Mountain Lake

by Steve W. LaBounty
March 2001

Exactly 225 years ago, Spanish explorers stood where I stand. Juan Bautista de Anza and his caravan wandered over the spot of future tennis courts, built fires where now a small backstop stands, and stared at a lake "of very fine water near the mouth of the port of San Francisco".

Other explorers had done reconnaissance in the area before, but Anza had come hundreds of miles from Horcasitas (in today's Mexico) looking to settle down. He had over 200 colonists waiting in Monterey, and he had come to found San Francisco's Presidio and Mission Dolores. Anza noted the advantages of the camp site: running water, firewood and good pasturage for cattle. "But along with these good qualities one must mention the lack of timber, for in the district examined there is none even for barracks..."

Anza could build his barracks today. Cypress, fir, eucalyptus and pine surround the water, although they've been thinned over the past few years. On the far northeast side of the lake a rope swing has hung from a tall eucalyptus since I was a boy thirty years ago.

Adventurers

Mountain Lake Park, running from Park Presidio to just passed 8th Avenue, served as our backyard. The kids from 11th Avenue spent half their childhood inside it.

We'd start as toddlers in the playground on the west side, using the swings and slides. Then as we grew older and more independent we had forts and tunnels inside the tangle of gnarled low trees that lined the "Parcourse" exercise path.

The meadow, so small to me now, served as our baseball diamond and any fly ball that landed past the big oak was a home run. We'd get daring and climb on the roof of "old man shack", an enclosure where suit-coated gentlemen of a certain age played cards.

The lake's backwater served as "the swamp". Under the tall bushes, the water completely covered in bright green peat, we were pirates in a blink. Here we often found stray pieces of pornography or ripped-out excerpts from Judy Blume books. The swamp looked like it could swallow you up at any time, and the magazine detritus just added to the dangerous feeling.

These statements won't surprise anyone familiar with the history of California or the West. The mission system that colonized California was fueled by the sweat of Indian labor. The Costanoan population around San Francisco Bay has been estimated to have been about 10,000 when Anza and Font arrived. Sixty years later, less than 200 remained. Their culture was replaced by Christianity, and their numbers decimated by disease.

But as a child reading the plaque placed by the "Daughters of American Colonists" I imagined a small group of Spaniards marching into the forested, but unpopulated park I played in. I saw trees that weren't there, and didn't see people who were.

Remember that Juan Bautista de Anza and Father Pedro Font would have failed without the impressed labor of the indigenous people. What the Daughters of American Colonists really commemorated with a rock is not just the glorious beginnings of a great city, but the beginning of the end for thousands of people who already lived here.

Image credits: WNP, March 2001.

Bibliography: This is San Francisco, Robert O'Brien, 1948; Anza's California Expeditions, Herbert Eugene Bolton, 1930; Fire & Gold, Charles A. Fracchia, 1996.

Mountain Lake Park 080505
I lived right at the entrance to the park and par course.

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