You know, I don't talk enough about the YouTube channel that we launched about six months ago. I had Earth Ancients was on YouTube for a good five years. We had a London based company and we were posting, you know, a video every week. But we got caught up in some bad material I guess or the editors thought it was bad material having to do with I think it had to do with the Sphinx and Robert Shock and Zi. I might have said something about Zachie had Hawas that
got me in trouble. I think I was very frustrated. I'd just coming I had just come back from a tour, and I think I talked about this. I had a conversation with Egypt Egyptian archaeologist, and I was asking This was all recorded, I probably should have edited out. I was asking why you're not using ground penetrating radar and this was over at the Serapim. I was talking to this guy and he was very very forthright, and he
basically said we don't use it. And I was shocked because I was like, well, how the hell do you do excavations with all the sand and this everything is covered and is he said, we use the old survey if something has a hill or a bump or something, we look at it, we dig into it, and then
if it's what we think it is, then we start excavating. Well, I was flabbergasted, and I think I was frustrated, and I said something that was not great about the Antiquities Department of Egypt, which is still He's not officially part of it anymore. Zahi watched us to be the Supreme Leader. Supreme Leader. Anyhow, long story short, I got in trouble.
They asked to take that episode down. I think we waited too long and they ended up taking the whole channel down and we eventually got it back up, but at the time I said, I have many a great relationship with the organization. So they took the whole thing down and it was down for over a year, and six months ago we relaunched it and so Earth Asia's YouTube channel is back, so I hope people can get back on there and see some of the great editing
and programming that we do. Of course, everyone listens, which is good, but if you want to see details and you're not one for Facebook, check out the YouTube channel Earth Ancients YouTube and you'll see everybody we talk to each week, so YouTube's very sensitive. There was a time a couple of years ago, if you spoke out about a certain drug, or you are speaking out against the AMA American Medical Association, they would flag you. It's really
gotten bad. And of course no foul language, no nudity, obviously, no pornographic imagery, cartoons or anything like that. But I still get flagged occasionally, and I know people that are getting flaked. I know Kob people have their whole site taken down. So anyhow, if you can take a look at the Earth Ancients on the YouTube channel and see what's going on there. Hey, today we are going to California.
We're going to talk about the Conquistador, and that is the period when Cortes Hernanez Cortes landed in Mexico and basically destroyed the Aztecs. But today's story has to do with northern Mexico and Baja California, and my guest today is talking about really his belief on how California was developed, the various indigenous people there, and his own personal trek into Baja California in the late nineteen seventies. It's kind of cool for me because I'm a Native California, and
I'm always interested in what the history is. We have a history in the late fifteen hundreds where we had father Sarah Jenupero Sarah coming up from Mexico into southern California and eventually into northern California, and he placed missions in I think every five hundred five hundred miles increments. And if you come to California today, you can see a mission in San Diego, in Santa Barbara, LA, all the way up into Marin County, which is in the
San Francisco Bay area. There's one in San Francisco too, and and they're they're kind of cool. Uh, They're they're stucco. And the sad thing is they were made by slave labor and they you know, if you they crowd the local natives together and they forced them to build these these missions. They were also made to support the local military and they would, you know, barricade themselves in I don't think there was ever any an uprising, but there may have been. But that's that's a little bit of
California history. This program we're presenting today is more on the final period of Corteza's stay in northern California, North America, and he actually came and settled in what is today Baja California. But it's a it's an interesting show, and I thought it would be one for the books and we like it. So today's program is The Elusive Conquest of Queen Khalifa, California History Revisited, and my guest is
Alan Ergot. If you're a fan of California history like i am, you're always looking for new bits and pieces of data, and we got a new one that just came out, actually came out last year. It's called The
Elusive Conquest of Queen Califa, California History Revisited. And I'm a native California and of course when you study California history, you learn about the Spanish who came here, but also the mission fathers who indoctrinated the Native Americans, and the history is always very flowery and positive, but really in
real life it wasn't very flowery at all. But this new book is excellent, and we have the author with us, Alan Ergott, who's going to explain to us just what he discovered and the reason why he wrote this book. So Alan, welcome to Destiny. Great to have you on the program.
Thank you for having me.
Talk a little bit about this journey. Nineteen seventy five, you, your brother, your friend decided to go to Baja California and you literally, over what was it six months, hiked the entire length of Baja I mean, what was the thought process to do about doing that, because that's a huge undertaking.
Yes and no, I think as far as a huge undertaking is concerned, we were young and probably naive and just decided to do it. Two years previously, in nineteen seventy three, I hiked the the vast majority of the Simit Crest Trail from the Mexican border to the Oregon Orshington border at the Columbia River, and I just I love the impact it had on me of just hiking through the landscapes, getting to know what lived there and how that landscape had shifted or had guided their you know,
their their lives. And we had traveled to Baja California before driving down the highway one the highway, you know, goes through the path of least resistance, which means it stayed in the flatlands, and there were seven mountain ranges in the world. Parts of Baja California that were essentially unroaded, and I just I just had to find out what
was in what was in those mountains. And my brother and friend felt the same way I did, and it turned out that we we created a partnership and that's what happened.
So that's approximately twelve hundred miles.
The peninsula itself. If you fly like the crow, it's from the border to Cabo San Lucas at the very end of the peninsula. It's about eight hundred miles. Yeah miles, okay, But when you figure in the ins and outs of trails and the topography, we figured it was about twelve hundred miles.
Yes, okay, So just get a sense of this trek. So did you land in San Diego, put your backpacks on and physically walk this or did you actually drive this this adventure both.
We strategically decided that we would drive down in every eighty eight miles plant a food can about two feet underneath the surface of the earth. These were steel five gallon paint cans that you can find in any paint store, but they had the metal tabs that fit around the top of the rim and secured the contents pretty darn well, we figured two feet deep the food would remain somewhat cool, and this was the kind of the core of the
food that we needed to complete our hike northwards. So again we drove down to Cabo San Lucas heading south, took bearings, tried to understand where we might find water here and there, and did our best to drive up into the mountains to bury those food cans along our
route predominantly for two thirds of the peninsula. It was about El Camino Real, which is still a dirt trail in Baja California, and it took us about three months to do that, to take our bearings, map the food sites, the water sites, sites of interest, and then at Cabo San Lucas, we put on our backpacks and started hiking north.
Start hiking north. The initial intention sounds like exploration, but it was so much And you're right about this, and I want to mention to our listeners this is also somewhat of a memoir. As you're hiking, you're running into these caves and finding these these amazing paintings. Was that an outcrop from your initial idea of doing this or was it something that just happened as you began following this trail.
I think it was one of the attractions. You know, Earl Stanley Gardner made the cave paintings of the Sierra San Francisco famous in the early nineteen sixties with his illustrious helicopter exploration of that that's mountain range what I prefer to call the Sacred Canyons, and then that was followed up by a number of archaeologists that went down and reported, you know, factual content within the midden of the cave caves themselves and started talking about the anthropology
and likely time frame with which those paintings had been actually sketched out by the artists. So it was an attraction, but the real thing was way beyond my expectations. And as we spent hours looking at them, stories began to present themselves to me at least, and I realized that the paintings themselves were the Indians, the indigenous natives way
of telling history, of describing their own personal history. I mean, they don't have a written language, so oral language and their painted history is what we have.
Is there And you're write about this in your book. Are there descendants or are there actual Kochimi Natives? That are still alive up and down the Baja.
There are few homer astmen and anthropologist, geologist or geographer. I should say estimated about thirty thousand natives in Baja California at the time of the spaniards arrival about fifteen thirties, and I think they're and the Coach of Me were one of the largest tribes, tribal groups, and they occupied the very central part of Baja California. And I think that the most recent census put the number at about one hundred Coach to Me speakers left, mostly in Tijuana and Sonata, maybe MEXICALI.
Yeah. The reason I asked that is that you document that you observed one hundred and fifty cave paintings, and I wonder if you were able to get any interpretation from the remaining indigenous people that are in the area, just to get a sense of because they didn't have any writing, right, they had no written language, So what were these representing.
It's hard to find the Coach of Me and we did not do that, but we were able to interview I should say a number of other Indian tribes, the Pie Pie in the very northern part of Baja California, and also the Kumier or Kumia in the San Diego area,
so that was the closest we could come by. There are some symbols that I think are universal, like a concentric circles representing water, Like when you drop a pebble into a pond, you get that concentric flow of lines moving out from the impact of the of the rock. That's I think that's globally fairly uniform as a symbol of water. But some of the storylines they could not confirm, and they were hesitant to do so. It was like,
those are ancestors. That's their story. It's not my story, and I don't want to presume to know that story.
That's that's interesting. Are there paintings of interactions with the Spanish that you found or are they much much earlier by thousands of years.
It's a very good question. There have been some carbon dating of implements in the caves themselves that go back let's say four hundred to six hundred years, so they're not ancient paintings like you would find in Europe. They're not ten thousand years old. These are much more contemporary. And I know of one painting that had gold crosses, much like you would see on the chest of a
Jesuit priest. There's another painting in the southern Sierra Ares of an expedition, specifically an expedition that Spanish lad in the mid seventeen and seventeen sixties, and these were clearly cowboys or cowboy like on horses, and I believe that that is part of that expedition, which was only two hundred and it's only two hundred and fifty years ago.
Oh interesting.
So there is a range I think of more contemporary paintings, perhaps extending before the Spanish arrived, but I think it includes the early part of mission history.
That's fascinating. Did according to your book, were there explorations that were sanctioned by Cortes into the Baja area or did it just was it just kind of a natural migration that the Spanish would be seeking out as many lands as they could, and so Baja became another destination.
The fascinating part of the history to me is that Cortes conquered the Aztecs Tinachalon in the fifteen twenties fifteen twenty three, twenty four, and her name was her Nan. Cortes was he was. He's a conquistador, and he wasn't much of an administrator, although some would say he was a good governor of Mexico when it first was created. But his natural inclination was to extend New Spain Northwarods
and that meant mainland Mexico. But it also meant California, which was the name was popularized by a writer in Seville in fifteen ten. It became a very popular book, and California was described as being to the right of terrestrial paradise and run by a queen Khalifa. Actually it's
Queen Kalais. Some say Khalifa. Wo, so sorry, and I think Hernand Cortes felt that if he could equate that northern island of California with something that was close and it had some fictional popularity with it, that it would be easier to convince the king to underwrite his conquest northwards. Well, the King was interested, but he basically told Cortes, hey, you've got plenty of money from plundering the Aztecs. Use your own money to find this California. So Cortes did.
He was expecting more gold, more silver, more riches, akin to what he found with the Aztecs, which he did not, but ultimately it took three voyages northwards from the Pacific coast of New Spain of Mexico to actually land in the southern part of Baja California. He called that spot Santa Cruz, but a later conquistador renamed it a Lapase. So it's the city of Lapause in the very southern cape region of Baja California, which became the first landing place of Europeans.
Yeah, you know, I had to remark that you have this great map in your book that shows some of these trailways. But what also was intriguing is all the missions that are located in Baja are those actually functioning missions now or are they just more like foundations in the buildings themselves are gone.
There's a mix there. The Spanish when they say they found did a mission and let's say fifteen or let's say sixteen ninety seven that was Loretto founding, is really the the location of where the mission is going to be. It has nothing to do with the completion of any structure itself. Oh something happened here?
Does that mean you're coming across perfect? Oh? Good?
So the first mission was typically stick constructed I mean branches providing some shade and relief from the sun. The second was typically adobe that replaced it, and adobe walls and probably woodn't roof structures as well. The third was actually cut rock that was strengthened with cement, and it would take typically eighty to one hundred years to get from the sticks to the cut rock finished a church itself.
So many of these churches were begun by the Jesuits, and some reached cut rock proportions by the time they were kicked out of California seventy years later, but most were completed by the Dominicans in the early eighteen hundreds.
Yeah, I mean, I've been to Mexico many times. In the Yucatan, they take they deconstruct the pyramids of the Maya to build their cathedrals. Is that what some of the there weren't temples or pyramids by this indigenous people were there, No.
They were not. They were a hogan, willow constructed structure that was small enough for typically a family. There were larger hogans that were used as tribal meeting rooms, but to my knowledge, nothing was really constructed of cut rock or cement that was definitely a European invention brought to the New World.
Interesting, let's talk about Khalifa, who exactly is she? Is she an actual person or is it more of a myth. Lifa is definitely a myth. In the book that was printed in Seville in fifteen ten, she was an Amazon queen of the island of California that used golden.
Armaments to fend off men that the island was strictly of women. Men were invited on occasion to presumably replicate the race, but as soon as as soon as that was done, the men were kicked off the island, and so it was just it was a fictional character from an author that actually named a fictional place called California.
I took that.
Fictional figure, Khalifa, and turned it into a primary personage of the book itself. Queen Khalifa, I use the word Cali in the book, but she was a seventeen year old young woman healer who had a great deal of empathy and an ambition to become a chief of the Kachin tribe. And she was created primarily from one of the cave paintings in the Sierra San Francisco just north
of San Ignacio. She was incorporated next to a painted man and then a painted mountain lion, larger than life mountain lion, and she was between the mountain lion and the man, and her positioning was at the very apex of the mural, in the most noticeable position. And I could not help but feel that she had played a large part in the coach Me tribe history, cultural history, and that she was a person of renown. So she became one of the focal characters of the book of the story.
As you're on this trail in seven nineteen seventy five, you are befriended by different families and you direct you write a great deal about this who were very open and receiving you, and occasionally you had a meal and were able to sleep there. We're going to take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly with my guest today, Alan Egart, discussing his newest book, The Elusive Conquest of Queen Khalifa, will be right back.
Don't you want to get to know me? I bet I'm stuck inside yourn. I see you with mighty but look in my way all night to keep your hands.
My guest today is histori orian Alan Egart, who has written a new book called The Elusive Conquest of Queen Khalifa, a fictitious character whose name eventually morphed into California. Did you get any kind of a historical reference from these visits with the people who have lived there for perhaps generations, Yes, we did.
They're very On one hand, they're very proud of their history. They know how many generations back. The first of their name a surname Cain. For instance, in the Cape region of Baja California, there were parts of the Sierras that had just one name associated with all of those ranches, and for instance it was a a name made of Sisaania and Banyagau. Sosanio was Italian and Benyaga, unusually was
a Filipino. And I realized that many of the Philippines came back from the Asia during the days of the galleons, the Spanish galleons, and actually homestead at the southern part of Baja California. So there was I think there was a pride in the fact that they had been there for generations to come. They were also they also admitted to having Indian blood in their veins, that they were essentially the descendants of an Indian woman and a Spanish
soldier that accompanied typically the missionaries. Many of the soldiers, of course, were given grants, land grants to create ranches, and there were no European or Spanish women there at the time, and it's only natural for Indian women to become married to these Spanish men over time, so they understood that they were part Indian or Mestizo, but they liked to be called Mexicans first, Latino second, andina Mestiso kind of a distant there's still a bias against the
indigenous natives. But you know, to me, in my view, there was a richness in their hereditary that actually helped them survive in that landscape, and there was a genius that that came with that hunter gatherer culture that extended well into the Mexican bloodline.
Fascinating. How did the Spanish expl yours come to believe that the area was ruled by a powerful queen? The book.
The book was I don't have the name of it right in front of me, and I'm embarrassed to say it, but it was again published in Seville, Spain, in fifteen ten, and by the time that Cortes had conquered the Aztecs, I think it was in its fourth printing, and so Queen Khalifa was again a purely fictional romantic figure in that book, but was used frequently by Cortes and his
captains and soldiers. California became the name of this peninsula what then was thought to be an island that extended from Kabosu Lucas all the way up to the marine area of Upper California. And so California was large, and in the early maps it was portrayed as a very large island offshore of New Spain or Mexico. But in reality, of course, it was a part of peninsula of the continent, and it took them almost two hundred years to confirm the fact that it was indeed an island.
Wonderful, So we're does Cortes go around the tip of the Cape Horn and then up to the Pacific Ocean to settle or are they crossing the land from Mexico to Baja and then coming up.
That's what intrigued me, you know, of course, as governor of the newly designed of Mexico City, moving to the west coast of Mexico, somewhere around Port of Varta or a little bit south. It was a short joannt I mean, it was a ride of three or four days, and there were ports in that area that, soon after the conquering of the Aztecs, became boat construction ports, and so actually one of Cortesa's captains was instructed to build him three ships to explore the northern parts of Mexico as
well as the portions now called California. It took him eight years to come up with the boats, the money, the crew, and the first two voyages north were assigned to other captains. Both failed. Both ships were actually of the two ships in each voyage that would be four ships, two were lost and two came back, one after having discovered an insignificant chain of islands, and the other with a mutineer or the crew of a mutineer who had discovered the area around Lapause or the Cape region. On
the third voyage. Frustrated having spent so much money building ships and crew and provisioning the ships, Cortes decided to take the captainship himself, and he led that group to the area of Lapause, which had an extraordinary court that was said to be able to house all of the the you know, the Spanish oh gosh, this, you know, the Spanish ships all at one time. And he landed
in fifteen thirty five. He actually stepped ashore at La Pause, Baja California in fifteen thirty five, took title to the land, as most explorers did at that point, and proceeded to build a colony, but it lasted only one year and he left California very dispirited. By that time, the law had caught up with him and he found himself defendant of a lot of lawsuits that came about as a result of his conquering the Aztecs. And he was, you know, he was out of favor with King Carlos, the Spanish
king at the time. I believe something happened to him during his journeys into the interior of Baja California, into the Cape Mountains. He we know, he lost four horses, and he was definitely a horseman and was very fond of his horses. But he lost four horses, didn't say how they were lost, and he left defeated. And I believe that the reason for that was the resistance on the part of the Peraku and Guaikura Indian tribes that occupied the very southern part of Baja California when he had landed.
So when he's encountering resistance, is this he's losing his people, his soldiers or because I mean, are they as are they as aggressive as the Aztecs were, Because we do know that when he was in Mexico City that in the beginning he took a pretty good beating and then after a while, obviously he had weapons that were superior to the Aztec. When he's in Baja, is that the same kind of a resistance he's dealing with, Or they're not as sophisticated, Uh.
They're perhaps not as sophisticated uh as the Aztecs. And we can go into detail in terms of how Cortes managed to defeat a technologically, at least from the indigenous point of view, superior as technicians. But I think of the Guaykura and the Peraku in the southern part of Baja California as being oh, what's the word I'm looking for? You know, they fought in not an upright fashion. They were guerrilla fighters. They chose the time and period of
their of their wars and their battles. They would pop up and disappear, and it was a difficult foe for the Spanish to to find and defeat soundly.
It was a war of.
Well, pardon me, it was a war of of period. Well, it lasted a year, and I think it was a war of attrition is the word I was trying to think of. Where the Spanish eventually had consumed almost all
of their supplies. Their water supply that they had depended upon was seasonal, and they found that they were having to deep deeper and deeper into the wells, and they found that the workers were being shot at at you know, poor times, and a lot of the supplies that they had stocked on land were stolen by the Guaycura and Peracut. So it was a protracted guerrilla war that did not favor the Spaniards, and that was in but that was particularly true for the next one hundred and sixty years.
Not until sixteen ninety seven did a colony become permanent in California.
But it was done.
The work was done by Jesuit padres and not the Spanish soldiers. The King of Spain was so frustrated at not being able to complete a colony in California, and had put out tons and tons of money, I mean silver and gold to that effect, and he finally, out of frustration, gave a monopolistic license to the Jesuits to not only colonize Baja California, but to administer the business and the wealth that would eventually come out of it through trade.
Is this prior to Jenneparo Sarah arriving or is this yes? Was he one of the ones who started Baja and then moved into proper California? No?
Who?
Nippros Sarah was a Franciscan missionary and he was brought into California after the Jesuits were kicked out. The Jesuits lasted in Baja California in California for seventy years, and they built about fifteen missions in that period of time. And the Jesuits.
Were very good at what they did, but they also managed to create some enemies and throughout the world, and eventually those enemies had convinced the king that the Jesuits were hiding large amounts of money of funds that were not giving their appropriate twenty percent share to the crown to the Spanish crown.
And they were also seeking to remove the the current Spanish king. So the king became very upset over this what was essentially a rumor, and kicked the Jesuits out the.
Group.
The next group of missionaries that came in were the Franciscans, and they were only in Baja California for a year because they were directed to march northwards into Upper California which is now Upper California meaning San Diego to San Francisco and create a number of colonies on the west coast of Upper California. The Dominicans were immediately given the keys to the missions that the Jesuits had built and had started, and they ran the miss in Baja California through the eighteen twenties.
Interesting. Was there a political and social system attributed to the indigenous people that the Spanish encountered or was that more of a myth? And could you kind of write about that. You make it sound like there may have been a system, but this may have come from the book.
I believe there was. I think that tribal groups were anywheres from twenty on up to eighty people in size. They were typically loaded located at water sources year round, water sources that also had the game and the plant foods that would support the tribe. The leadership I very
much know to be a meritocracy. Any hundred gather societies are of course that that way you you you support a leader by following him or her, and it's because they produce good decisions and the tribe survives under their leadership. And I think, you know, I don't think there are polling booths and ballots, but it was you voted upon a leader based on your willingness to follow him and accept his suggestions or his direction. And uh, that was
kind of confirmed by a number of missionaries. There were historian missionaries that wrote about the native coach me Me in particular, I think, in somewhat of at least an neutral standpoint. They felt that the natives were not of an intelligent variety, that they were dirty, they didn't even dig wells, and they didn't really construct know how to construct certain simple weapons systems. But the ideology was that we Europeans are far superior and we're going to show you the way.
But in reality they were up against the wall with a very tough terrain and landscape that they were trying to colonize. They did not know how to survive as well as the indigenous and that became a problem for one hundred and sixty years.
Wow. One of the things that's come out in the last few decades is that the Maya were maritime people. They actually had boats that went up and down the coast. There's some speculation they may have been in the Gulf, and they were in Florida and Louisiana. You mentioned Lapage as a port. Were the indigenous people of Baja somewhat maritime related and had fishing and exchange with other groups up and down the Baja coast.
That's a very good question, and I thought a lot about it. The Peracu occupied the very tip of Baja California, and then the tribal group that was just north of them was the guay Kura. They were both recognized as having much darker skins than the peninsular humans to the north, and they were also focused on a more maritime or
marine style of survival. They were much greater fishermen and uh, you know, used all the resources of the sea to survive, and they had boats that the that the tribal groups north of them did not, so both the Peraku and
the Guaikura were assumed to be uh. We're assumed to have arrived by boat, probably from the north, down the Humboldt Current that they had reached, perhaps from from the Japan's uh So or from Micronesia, essentially moving northwards to the Japans and then catching the Humboldt Current as it was brought down the northern coast of Washington, Oregon, California to Baja California, which was a warm uh semi tropical
habitat that they were familiar with. Now, in terms of having gone first further down into south of Cabo San Lucas down into mainland Mexico, I'm not aware of that. There are certainly stories that support that, but I haven't seen much anthropological evidence to confirm it.
Okay, we're going to take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we'll return shortly with my guest today, Alan Ergot, discussing his new book, The Elusive Conquest of Queen Khalifa. Will be right back with you. My guest today is Alan Egart. He has written a new book called the elusive conquest of Queen Khalifa. This also chronicles the last days of Cortes, the well known Spanish conquistador who traveled north in and up through
Baja California Lapause. You mentioned La Pause being a really good port when the Spanish came, where the natives building of a support or are you suggesting that early Spaniards came and made it into a superior port.
It was.
It was kind of a landlocked port that had a fairly small canal entrance, and the Spanish liked it because it had just enough depth for oh probably hundreds of ships. But it was also it would also protect those ships from the southern storms, the Chebasco's as they called it, that you know, created winds in the excess of one hundred miles per hour and would literally destroy an unprotected anchorage.
The Indians did travel to the islands in and around the Pause and to the north, so they whether they were balsa type canoes, I believe that they were on that order, they were not larger. There were tales of Seri Indians coming by canoe all the way across the Sea of Cortez, which is roughly one hundred mile wide.
Gulf of California to the peninsula. There was some communication between mainland tribes and peninsular tribes, and it is felt that there was a limited amount of trade that occurred there as well.
So we're not talking about any sophisticated sea worthy boats or like a catamaran like you've seen in Polynesia. We're looking at hallowed out trunks of trees, which are I think you call them canoes, right.
Yes, yeah, I think so balsas or canos canoas. But there was you know, in Upper California there is quite preponderance of the balsa rafts or canoes, that is, particularly around San Francisco, and I believe that they were seeing in some of the island natives off the coast of Baja California too. They just weren't utilized by the tribes north of La Pause very much because all the water
was confined to the interior. The surface water was found in the mountains of Baja California and not along the coast. So the vast majority of the populations of those indigenous group beings were always in the interior of Baja California and not so much along the coast.
So are you suggesting that Cortees landed and actually maybe surveyed true California, or did he always stay in Baja and hope for the to make a big killing there. Of course he didn't find gold, but maybe you know, you mentioned that they divided up the land, and of course that would be Haciendez is what they would create. Yes, Sanchero's haciens Ranchero's. How far north do you think Cortes got.
He didn't get any further north than Lapause. I mean it did make He did make some some journeys into the interior of what we would call the northern part of the Sierra del Cabo, the Cape Mountains, and the book has a story about what he saw and did there that I you know, that helped explain why he
became so dispirited upon leaving California. But the portions of upper Baja California, in California were it took the middle to late fifteen hundreds for those explorations to actually occur, and they were done by Viscaino, by an admiral Atando. There were probably no i'd say nine or ten expeditions that were intended to find places of colonization that ended
up in total defeat. Uh typically Spaniard soldiers attacking the women and then unleashing an onslaught of male indigenous men that basically ran them out of the country, ran them out away from shore. And I believe it or not, that happened again and again and again, much to the consternation of the Jesuit padres that sometimes journeyed with those initial conquista doors.
Well, I mean, that's interesting, Alan, because I'm wondering, if these expeditions are constantly failing, what motivated them to stay you know, I guess some of them did stay back, but they it was a failure for the most part, wasn't it. It was.
The drive was I think primarily featuring two situations. One was that there was some wealth in Coastal Ba, California. They did find pearls and there was a sustained pearl fishery much later on off the Gulf coast of southern Baja, California.
The second situation was in the fifteen sixties. The trade route between the Philippines and Coastal Baja or the Pacific coast of Mexico City, was actually created by the Black galleons that found a huge profit margin in the trade of silver from New Spain from that which they took from the Aztecs, and they came back with silks, perfumes, spices, all the riches of Southeast Asia that were traded to the Philippines, and that route was at that time became
one of the the most profitable enterprise of Spain. Unfortunately, the English and the Dutch pirratized those galleons and Mexico the king realized that they needed colonies on the west coast of Baja California and Upper California to create ports and ships to protect that trade route, and that was the primary motivation for the king to keep on trying to colonize both what is now Baja California and Upper California.
So when Mexico revolted against Spain, I guess that area became owned by Mexico. And then eventually it was after the Louisiana purchase that we the Americans took that it made it California, Upper California, Upper California.
Yeah, the territory of California soon to be the state of California.
Fantastic. The books called the Elusive Conquests of Queen Khalifa, and my guest today has been Alan Eric Ox. Hey, Alan, I want to talk about this myth. How did the myth of Khalifa evolve after each failed attempt, because it must have kept growing after these Spaniards were not getting what they had hoped for.
It did, and it was it was a matter of pride for Spain. You know, at that time, Spain and Portugal had the two largest navies in the world, and they colonized an incredible amount of land. It was just immediately after Columbus's quote unquote discovery of the New World that led to the Pope and his Treaty of Torsidias that divided the New World into both Spain and Portugal.
And uh.
So Spain was or they felt that they.
Were, you know, the prime of the prime or the conquistadors of the conquistadors. And there was such a large amount of gold in the New World, primarily from the Incas and the Aztecs, that supported Spain's power. And it really wasn't until oh Thomas of Cavendish, who took down the Santa Ana galleon on its way back from from
the Philippines right at Cabo San Lucas. I mean that that ship battle was right there at Cabo San Lucas, and Thomas of Cavendish captured the Santa Anna and brought it back to London and the Queen and was knighted, and it infuriated the king and the whole Spanish nation. And so they doubled up or doubled down on the amount of money they were spending to colonize what was now uniformly called California, and that included Baja California.
Wow, so how far I know? We know that the English got to northern California, Sir Francis Drake got into San Francisco. How far north did the Spanish get And is there any known established cities that can be attributed to Spanish settlements?
Well, Cabrio Nscuyano. There were a number of I wouldn't call them necessarily contista doors, Let's call them explorers for the minute, for the moment they did make. They did travel up the coast of Baja California in upper California during the fifteen hundreds, but they were unable to bring with them enough material and colonists to create a colony. They discovered first San Diego and Monterey Carmel area. San Francisco really wasn't discovered until after who nippro uh brought
his expedition into upper California. Yeah, but certainly the Marin County area was discovered by Sir Francis Drake, and he found he actually had a very nice run in with the meewalk No, yeah, I mean yeah meewalk. I believe it was coastal meewalk and very profitable relationship that was never nothing came of it because Drake of course went south and then west back.
To to London as well, with the horde of treasure that he had somehow managed to take through piracy off the coast of of mainland Meco.
I think he took a ship called the Cacafuego, which basically translates to fire shitter. But that ship had an enormous amount of wealth to it, and Sir Francis Drake actually became Sir Francis Drake on returning to London with roughly one hundred and eighty million dollars in today's you
know standard amount. But you're right, Drake and Cavendish both were knighted Drake first and then Cavendish later, and that was a lot of money that just dropped from Spanish hands into their enemies and you can imagine how much
it infuriated them. And this was particularly during the time of the Spanish Armada, which was you know, the giant naval war between Spain and England, and this amount of money being returned to England actually helped the queen in fighting off the Spanish Ramada and achieving primacy between the two waring nations.
Wow, that's a history we don't know about. As we close Alan, what is it about the story that we are told in the interpretations of history that are so off? I mean, you've found out some You've discovered some very very key bits of information in your research that we don't hear about in typical history books. It seems like, you know, the Spanish have their narrative about what they did, and there's also the indigenous side of it that is interesting as well. Is this just the way history is?
You know, when you ask the question, I immediately think Winston Churchill and this famous line that the propaganda propaganda of the victors becomes the history of the defeated, And that does seem to replicate itself throughout history. I think typically the native or indigenous side of history is the one that has been defeated culturally, and I don't think it's recognized. I don't think they are recognized for the
intelligence they have. In Baja California. I think that shows up more than other places because it was such a difficult place to live. It is dry. There are parts of Baja California, large parts of Baja California that do not receive rain for four years, five years at a time.
The central desert of Baja California had very little rain, and survival in that area required literally literally generational intelligence that had been passed down where to go when there is a drought, what to do when there is a drought, and uh that was unknown to the conquistadors, to the Spanish who tried to colonize the area, and it literally took them one hundred and sixty years to figure it out. So I suspect that storyline replicates itself in other parts
of the world for one reason or another. I just know the California side of the story, but it it it kind of points out a bias that we have till to this day. That you know, the technology is there, but perhaps the knowledge of survive in difficult habitats or environments is not. And I think that's that intelligence, that's the value of an indigenous society that we need to recognize on a firmer basis.
Yeah, and we don't hear anything about that whatsoever. It's just like a lost narrative of indigenous lifestyle.
I agree.
Yeah, real quickly. Where does Khalifa eventually morph into California? Where is that? Where does that happen.
In the book that was written in fifteen ten, both California and Khalifa or Colofia was a part of that book, So they were they came together in the mind of the author in you know, in his romance novel.
Fascinating is that the question you asked, Well, it's I need to if you can expand on that. It's like Khalifa is part of California, the wording and the full word California. I'm just wondering how that was established and was it established by the time the Spanish had firmly entrenched themselves in Baja.
That is a great story, a short one. It turns out that the Muslims occupied conquered and occupied Spain for seven hundred years, from about seven hundred AD to about fourteen hundred AD, So this book was written in the fifteen hundreds. And I believe, as do many other historians, that Khalifa in California came from the Arabic or Muslim word khalif, which means either a religious or administrative leader
of a country or a tribe. So khalif c Alif is a shortened version or shortened spelling of khalif in the Arabic of sense, and that became a California, So in essence, the great state of California is named after an Arabic leader.
Wow, fantastic, All right, hey, real pleasure, Alan. Won't you let people know how they can get more information? What's your website address?
Yeah, the website is just californiaconquest dot com and we are in the process of updating some of the photos. If you're interested in knowing more about the cave paintings and some of my interpretations of those cave pains, you're welcome to look at that. Those additional photos should be popping up in a couple of weeks on the website. Californiaconquest dot com.
Fantastic and the book came out in October of last year. It's available on Amazon, and I would think pretty much anywhere else, right.
That's correct, Kindle Goodreads, it's there, or you can order the book too from the website itself.
And before we started, I mentioned the cave paintings there. It was one hundred and fifty of them, and you are at some point going to put a few of the color ones up on the website. Absolutely fantastic, All right, Alan, much success, Thank you for joining me. And I really appreciate the history as a native California and I'm like wonderfully informed with this detailed information. Thank you well, thanks for reading it, and I appreciate the time.
Thank you.
The maps in this book are kind of worth the price by themselves if you're a fan of maps. He illustrates and tracks the missions that are up and down the Baja Peninsula and I cannot believe how many there are. And I asked him before we started the interview if they're still functioning. Yeah, the Mexican government has made sure that they're restored. That would be kind of a neat trip by itself to go down to Mexico to Baja California and check out those missions, just to see what's there,
because the archives might be very, very cool. So the other thing that I did not mention is the fact that he has over a one thousand illustrations or excuse me, a thousand photographs of these petroglyphs, of these wall paintings, and he didn't he hasn't done anything with him. He had him shot and this is nineteen seventy five, so the it was all film and he shot the wall paintings in slide film. And I didn't realize that you can use id stretch, that amazing product that you can
upload into your either your desktop or your laptop. That was created by the engineer John Harmon, and John Harmon designed it because he was a huge fan of the wall paintings and petroglyphs at in Baja California. That's why he designed it. And so I think it's fifty bucks and he can up Alan can upload it and really clarify what's on those walls. A thousand paintings. I mean, he's got to do a book on that by itself. That's totally amazing. So there you go id stretch. If
you don't know about id stretch, check it out. I the letter I and then D and then stretch rock Art photograph enhancement or rock Art photo Enhancement. I think the version now is two point two. And you color correct the stone that the painting's on, and you can actually extract the original colors. It's really an amazing tool, and so Alan probably has well over enough images to
create a catalog or a website or something. But if you have anything that is on stone painting in your area and you want to enhance it and in some cases actually bring back the colors that were originally applied to the stone, it can be you know, hundreds of thousand or a thousand years older. Use id stretch. Check it out. The phone version is fifty. I think the desktop version has double that, maybe one hundred bucks, well worth the investment id stretch. All right, that's it for
this program. I want to think my guest today, Alan Ergott, coming to us from northern California. As always a team of Gael Tour, Mark Foster and Feya Pavar. You guys rock all right, take care of every well and we will talk to you next time