 44-49.
41. Although nothing appeared in official records about this incident, three different members of
the boundary commission wrote about the shooting in their letters. See Hiram H. Robinson to The
Cincinnati Enquirer, November 3, 1849; George Clinton Gardner, The U.S. Mexican Boundary Survey:
Letters from the Field, 1849-1854, ed. Jane Lenz Elder and David J. Weber (forthcoming); “Robert
Patterson Effinger, Letters from San Diego, 1849,” ed. Carol Judith Schille (master’s thesis, San Diego
State University, 1986), 114-18. Weller’s health evidently experienced more than one set back while
serving as boundary commissioner in San Diego. According to a New York Daily Tribune article, March
11, 1850, he received another injury the previous July due to the accidental firing of a shot gun while
on a reconnaissance in the mountains. None of the San Diego correspondents cited above reported
this July incident.
42. Hewitt, “The Mexican Boundary Survey Team,” 186-88; Whipple to Salazar, November 29,
November 30, 1849, Weller to Clayton, January 3, 1850, SED 34, 1:33, 37-39.
43. Ibid.
44. Congressional Globe, 31st Congress, 2nd Session, 1850, 78-84.
45. Norris, William H. Emory: Soldier-Scientist, 95-96; Clayton to Emory, November 23, 1849, Ewing to
Weller, December 19, 1849, Ewing to Emory, January 8, 1850, SED 34, 1:12-18.
46. Congressional Globe, 31st Congress, 2nd Session, 1850, 78-84.
47. Journal of the Joint Boundary Commission, January 28, 1850, SED 119, 60-62; Hewitt, “The Mexican
146
Boundary Survey Team,” 190-91.

48. Journal of the Joint Boundary Commission, January 28, 1850, SED 119, 62-65.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid; Congressional Globe, 31st Congress, 2nd Session, 1850, 78-84.
53. Canby to Emory, January 28, 1850, Records of the 10th Military Department, Microcopy 210,
Roll 1, Letters Sent, 6:298-99; Emory to Ewing, August 20, 1850, Emory to M. L. McKennan, October
2, 1850, U.S. National Archives, Records Group 76, Inventory Entry #425, Letters Received from the
Fourth U.S. Commissioner, 1849-60; Alex H. H. Stuart to D. R. Atchison, January 18, 1853, U.S. Senate
Executive Document No. 6, 33rd Congress, Special Session, (Serial 688), 29-30. In summary, after an
initial funding of $33,325 in February 1849, the Pacific coast phase of the U.S. boundary commission
work received no additional financial support from Washington until Emory returned to the capitol in
October 1850.
54. Hardcastle to Jimenes [sic] and Jimenes [sic] to Hardcastle, February 23, 1850, SED 119, 72-73.
55. Hardcastle to Blunt, April 3, 1850, Henderson Collection, MSA SC 501, Maryland State Archives,
Annapolis, Maryland.
56. Declaration of W. H. Emory and Jose Salazar Ylarrequi, February 26, 1850; Emory to Ewing, April
3, 1850, in SED 34, 2:8, 13-18.
57. Brown, “Survey of the United States-Mexico Boundary,” 148-171; Hardcastle & Ramírez Minutes,
March 19, 1851. The Boundary Commission formally approed the minutes of the Hardcastle and
Ramírez meetings on September 18, 2852. See Boundary Commission Official Journal, John Russell
Bartlett Papers, Microfilm Edition, published by M.I.T. Libraries, 1966, Reel No. 9.
58. Hardcastle to Emory, May 2, 1851, U.S. National Archives, Records Group 76, Inventory Entry
#425, Letters Received from the Fourth U.S. Commissioner, 1849-60. In New York City George William
Blunt managed the family business, “At the Sign of the Quadrant,” that specialized in the sale of
nautical publications, charts and instruments used widely by mariners engaged in foreign commerce.
In addition to assisting his brother with the store, Edmund Blunt served as a member of the United
States Coast Survey and was a highly respected surveyor. Along with their father, Edmund March
Blunt, they were considered the foremost authorities of American Hydrography in the years prior to
the Civil War. Harold L. Burstyn, At the Sign of the Quadrant: An Account of the Contributions to American
Hydrography made by Edmund March Blunt and his Sons (Mystic: Conn, Marine Historical Association,
1957), 11-21.
59. Brown, “Survey of the United States-Mexico Boundary,” 148-171; Metz, Border: The U.S-Mexico
Line, 28.
60. Ibid, 163; Daily Alta California, March 14, 1850, 2.
61. Hardcastle & Ramírez Minutes, June 16, 1851; Hall, Drawing the Borderline, 40.
62. Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America: Documents 152-172, 1852-1855, ed.
Hunter Miller (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1942), 6: 342-91.
63. John Russell Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Exploration and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California,
Sonora and Chihuahua (1854; Chicago: The Rio Grande Press Inc., 1965), 2:105.
147
The Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation
The San Diego Historical Society honored Daniel J. Tucker, Chairman of the
Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, with the George W. Marston Award for
Civic Leadership at the 2007 History Makers Gala held at the U. S. Grant Hotel on
June 2. Marston, founder and first president of the San Diego Historical Society
in 1928, is well remembered for his many
philanthropic activities. Tucker received
the Marston award for his leadership and
the outstanding service the Sycuan Band
has given both to its tribal members and to
the San Diego community as a whole. It is
therefore important to recount the unique
and remarkable history of the Sycuan Band of
the Kumeyaay Nation from earliest times to
the present.
Ancestors of the Kumeyaay arrived
in the San Diego area nearly 12,000 years
ago. Currently, there are 130 Sycuan tribal
members who proudly pass down many
time-honored traditions to keep the heritage
and customs alive. As a Native American
Indian tribe, Sycuan is an independent,
Daniel Tucker, Chairman, Sycuan Band.
sovereign nation with its own democratically
elected government, the Tribal Council. The people abide by tribal laws as well as
state and federal laws. As an independent nation and independent government,
Sycuan maintains government-to-government relationships with the city, county,
state and United States governments.
 The earliest documented inhabitants in what is now San Diego County are
known as the San Dieguito Paleo-Indians, dating back to about 10,000 B.C.E.
Different groups later evolved as the environment and culture diversified. It is
from one of these groups that the Southern Diegueño emerged at about 3000 B.C.E.
The name Diegueño was given to them by the Spaniards. The Southern Diegueño
are the direct ancestors of the Sycuan Band currently living in Dehesa Valley.
Today, Sycuan is one of thirteen Kumeyaay Bands in the county. There are a total
of 18 Indian tribes in San Diego, more than any other county in the United States.
For thousands of years, the Kumeyaay lived peacefully and prospered in San
Diego’s temperate climate. Their ancestral territory ranged east to El Centro, north
to Escondido, and south to Baja California. They were skilled hunters and took
full advantage of the native plants, using them for shelter, food and clothing. The
Kumeyaay established their rich cultural identity and traditions, many of which
are still practiced and honored today. The Kumeyaay first encountered Europeans
with the arrival of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo in 1542. By the year 1769, when Spanish
soldiers and missionaries, led by Father Junípero Serra, founded the Mission
and the Presidio of San Diego, the destruction of the Kumeyaay way of life had
148
Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation
irreversibly begun. Although the Kumeyaay were among the most resistant of all
California Indians to subjugation, they still saw their ways destroyed and their
land stolen. At the same time, even though they learned some useful skills, the
ravages of deadly, newly introduced diseases, primarily smallpox and measles,
decimated the Kumeyaay population.
Life for the Kumeyaay worsened following Mexico’s overthrow of the Spanish
government in 1821. All lands and power were transferred from Spain to the
Republic of Mexico and, after 1835, when the mission lands were turned over to
civilian administrators, they were further displaced. From the establishment of
the San Diego Mission in 1769 through the end of the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848, the
Kumeyaay population decreased from nearly 30,000 to approximately 3,000.
The period between California statehood in 1850 through post-Civil War
reconstruction was one of the worst in Kumeyaay history. With virtually
no protection, the Kumeyaay were at the mercy of the state and the federal
government. With the passing of the “Government and Protection Act” of 1850,
California imposed its authority over Indians, and even though treaties were
made to give them land, they were never ratified. The Kumeyaay continued to
be strangers in their own home as more land was taken, commitments ignored,
treaties broken, and in some instances, their people physically removed to other
areas.
In 1875, after over 100 years of unspeakable treatment of Native Americans,
President Ulysses S. Grant took the first step towards an Indian Peace Policy. He
passed an Executive Order that set aside specific lands in San Diego County for
the exclusive use of the Kumeyaays. The current 640 acre, one-square mile Sycuan
Reservation in Dehesa Valley was included in this order. The land given to Sycuan
was remote, harsh and poor for farming. But the Sycuan people, through force
of will, maintained their time-honored traditions and survived. In 1891, the U.S.
The U.S. Grant Hotel originally constructed in San Diego in 1910.
149
Sycuan Casino
finally recognized the sovereign status of California Indian tribes by passing the
“Act For The Relief Of The Mission Indians.”
Sycuan has today diversified as a business enterprise. To date, the casino
has been the Band’s most noteworthy economic success. To realize their goal of
diversification, they established the Sycuan Tribal Development Corporation
(STDC). Their first acquisition was the golf course and resort property of Singing
Hills in east San Diego County near their reservation. Since then, STDC has
continued with development projects in downtown San Diego and National City,
purchasing and upgrading the historic U.S. Grant Hotel. They have a capital
management firm and have become boxing promoters with Ringside Promotions
by Sycuan. They have sponsored a number of activities for sport fans throughout
San Diego.
Today, the Sycuan Band again stands proud over its land. While not forgetting
their past and their unique cultural heritage, the Sycuan people look forward to the
future, and to becoming self-reliant once again. Their identity as a good neighbor is
of utmost importance. They have contributed generously to hundreds of charitable
and civic organizations over the years. It is an obligation that they have taken upon
themselves to help their neighbors and make San Diego, their native homeland, a
better place to live.1
The San Diego Historical Society features an exhibit of the Kumeyaay heritage
at the Serra Museum in Presidio Park and a future display will be a part of the
permanent exhibit in Balboa Park.
1. Information in this article has been adapted from the Sycuan Band website that may be visited at
www.sycuan.com
150
Dead Sea Scrolls
Museum Review
San Diego Natural History Museum
Dead Sea Scrolls
June 29, 2007-January 29, 2008
On June 29, 2007, the San Diego Natural History Museum will open the
largest, most comprehensive exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls ever presented
to the public. The exhibition—created and assembled by the Museum—includes
authentic Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient illuminated manuscripts, artifacts, landscape
and aerial photography, and interactive displays about science, discovery, and
exploration. Because of the generosity of the Israel Antiquities Authority and the
Department of Antiquities of Jordan, 27 Dead Sea Scrolls will be on display over
the course of the exhibition.
The unprecedented six-month exhibition displays materials never before
exhibited together: Dead Sea Scrolls from Israel and Jordan reunited for the first
time in sixty years, rarely seen ancient Hebrew codices from the National Library
of Russia, medieval manuscripts from the British National Library, and stunning
modern interpretations of the texts. Tracing the scrolls and their meaning through
time, the exhibition connects the ancient world to the modern. The exhibition will
span two floors and over 12,000 square feet.
According to Dr. Risa Levitt Kohn, curator of the exhibition and director of
San Diego State University’s Judaic Studies Program, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity to encounter some of the world’s most significant documents and
artifacts, all in the same space. The scrolls are the oldest discovered copies of the
books of the Hebrew Bible, and the ideas in them have shaped our world. They
shed light on life, faith and culture in ancient Israel, which influenced Judaism and
Christianity.”
The Dead Sea Scrolls, dating from 250 BCE–68 CE, are indisputably one of the
greatest archaeological finds of all time. Discovered beginning in 1947 in eleven
caves along the shores of the Dead Sea in Israel, the scrolls are a bridge to the
period when the foundations of western civilization were being laid. These ancient
11QPsalms. Photo by Tsila Sagiv, Courtesy of Israel Antiquities Authority.
151
Qumran ruins. Courtesy of Israel Antiquities Authority.
manuscripts embody universal values and bring to life a vanished world. Upon
entering the exhibition, visitors will be surrounded by landscapes from top Israeli
photographers Neil Folberg, Duby Tal, and Yossi Eshbol that explore Israel’s
unique beauty and varied climate. The photographs will also show the similarities
in San Diego’s and Israel’s climate—two of the five Mediterranean climate regions
on Earth.
The next area explores scientific methods, new and old, that unlock the
mysteries of the scrolls and help researchers better understand them. The exhibit
investigates scroll preservation, DNA and chemical analysis, infrared technology,
Carbon-14 dating, and digital document reconstruction. Visitors will then explore
Qumran, an archeological site near where the scrolls were found (thought by some
to be where some scrolls were copied and written). This area of the exhibit will
partially recreate Qumran at the height of its existence around 100 BCE to 68 CE.
Authentic artifacts — coins, sandals, and an inkwell—provide insight into the lives
of this ancient community.
Twenty-seven scrolls will be on display throughout the course of the exhibition:
visitors will see 15 at any given time, scrolls will change in the fall. Scroll
highlights include: scrolls of the biblical books of Leviticus, Isaiah, Job and others;
152
Dead Sea Scrolls
Scroll jar. Courtesy of Israel Antiquities Authority Copper Scroll. Courtesy of West Semitic Research.
scrolls such as the Damascus Document and the War Scroll highlighting the life
and thoughts of the Qumran community; Psalms scrolls containing passages from
liturgy still in use today; a section of the Copper Scroll from Jordan, the only Dead
Sea Scroll inscribed on copper; the best preserved of all Deuteronomy manuscripts
containing the text of the Ten Commandments; and scrolls written in Hebrew,
Aramaic and Greek.
Ancient Qumran: A Virtual Reality Tour will be featured in the Museum’s giant-
screen theater and is included in admission. The Museum will offer an educational
program that will include 22 lectures by world-class scholars and archaeologists,
films, classes, and audio tours. Additionally, a curriculum will be prepared for use
in schools, home schools, synagogues and churches.
Tickets and more information are available at www.sdscrolls.org. Joan and
Irwin Jacobs are the presenting sponsors of Dead Sea Scrolls.
153
BOOK REVIEWS
San Diego: California’s Cornerstone. By Iris Engstrand. San Diego, CA: Sunbelt
Publications, 2005. Bibliography, illustrations, maps, chronology, and index. 300 pp.
$19.95 paper.
Reviewed by Eugene P. Moehring, Professor of History, University of Nevada,

Las Vegas.
Aimed primarily at the general reader and based partly on material published
in two of her earlier books, Iris Engstrand’s newest survey of San Diego’s history
covers a wide variety of topics and noteworthy incidents. Supporting the narrative
are numerous photographs, maps, drawings, and other visual evidence. The
early chapters tracing the role of native peoples and the clash of colonial cultures
are informative, as are the pen portraits of leaders who helped shape the city’s
history. Alonzo Horton, Major Reuben Fleet, Pete Wilson, and other influential
figures are all there along with a concise summary of their contributions to San
Diego’s growth. Engstrand devotes considerable space to the Panama-California
Exposition, city promotion, transportation links, and downtown revitalization
efforts. The latter involves discussions of park expansion, historic preservation,
retail center development, and tourism. The author’s coverage of water issues,
suburbanization, education, and professional sports are all satisfying, although not
all subjects are of equal importance. Sometimes the desire for balance needs to be
sacrificed. Subjects like the vital role of defense spending and particularly the navy
– what Roger Lotchin has called “the metropolitan-military complex” – in shaping
west coast urban development in places like San Diego, require more space.
Moreover, a discussion of the role of defense spending in San Diego’s development
demands some mention of Congressman Bob Wilson.
Although wide-ranging and instructive, Engstrand’s narrative is at times too
episodic. For example, she follows a section describing San Diego’s response to
the September 11 terrorist attacks with coverage of the city’s water crisis. At other
times, she attributes ideas and reforms to locals without placing the subject in
its broader context. For instance, her discussion of Alonzo Horton’s 1867 plans
to build a grand city park should recognize that New York’s recently-opened
Central Park (1865), with its positive effect upon adjacent land values, inspired
myriad park-building projects across urban America at that time. In the same
vein, Engstrand correctly credits chamber of commerce President G. Aubrey
Davidson with suggesting that San Diego hold a Panama-California Exposition to
exploit the opening of the Panama Canal, but she should note that San Francisco
businessmen were already working on the same idea for their city. The author’s
prose chronicling San Diego’s triumphal march to greatness is largely celebratory
in nature. Most readers will not object to this tone, but there are places where a
more critical approach to policy is warranted. There is, for instance, little critical
coverage of discrimination against the city’s minorities in housing, education,
employment, and public places.
154
Book Reviews
Overall, however, Engstrand has provided an up-to-date overview of San

Diego’s emergence as America’s seventh-largest city. The book is packed with
useful information and dates. Her maps, photographs, and chronology of events
will be especially helpful to local students and to those largely unfamiliar with the
city’s past. This work contributes to our general knowledge of a Sunbelt city that,
for some strange reason, still lacks much of a scholarly literature.
All Aboard for Santa Fe: Railway Promotion of the Southwest, 1890s to 1930s.  By
Victoria Dye. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.
Illustrations, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. 163 pp. $24.95 cloth. $17.95
paper.
Reviewed by Marisa K. Brandt, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History,

University of Minnesota.
The American Southwest has been a popular tourist destination throughout

the twentieth century.  Its environment, architecture, and culture have provided
tourists with a wide variety of reasons to visit the Southwest.  Victoria Dye
argues that the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe (AT&SF) Railroad’s relentless
promotion of the Southwest during the early twentieth century was a crucial
element in the development of tourism in the region. Dye’s All Aboard for Santa
Fe: Railway Promotion of the Southwest, 1890s to 1930s provides a lively view of the
AT&SF’s advertising strategies during this time period.  Her concise monograph
chiefly examines the city of Santa Fe itself and also provides a short discussion of
Albuquerque.
All Aboard for Santa Fe begins with a whirlwind summary of the region’s
history and swiftly moves on to a discussion of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa
Fe Railroad and its development. The bulk of the book focuses on the Railroad’s
marketing strategies.  The AT&SF’s advertising materials describe a southwestern
culture that had melded its Spanish and Indian history into a romantic retreat
from modern life.  The mythologized (and heavily sanitized) cultural story that
the AT&SF used in its materials emphasized the uniquely American aspects of
the area. Railway literature skillfully combined copy that touted the Southwest’s
healthy environment with promotion of southwestern culture.
Dye contends that the city of Santa Fe is emblematic of the region. Its success
as a tourist draw “may be seen as testimony to the unprecedented use of regional
motifs and cultural icons” by the AT&SF (p. 4). The Railroad initially promoted the
town as a health resort (primarily for tuberculosis patients) but by the 1920s had
collaborated with the Fred Harvey Company in opening and advertising hotels
and other attractions that focused on the region’s cultural heritage. The Harvey
Company also began running “Indian Detours,” a series of sight-seeing trips in the
region. The company designed these excursions to provide a reason to stop in the
Southwest during an otherwise less-than-exciting trip from the East to the West
Coast and also as tourist destinations in and of themselves.  Dye maintains that
Albuquerque benefited from the AT&SF’s efforts, although to a lesser extent than
Santa Fe, and she spends some time describing the effects of AT&SF’s advertising
155
on “The Town Down The Tracks: Santa Fe’s Rival” – Albuquerque (ch. 5).
Unfortunately, the book’s brevity prevents in-depth discussion of the region
as a whole.  Although Santa Fe is clearly an important part of the Southwest’s
tourist industry, a discussion of the Grand Canyon would have added greatly
to Dye’s analysis and would have helped to place it in the broader context of the
region.  The AT&SF spent a great deal of time and money promoting the Grand
Canyon.  The company also extensively developed its tourist attractions and, in
collaboration with the Harvey Company, dominated tourism at the Canyon during
the early twentieth century. Similarly, the Indian Detours were not specific to Santa
Fe – although they were explicitly southwestern – and they were a central focus
of the AT&SF’s regional advertising efforts.  A more regionally-based analysis
would allow Dye to draw some further-reaching conclusions about the effects of
railway promotion of the Southwest and would show her readers the long reach
of the Railroad in developing the region’s image.  Nevertheless, All Aboard for
Santa Fe is an accessible and useful examination of the AT&SF’s efforts to build
regional tourism through the promotion of their idea of southwestern culture. Dye
examines this under-explored topic from a new angle, providing an in-depth case
study of its effects on the city of Santa Fe. All Aboard for Santa Fe will be a useful
resource for anyone wishing to know more about the development of tourism in
the Southwest; the extensive appendices and bibliographic notes are especially
valuable.
Charles F. Lummis: Editor of the Southwest. By Edwin R. Bingham. San Marino,

CA: The Huntington Library, 1955. Reprint 2006. Bibliography, illustrations, index,
and notes. 218 pp. $19.95 paper.
Reviewed by Nicole Dawn Goude, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History,

University of California, Riverside.
Through his work as an editor and contributing writer for a regional journal
in Los Angeles, Charles Fletcher Lummis extolled the beauty of the Southwest
and called for the preservation of indigenous culture. He founded the Southwest
Museum and was instrumental in the conservation of the California Missions.
One of the first historians to document the legacy of this fascinating figure was
Edwin R. Bingham, professor emeritus of history at the University of Oregon.
Although it was written over fifty years ago, this monograph by Bingham remains
one of the few texts dedicated to the life and work of Charles Fletcher Lummis.
While this second printing does not deviate from the original text or give a new
introductory note, it does provide the reader with a wealth of regional history in a
relatively compact volume.
Bingham provides a short biography before exploring the professional editorial
career of Lummis. He draws on a large body of information regarding the life of
Lummis, including published works, diaries, letters, and reminiscences of others,
which he makes an effort to discuss without dwelling on any particular point. In
recounting the life of Lummis, Bingham allows the exciting and somewhat lurid
details to come through, such as the “immoderate use of tobacco and alcohol”
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Book Reviews
(p. 11) and womanizing that led to the failure of two marriages. These details
are skillfully retold so that the reader is interested in a man who dropped out
of Harvard, hiked from Ohio to California, and was afflicted with a sudden,
if temporary, onset of paralysis – all before the age of thirty. In later chapters,
Bingham relates how these early events affected Lummis’ career as a writer and
editor of The Land of Sunshine (renamed Out West in 1902).
While one might expect the rather dry statistics relating to the business of the
magazine (such as advertising revenue and circulation rates) to be mind-numbing,
especially after the thrilling account of Lummis’ life story, Bingham manages to
weave this information into colorful anecdotes to create a fascinating read. This
technique, however, comes at a cost. In the non-biographical portion of the work,
he does not tell the history chronologically, so that from one paragraph to the
next he jumps from Out West (1902) back to The Land of Sunshine (1895). A reader
attempting to determine what contributed to the success of the magazine in a
given year (whether it was Lummis himself, the advertising funds, circulation
rate, or contributing writers) would have to flip back and forth to find the requisite
information.
It is somewhat regrettable that no revisions or additions to the original text
have been made. This second printing would have benefited from an afterword
that addresses the impact of Lummis’s works on the indigenous populations with
whom he was so concerned. For example, Lummis founded the Sequoya League
to “make better Indians and better treated ones” (p. 116), but Bingham did not
include the native reaction to the Lummis’ efforts to aid in the welfare of the tribes.
Additionally, the text contains some outdated and inaccurate material: “…the
Chumash, the Gabrieliño, the Luiseño, and the Juaneño are now wholly extinct” (p.
114 n. 27). As we know, these tribes are not extinct, although their numbers have
been drastically reduced. Ironically, these very tribes have actively conferred with
one of the institutions established by Lummis, the Southwest Museum, in blessing
the new exhibits.
Nevertheless, this text remains a well-researched and engaging treatment
of Lummis and his involvement with the preservation of the American West.
Bingham’s work is still a valuable resource for the study of the Southwest and
retains its relevance to the growing field of Los Angeles regional history.
Teaching Mikadoism: The Attack on Japanese Language Schools in Hawaii, California

and Washington, 1919-1927. By Noriko Asato. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2006.
Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. 176 pp. $40.00 cloth.
Reviewed by Lori Pierce, Assistant Professor of American Studies, DePaul

University.
It is one of the more interesting historical anomalies that the United States,
a country which proudly regards itself as multicultural, is also so relentlessly
monolingual. Our cultural diversity masks a deep suspicion of linguistic diversity.
Noriko Asato’s Teaching Mikadoism explores an early episode in the history of our
linguistic paranoia, the controversy over Japanese language schools in Hawai’i,
157
California and Washington.

Teaching Mikadoism attempts three difficult tasks: first, the book describes a
narrow slice of the history of Japanese language schools in Hawai’i, California and
Oregon by focusing on eight years of public debate. Second, the author attempts
to “reframe” the controversy by comparing and linking the situation in these three
locations. Finally, the book expands our understanding of Japanese American
history by providing more insight into the Issei (first) generation of immigrants
by utilizing Japanese language resources, particularly newspapers, periodicals,
and the reports of the Japanese consular authorities in the United States and the
Territory of Hawai’i. In order to fulfill these aims, any historian would require a
volume of double the length and twice the density. Teaching Mikadoism succeeds in
introducing these problems but not in resolving these issues.
The book is arranged into four substantive chapters, two of which focus on
Hawai’i and two of which describe developments in California and Washington.
In each case, Asato argues that the controversy over language schools was
symptomatic of a larger political battle between the Nikkei (Japanese) and white
American communities. The attacks on language schools were an excuse to
advance more far reaching efforts to control the political and social advancement
of the Japanese community.
Asato describes two facets of the language school debate in Hawai’i: the
internal struggle between Buddhists and Christians in the Japanese community
to control language schools and how the battle over language schools became
a part of federal efforts to oversee education in order to promote and enforce
assimilation. In the second chapter, Asato focuses on the 1919 Federal Survey of
Education which led to the passage of Act 30 (later overturned by the Supreme
Court) which made foreign language schools subject to control by Hawai’i’s
Department of Public Instruction. The national attention garnered by this survey
and the campaign for Act 30 influenced the way that Asian exclusionists in
California framed the debate over language schools in that state. Exclusionists
in Washington then copied Californians, using the vague threat of “mikadoism”
to fan the flames of bigotry and gain support for white control over Japanese
language schools.
Each case is an intriguing example of how the forces behind Asian exclusion
movements manufactured the controversy over schools to further other political
goals. In Hawai’i, Territorial authorities, plantation owners, and religious groups
vied for influence over the Japanese community, the largest single ethnic group
in the islands. In California, exclusionists saw control of the schools as a way to
thwart the growing economic power of the Japanese community in the agricultural
industry. And although the Japanese population was relatively small, the white
community in Washington seemed to take a preventive approach, attempting to
keep the Nikkei from gaining any power as they had in California and Hawai’i.
Asato covers no new ground in this work. As she acknowledges, the study
of Japanese language schools has been the subject of numerous theses and
dissertations and is a standard part of the teaching of Japanese American history.
She adds to our knowledge by working with Japanese language documents and
thereby introducing new perspectives to the historical record. This is evident in
her descriptions of the reactions of the Issei and the role of the Japanese consular
officials in these controversies. This is valuable, elementary historical work which
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Book Reviews
globalizes Asian American studies in a way that is long overdue.

Good history, however, requires sound interpretation in addition to the
amassing of facts. As an analysis of the Japanese language school controversy,
Teaching Mikadoism is less successful. Chief among the lapses is the lack of a
sustained discussion or definition of “mikadoism.” At no point does Asato define
or interpret the phrase for a contemporary audience. She refers to Valentine
McClatchy’s “Theory of the Mikado doctrine” (p. 55) which argued that Japanese
schools and churches were an inherent threat to America because the Japanese
government was using immigrants to colonize the United States. Her descriptions
lead us to infer that mikadoism meant emperor worship or Japanese nationalism,
but the reader longs for a clear, cogent definition or theory of mikadoism from the
point of view of the researcher. And although there seems to be some connection
between Buddhist-Christian rivalries in Hawai’i’s Japanese community (explored
in Chapter 1) and the accusation of emperor worship by Asian exclusionists in
California and Washington, Asato does little to make explicit these connections in
a way that truly “reframes” the controversy over Japanese language schools.
The Failure of Planning: Permitting Sprawl in San Diego Suburbs, 1970-1999.

By Richard Hogan. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2003.
Bibliography, illustrations, index, and notes. 200 pp. $69.95 cloth. $24.95 paper.
Reviewed by Steven P. Erie, Professor of Political Science and Director of the

Urban Studies and Planning Program, University of California, San Diego.
The Failure of Planning is a study of so-called “progressive planning” in the

San Diego region during the last three decades of the twentieth century. Richard
Hogan argues that progressive regional planning has failed to restrain suburban
sprawl and produce a better quality of life in San Diego, not because of failures of
implementation, but because of a deficit of political and economic imagination.
The chief bêtes noires are San Diego Mayor and later California Governor Pete
Wilson at the local and state levels and Governor and, later, President Ronald
Reagan at the state and national levels. In particular, President Reagan made
the “New Federalism” a supposed cover for marginalizing grassroots radical
movements spawned by the sixties and co-opting both liberals and conservatives
into managerial coalitions whose agendas were ultimately dominated by big
developers. The builders had the resources and staying power to pay for and shape
“managed growth” and “smart growth” policies that have amounted to seeming
Band-Aids on cancer, at least according to Hogan (pp. 31, 135).
The anti-Mira Mesa backlash of Wilson’s early years in City Hall gave way
to a more accommodative managed-growth paradigm that was challenged
in the 1980s by the environmental and slow growth movements. However,
the post-1989 recessionary collapse of the speculative housing market muted
political pressures for less development, more affordable housing, and greater
habitat preservation until 1996 when a new speculative boom began and “smart
growth” became the reigning mantra. According to the author, the San Diego
Association of Governments (SANDAG) facilitated the process by co-opting the
159
slow growth movement into the regional planning process. Governor Wilson’s
Natural Community Conservation Planning (NCCP) initiative was adopted, the
federal Endangered Species Act gave protection to the gnat catcher, yet suburban
development rolled on inexorably.
Rather than embrace the conspiracy theory popular among liberal
environmentalists and slow-growth advocates that progressive planning has been
thwarted by a planners’ sellout to developers, Hogan advances the view that the
result was inherent in progressive planning’s inability to think beyond a bourgeois
market society with private property in land and a bias toward homeowner
politics. Land-use decisions in San Diego are made according to “the carnival
model, with multiple authorities anxiously currying favor with constituents
through endless meetings and an endless struggle toward consensus” (p. 101).
“Ballot box” initiatives that sought to curb development only complicated the land-
use process in ways exploited by big developers (p. 95).
The book’s practice of hiding behind pseudonyms of the actual names of
suburban communities studied and key informants interviewed in order to
protect the innocent (or the guilty) is irritating. Also off-putting are the ideological
effusions and excessive self-revelations. Does one really need to know that Hogan’s
own preference for radical-anarchist “eco-politics” apparently led him in 2000 to
vote for neither George Bush nor Al Gore nor Ralph Nader? (p. 128). The author
grew up mostly in San Diego, but minces no words about his happiness in no
longer living there. He loathes life in automobile-driven San Diego compared to a
bucolic bicycle-centric “college town in the Midwest” (p. 139).
Notwithstanding such criticisms, the book’s underlying model of historic
progressive planning in San Diego as a sorcerer’s apprentice in thrall to developers
and a boom-bust housing market has something to recommend it.
The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape. By Erik

Davis. Photographs by Michael Rauner. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006.
Bibliography, photographs, and index. 272 pp. $40 cloth.
Reviewed by Joshua Paddison, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History,

University of California, Los Angeles.
“The number of churches in San Francisco implies either great devotion, or

immense necessity for prayer,” observed British author J. G. Player-Frowd during a
visit to California in 1872. Within a few square blocks he counted two synagogues,
a Catholic church, two Swedenborgian tabernacles, and a variety of Protestant
congregations including a branch of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The
tremendous religious variety noted by Player-Frowd has increased exponentially
in California in the years since his visit, and today the state is home to an
unparalleled panoply of denominations, sects, and creeds. For The Visionary State,
writer Erik Davis and photographer Michael Rauner visited dozens of California’s
sacred sites, producing a fascinatingly idiosyncratic exploration of the state’s
religious history.
Not interested in the mainstream churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues
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Book Reviews
attended by the vast majority of observant Californians, Davis and Rauner focus
on “visionary” groups and individuals who have occupied the mystical margins of
the religious landscape. San Diego, for example, is represented by photo-essays of
Mission San Diego de Alcalá, the Mormon San Diego Temple, Spiritualist mansion
Villa Montezuma, Theosophist buildings at Point Loma (now owned by the
Church of the Nazarene), and First Church of Christ, Scientist. Pursuing the “great
polytheistic collage” that makes up what Davis terms “California consciousness”
(p. 9), the book’s creators include within their purview a dazzling range of
“new” religious groups, from Mormons, Scientologists, Christian Scientists, and
the Vedanta Society to many lesser-known ones such as the Self-Realization
Fellowship, Church of All Worlds, and Ordo Templi Orientis. Accounts of famed
California seers Thomas Starr King, Aimee Semple McPherson, Aldous Huxley,
and Paramahansa Yogananda abut stories of largely forgotten spiritual seekers
such as mystic Thomas Lake Harris, Bohemian poet Elsa Gidlow, Zen leader
Shunryu Suzuki, and Tantric sensualist Penny Slinger.
In his forty-three short, wide-ranging essays, Erik Davis draws upon previously
published histories, journalism, and biographies to guide readers down seldom-
traveled paths. Though his writing style veers toward slang – Native American
tribal leaders are called “fat cats” (p. 12); Charles Manson is a “shrimpy antichrist”
(p. 184) – Davis’s intelligence, ardor, and omnivorous interests elevate The Visionary
State above the standard coffee table book it resembles. That said, his lack of
footnotes is inexcusable, especially given the extraordinary subject matter into
which he delves. Michael Rauner’s photographs are elegant and formally precise,
but his decision to exclude all people from the sites he documents makes them
seem—to me, at least—sterile and trapped in the past. The book suffers from a
disconnection between Davis’s text, crowded with colorful people and messy
stories, and Rauner’s photos of deserted, perfectly lit buildings.
It feels odd to read about Tantric orgies, LSD hallucinations, arcane magic rites,
and secret Spiritualist societies in the pages of an attractively designed, full-
color, carefully edited, expensive tome published by Chronicle Books. Though
attempting to celebrate the “restless, heretical edge” of California’s religious
culture (p. 9), Davis and Rauner cannot help but tame the unruliness of their
subject matter. Of course, anyone who studies or writes about religion struggles
with understanding and capturing someone else’s transcendent experience. Davis
and Rauner are not fully up to the challenge, but their ambition and passion make
The Visionary State as singular as the people, stories, and sites it documents.
The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border. By David Bacon.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Bibliography, photographs, epilogue,
and index. 348 pp. $40.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.
Reviewed by Altha J. Cravey, Associate Professor, Department of Geography,

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border documents ravaged
lives of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances. These people
161
defiantly confront multibillion dollar corporations, speak straightforward truths

in the face of imminent danger, seek food and dignity for their impoverished
children, forge alliances in unlikely places and, above all else, inspire others
to follow in their footsteps. The struggles documented in David Bacon’s book
illuminate the impact of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement on labor
activists, agricultural families, meatpackers, industrial workers, and independent
trade unionists in Mexico and the United States.
Their stories might have been covered in U.S.-based newspapers if such mass
media were equally concerned with labor and business topics. Since labor concerns
have been neglected in such outlets, Bacon had to devote years collecting the
narratives that comprise this disturbing account of social destruction wrought by
the North American Free Trade Agreement. Personal stories from many distinct
places reveal courage, dignity, and determination. At the U.S.-Mexico border, we
meet a young man making $8 per day who was allowed only a ten-day leave when
he fractured his right forearm while welding steel for Hyundai subsidiary Han
Young. In Mexico City, we meet a lawyer who sews his eyelids shut for several
weeks to dramatize the public protest of privatization by an independent bus
drivers’ union. We meet workers in several locations who publicly declare their
support for an independent union despite forceful intimidation campaigns. Most
disturbing of all, we meet countless, nameless children who are harvesting onions
and field crops because their parents’ salaries simply do not provide the bare
essentials. In the twelve years since NAFTA was enacted, the Mexican government
has turned a blind eye to the illegal use of child labor and many other labor law
violations.
Bacon’s riveting account of diverse labor struggles provides grim details of
which many people (especially in the United States) are completely ignorant.
His focus on personal narratives and specific struggles is compelling. While
Bacon does not claim to be comprehensive, his analytical approach forcefully
demonstrates the way in which many workers (and their families) have been
irreparably harmed by the refusal of NAFTA negotiators to anticipate the
social dislocations the treaty unleashed. In particular, Bacon’s book provides
an indictment of NAFTA’s labor side agreements, showing that union activists,
lawyers, and workers alike have spent considerable time and energy pursuing
grievances in a good faith effort to hold NAFTA accountable. Over the years it has
become increasingly clear that NAFTA’s complex labor grievance procedures are a
waste of time because there are no enforcement mechanisms.
This is an accessible book on a timely topic. Bacon suggests that cross-
border labor organizing has been difficult yet the NAFTA experience has forced
workers and activists to forge new kinds of cross-border alliances and new
organizing strategies, especially in the US and Mexico. Thus, while the book is
full of devastating details, it also highlights collaborations that are educational,
transformative, and far-reaching. The black-and-white photographs in this book
reinforce the compelling narrative. A six-year-old onion picker looks up from her
tasks and gazes coolly and knowingly from the page. The young Hyundai welder
mentioned above displays his outstretched arms on the front cover, revealing
permanent deformation of his right limb. In a 1993 photograph, Tijuana workers
stand before a table where they must declare out loud which union they support.
A 2002 photograph shows activists in Omaha, Nebraska, handing out union
162
Book Reviews
information at a successful organizing drive in a ConAgra beef plant.

Bacon’s book is refreshing for its unapologetic stance in telling the human
story behind the North American Free Trade Agreement. Methodically unraveling
NAFTA’s central contradiction – that goods and investments are free to move while
people are not – he weaves together many stories of people in diverse places. In my
view, the real strength of the book is the comprehensive way in which Bacon treats
cross-border relationships. That is, the ravaged lives that Bacon documents are
also meaningful lives, where individuals, unions, and community activists have
insisted on the simple priorities of human dignity and social justice.
BOOK NOTES
Agriculture and Rural Connections in the Pacific, 1500-1900. Edited by James Gerber
and Lei Guang. Volume 13 of The Pacific World: Lands, Peoples and History of the
Pacific, 1500-1900. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006. Illustrations, maps,
notes, and index. 387 pp. $144.95 cloth. The editors bring together essays from a
range of disciplines to explore the development of a trans-Pacific agriculture that
involved the migration of people as well as plants.
The Coming and the Going: A History and a Story of Baja California. By John Joseph.
Bloomington, IN: 1st Books Library. Illustrations. 700 pp. $28.95 paper. Joseph’s
research on the Jesuits in Baja California provides the basis for this fictional
account of a missionary’s experiences on the peninsula.
Spain’s Legacy in the Pacific. Special publication of Mains’l Haul: A Journal of Pacific
Maritime History. San Diego, CA: San Diego Maritime Museum, 2006. Illustrations
and notes. 105 pp. $11.95 paper. Eleven essays from historians and anthropologists
examine a number of facets of Spanish seafaring in the Pacific. The volume
features numerous high-quality illustrations.
Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico. By Elaine Carey.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Illustrations, notes,
bibliography, and index. 254 pp. $22.95 paper. Historian Elaine Carey analyzes
the origins and implications of the uprising that culminated in the October 1968
killing of student protestors in Mexico City.
Mexico OtherWise: Modern Mexico in the Eyes of Foreign Observers. Edited and
translated by Jürgen Buchenau. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2005. Map. 304 pp. $22.95 paper. Grouped into four time periods, this collection
features obscure and well-known writings on nineteenth and twentieth-century
Mexico. Buchenau provides biographical notes on the authors.
163
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166
SAN DIEGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY
39th Annual Institute of History
The San Diego Historical Society’s Institute of History
encourages research on San Diego subjects of historical
significance. Papers pertaining to California, the Southwest,
and Baja California are appropriate to submit to the
Institute when they involve events or individuals with some
relationship to San Diego’s past. Students, non-professional,
and professional writers are encouraged to submit papers.
Awards, which include cash prizes, may not be given in a

category if no papers of sufficient merit are submitted, as
determined by the judges. All papers submitted to the Institute
of History will be considered for publication in the Society’s
quarterly The Journal of San Diego History.
The 2006 Institute of History Award Winners were:

Charles W. Hughes: Marc Tarasuck Award - $600 - Architects and
Architecture for La Mojonera & The Marking of California’s Mexico-U.S.
Boundary Line
Ernie Liwag: Joseph L Howard Fund Award - $500 - Business and
Business People for Craft Beer in San Diego Society
Scott Fraser: Mary Ward Memorial Award - $500 - San Diego County
History and Historic Preservation for The Need for Water: The Federal Gov-
ernment, San Diego, and the Growth of a Major U.S. Metropolis from 1940-1955
Joshua Grace, Christopher Rhamey, Megan Dukett, Kaylin Gill, Ricky
Bell: James S. Copley Library Award - $300 - The American Period of
San Diego History for Coming Out Gay, Coming Out Christian: The Begin-
nings of GLBT Christianity in San Diego, 1970-1979
Jennifer C. Dawson Nolan: Jane Booth Award - $300 - for Women in
San Diego History for By Example: How the Southland Anti-Suffrage
Movement Helped California Women Gain the Vote in 1911
Awards not given:
Judge Jacob Weinberger Award - $600 - Legal History
Milton Fintzelberg Award - $600 - Native, Spanish and Mexican Eras
Dr. Charles Fenn Memorial Award - $500 - Medical History
Deadline for submission of papers

September 14, 2007
167
SAN DIEGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY BOARD OF TRUSTEES AND STAFF
Executive Director MUSEUM OF SAN DIEGO HISTORY,

David Watson RESEARCH LIBRARY, JUNIPERO SERRA
MUSEUM, VILLA MONTEZUMA, AND
Officers MARSTON HOUSE STAFF
Harold G. Sadler, President Jane Anderson, Administrative Assistant

Robert F. Adelizzi, President-Elect Itzel Baeza, Site Interpreter
Elisabeth Bergan, Vice President Catherine Berger, Human Resources & Office
Peter Janopaul, Vice President Manager
Helen Kinnaird, Secretary Jeff Boaz, Exhibit Preparator
Laura Stanley DeMarco, Treasurer Trina Brewer, Museum Store Manager
Ronald J. Urich, Past President Reggie Cabanilla, Facilities Supervisor
Rachel Carpenter, Site Interpreter
BOARD OF TRUSTEES Jessica Cohen, Museum Instructor
Tori Cranner, Director of Collections
Thomas Anglewicz Robert Cromwell, Site Interpreter
Bobbie Bagel Elizabeth Daoust, Development Director
Marian Barry Karie Dzenkowski-Castillo, Senior Exhibits
Diane G. Canedo Preparator
James R. Dawe Maria Filippelli, Store Associate
August J. Felando Katrina Glynn, Education Coordinator
Kenneth Golden Jamie Henderson, Collections Assistant
Sumiyo Kastelic Raffael Hoffman, Outreach Coordinator
Donna Knierim Burke Inman, Systems Administrator
Robert McNeely Johnna Jalot, Site Intrepreter
James Milch Jane Kenealy, Archivist
Michael Morgan Elizabeth Klueck, Site Intrepreter
Drexel Patterson Cindy Krimmel, Assistant Photo Archivist
Arthur G. Peinado David Krimmel, Associate Director/Director of
Marc Tarasuck Exhibits
John Vaughan Rebecca Lawrence, Associate Director/Director
Nell Waltz of Education
William V. Whelan Joel Levanetz, Assistant Curator
Leon Williams Treyer Mason-Gale, Assistant Registrar
Carol Myers, Photo Archivist
CREDITS Rosa Petroulias, Store Associate
Ginger Raaka, Director of Retail
Design and Layout Gabe Selak, Public Programs Manager
Allen Wynar Montay Shine, Museum Custodian
Sean Stewart, Assistant Archivist
Printing Susan Stocker, Accounting
Crest Offset Printing Michelle Swinney, Marketing Director &
Special Events Coordinator
EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Chris Travers, Director of the Booth Historical
Photograph Archives/Photographer
Kathryn Jordan Donna Van Ert, Membership Director
Cynthia van Stralen Nicholas Vega, Senior Curator
Arjun Wilkins Kate Vogel, Graphic Coordinator
Johann Wahnon, Site Interpreter
Beth Williamson, Site Interpreter
168
Publication of The Journal of San Diego History has been partially funded
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anonymous friend and supporter of the Journal.
Publication of this issue of The Journal of San Diego History has also been
supported by a grant from “The Journal of San Diego History Fund” of the San
Diego Foundation.
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Front Cover: ZLAC’s clubhouse around 1908. From left to right: Elsa Wentscher
Marston, Juliet Newkirk, Grace Gould Klauber, Edith Cole McFarland, and Brooke
Frevert Miller. ©SDHS #85:15353.
Back Cover: Thursday Morning Rowers in the ZLAC barge, April 7, 1973. Bow
to stern: Mary Jessop, Ellen Roche, Annette Frank, Margaret Redelings, Judy
Browne, Betty Sullivan, Nancy Leydecker, Suzanne Leibmann, and Mary Maddox
Grandell (coxswain). ©SDHS, UT #88:K7006-3, Union-Tribune Collection.
Cover Design: Allen Wynar

San Diego
History
T he Jou r n a l of
Volume 53 Summer 20 07 Number 3 • The Journal of San Diego History

The Journal of San Diego History Vol. 53

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The Journal of San Diego History Vol. 53

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San Diego

Volume 53 Summer 20 07 Number 3 • The Journal of San Diego History

(619) 235-2300 or (858) 385-1595

Cover Design: Allen Wynar

Published since 1955 by the

Editorial Consultants Published quarterly by the San Diego

RAMON EDUARDO RUIZ ©2007 by the San Diego Historical

Volume 53 summer 2007 number 3

Coming Out Gay, Coming Out Christian:

“La Mojonera” and the Marking of California’s

The Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation

Museum Review: San Diego Natural History Museum

to increase the length of their

Our boyfriends would go out in their boats, rowing or sailing,

SDRC’s Henry H. Palmer joined Crouse and her friends

a business street. She

She’d drive down Highland Avenue on her way to her parents’

School Board of Education before going

wear his stiffly starched jacket and he’d serve tea.”30

She said that she wanted us to be ladies and be very proud of

during the war. The club also

rights movement, which would transform American society, drew attention to

The men have considered the minutest details, including safety

Crescent Beach Development

history to the West

We hope you all know of our active leadership and participation

Older members remarked on the growing urbanization of the area. Jesse

It is now time to look to the future if we want to be visible for

Members remain upbeat about the future of ZLAC. Michalek remarked,

20. Minutes, ZLAC Board of Directors, 1929-1931, 28, 97.

66. Eight Oars, April 2002.

The Beginnings of GLBT Christianity in San Diego,

Can a person be a practicing homosexual and a Christian at the same time?

the addition of Integrity and Lutherans Concerned brought GLBT concepts

www.ewtn.com/library/CURIA/CDFCERTN.HTM (accessed April 14, 2006). A copy of Dignity’s

“La Mojonera” and the Marking of California’s

La Mojonera, or Western Land Boundary Monument No. 258, is threatened

sought a boundary that

In March, the Mexican government appointed General Pedro García Conde, a

focused on astronomical determinations while the Mexicans used triangulation,

they could identify as a point

presented severe hardships, and at times “almost insurmountable obstacles,” to the

The joint commission ordered that a hermetically sealed bottle enclosing a

The only method remaining that presented itself was to produce

the discouraging difficulties–the almost impassable hills of drifting

Boundary Survey Team,” 190-91.

The Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation

The U.S. Grant Hotel originally constructed in San Diego in 1910.

11QPsalms. Photo by Tsila Sagiv, Courtesy of Israel Antiquities Authority.

Qumran ruins. Courtesy of Israel Antiquities Authority.

Reviewed by Eugene P. Moehring, Professor of History, University of Nevada,

Overall, however, Engstrand has provided an up-to-date overview of San

Reviewed by Marisa K. Brandt, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History,

The American Southwest has been a popular tourist destination throughout

Charles F. Lummis: Editor of the Southwest. By Edwin R. Bingham. San Marino,

Reviewed by Nicole Dawn Goude, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History,

Teaching Mikadoism: The Attack on Japanese Language Schools in Hawaii, California

Reviewed by Lori Pierce, Assistant Professor of American Studies, DePaul

California and Washington.

globalizes Asian American studies in a way that is long overdue.

The Failure of Planning: Permitting Sprawl in San Diego Suburbs, 1970-1999.

Reviewed by Steven P. Erie, Professor of Political Science and Director of the

The Failure of Planning is a study of so-called “progressive planning” in the

The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape. By Erik