From a Kumeyaay village on the river to downtown's comeback, in order, with every claim cited at the bottom.
On May 10, 1867, a man named Alonzo Horton stood at an auction in Old Town and bought most of what is now downtown San Diego. He paid two hundred sixty five dollars. That works out to about twenty seven and a half cents an acre, and the people in the room laughed at his opening bid.
Twenty years later Wyatt Earp was running gambling halls on that land.
The rest of the story is stranger than that. The first Catholic martyr in California was killed here. A man was hanged here for stealing a rowboat. The city went broke in two years and the state took its charter away. And the plane Charles Lindbergh flew alone across the Atlantic was built here in sixty days.
What follows is the whole arc, in order, with every claim cited at the bottom. Where the records disagree, we say so rather than pick a winner.
People were living in San Diego County long before anybody wrote anything down. The oldest well dated site is the C. W. Harris Site on the San Dieguito River, which archaeologists date to about nine thousand radiocarbon years ago. Calibrated to calendar years, the San Dieguito people were here roughly eleven thousand years ago.
The Kumeyaay were the people living here when Europeans arrived. The National Park Service says they had been in the region for thousands of years by then.
Their village on the San Diego River was called Kosa'aay. The Spanish wrote it down as Cosoy. Its shelters stood about a hundred yards from the river, near the water at the foot of what is now Presidio Hill. That spot, the river village below the hill, is where the city of San Diego starts. The exact sites were later forgotten.
Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed into San Diego Bay on September 28, 1542, with three ships, the San Salvador, La Victoria and San Miguel. He named it San Miguel, after the archangel. The National Park Service credits him as the first European to reach the west coast of what is now the United States.
The name did not stick. Sebastián Vizcaíno anchored off Point Loma on November 10, 1602, in a flagship that happened to be called San Diego. Two days later a mass was said for San Diego de Alcalá, and after it Vizcaíno named the bay San Diego. He never wrote down why he picked it.
Then Spain left it alone for a hundred and sixty seven years.
When Spain finally moved on Alta California, it started here, and it nearly failed before it began.
The ship San Antonio reached San Diego Bay on April 11, 1769, after about eight weeks at sea. The San Carlos came in on April 29, after almost four months. A third ship, the San José, set out for San Diego, turned back for repairs, and then vanished with everyone aboard. Scurvy and disease went through the crews that did arrive. Dozens died, by some counts close to half the sailors.
The overland parties under Gaspar de Portolá and Father Junípero Serra came in by July 1. On July 16, 1769, Serra founded Mission San Diego de Alcalá on Presidio Hill, the first of the twenty one California missions.
The soldiers had already been camped on the hill since May. The post was given formal presidio status on January 1, 1774.
In August 1774 the mission moved about six miles east, up the river valley, to the spot where it stands today. The reasons on record are practical ones: closer to the Kumeyaay villages, better water and better farmland, and some distance from the soldiers at the presidio.
On the night of November 4, 1775, it burned.
Kumeyaay warriors from at least fifteen villages attacked the mission and set it on fire. One account puts the number at about six hundred. Father Luis Jayme was killed, by the mission's own account while trying to calm the attackers. The Journal of San Diego History calls him Alta California's first Catholic martyr. The blacksmith, José Arroyo, was killed too, and the carpenter, Urselino, died of his wounds.
The investigation ran on for a long time. More than a year later, thirteen men accused of leading the attack were still being held in the presidio jail. Serra argued against sending soldiers out to punish the villages.
In March 1803 an American ship called the Lelia Byrd anchored in the bay. Its captain, Richard J. Cleveland, was there to buy sea otter pelts, which Spanish law did not allow.
The Spanish seized one of his boats. Cleveland took his men back by force and ran his ship out past Fort Guijarros, the Spanish battery at Ballast Point. The two sides fired at each other for about three quarters of an hour. The ship had six three pounders and the fort had six nine pounders. The Lelia Byrd took hits to her rigging and sails and one shot near the waterline, and got away. Nobody is recorded as killed.
Mexico won its independence in 1821, and on April 20, 1822 the Mexican flag went up over the presidio.
Through the 1820s, retired soldiers started building houses at the bottom of Presidio Hill instead of inside the walls. Captain Francisco María Ruiz, the presidio commander, was the first. That cluster of adobes below the hill is what we now call Old Town.
San Diego held its first pueblo election on December 21, 1834. Thirteen votes were cast. The town government took office on January 1, 1835, with Juan María Osuna as the first alcalde.
It did not last. The population dropped from around five hundred in 1834 to around a hundred and fifty by 1841. In 1838 San Diego lost its pueblo status and was folded in as a department of Los Angeles.
Out in the county the land was going to a few families. When American rule began there were forty five Mexican land grants in the San Diego area. Rancho El Cajon alone was 48,799 acres. Rancho Santa Margarita, the biggest, was about 133,400 acres, and it is now Camp Pendleton. The mission itself was secularized in 1835.
On July 29, 1846, the sloop of war Cyane put a landing party ashore and the United States flag went up in the Old Town plaza. John C. Frémont's California Battalion came with it, and Kit Carson was among them.
The fighting came in December. On December 6, 1846, General Stephen W. Kearny and his dragoons met Andrés Pico's Californio lancers at San Pasqual, east of what is now Escondido. It went badly for the Americans. Their dead are counted anywhere from eighteen to twenty two, depending on the record. Pico reported one Californio killed.
Kearny's men were pinned down on a hill now called Mule Hill. Carson, Lieutenant Edward Beale and a Kumeyaay man named Panto, the alcalde of San Pasqual, crept past the guards at night to reach Commodore Stockton in San Diego. Relief arrived on December 11.
San Diego County was created on February 18, 1850, one of the original twenty seven counties in the new state. It covered more than thirty seven thousand square miles. The city was incorporated a few weeks later, by an act passed March 27, 1850, and elected Joshua Bean as its first mayor.
The city started with $10,610.54 in the treasury. The council voted itself salaries of $2,400 a year, over the mayor's veto. A jail contract ran over. Inside two years the city was bankrupt, and in January 1852 the state legislature repealed its charter. A three man Board of Trustees ran San Diego for the next thirty seven years, until a new charter in 1889.
The first try at a new downtown failed at the same time. In March 1850 a group led by William Heath Davis bought a hundred and sixty acres by the bay for $2,304 and called it New Town. They built a wharf that was supposed to cost $13,000 and cost $60,000. There was no fresh water, and it had to be hauled three miles. There was no wood. Davis lost a reported fortune in the San Francisco fire of 1851 and could not keep paying. By 1853 merchants were moving their buildings back to Old Town. Soldiers tore up the wharf for firewood in the winter of 1861.
Two executions from these years are still told in Old Town. Antonio Garra, who led a revolt in 1851 that started over taxes, was shot by a firing squad at the edge of his own grave in the Old Town cemetery in January 1852. And on September 18, 1852, a man known as Yankee Jim Robinson was hanged for stealing a rowboat. The scaffold stood on the lot where Thomas Whaley built his brick house a few years later. The Whaley House was later rented to the county as its courthouse, at $65 a month.
Alonzo Horton arrived in San Diego from San Francisco on April 15, 1867. He did not think much of Old Town. His line about it was that he would not give five dollars for a deed to the whole of it.
He wanted the land by the bay that Davis had given up on. Buying it from the city needed trustees in office to sell it, so Horton paid the county clerk ten dollars to call a special election. Three trustees were elected on April 27, with thirty two votes cast. The auction was held on May 10, with Ephraim Morse as the auctioneer.
Horton opened at a hundred dollars a parcel. The going rate was about twenty, and the room broke out laughing. He was the only bidder on all but one parcel. When it was done he owned about 960 acres for two hundred sixty five dollars, and Morse had put up a hundred and twenty three of it.
He sold the lots and donated land, including the site of the new county courthouse. That land is downtown San Diego.
By 1870 the county supervisors had voted to move the county seat to Horton's new town. Old Town fought it.
On the evening of March 31, 1871, the county clerk, Chalmers Scott, and a few others loaded the county records into express wagons at the Whaley House and drove them to the second floor of the Wells Fargo building at Sixth and G. Whaley protested and asked for the rent he was owed. The board did not pay much attention.
A year later, on April 20, 1872, a fire burned through most of Old Town's business district. The center of San Diego had moved, and it never moved back.
The railroad changed everything. The first transcontinental train on the Santa Fe route left National City on November 14, 1885.
In 1880 the city had 2,637 people. By 1887 it had somewhere around thirty five to forty thousand, by estimate, and lots were being sold and resold within a day. The 1890 census found 16,159. The boom had come and gone in about three years.
Wyatt Earp came with it. The historian Richard Pourade names three gambling halls he ran, one on Fourth Street facing Horton's Plaza, one in the 800 block of Sixth Street, and one on E Street near Sixth, with twenty one games of faro, blackjack, poker and keno between them. The city directory for 1888 lists his occupation as capitalist.
Across the bay, Elisha Babcock and Hampton Story bought Coronado and North Island together in 1885, about 4,185 acres, for $110,000. Their first lot auction drew six thousand people. They started the Hotel del Coronado in 1887 and opened it early in 1888.
In 1892 a nurserywoman named Kate Sessions leased land in the city's undeveloped park for her nursery. The rent was trees. She agreed to plant a hundred trees a year in the park and give three hundred more to the city. The park was named Balboa Park in 1910. There was no public naming contest, whatever you may have heard.
At midnight on December 31, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a telegraph key in Washington, and the Panama California Exposition opened in Balboa Park on New Year's Day 1915. About two million people came that first year, and the fair ran on through 1916. It also paid for the three hundred mile auto race through the streets of Point Loma.
Two things happened in 1912 that the city's boosters did not put in the brochures.
On January 8 the council banned public speaking in a six block area around Fifth and E, where union organizers from the Industrial Workers of the World had been holding street meetings. Forty one men were arrested in one day in February. Vigilantes took over from there. On May 14, the anarchist Ben Reitman was taken from his hotel, driven about twenty miles out of town, beaten, burned with a cigar, covered in tar and made to kiss the flag. Emma Goldman, who had come to town with him, left on the 2:45 train in the early morning. A man named Joseph Mikolasek was shot and killed by police. Governor Hiram Johnson sent an investigator, Harris Weinstock, who compared San Diego to Czarist Russia.
On Sunday, November 10, police raided the Stingaree, the city's red light district, and arrested 138 women. A judge fined each of them a hundred dollars and suspended the fine if they left town on the three o'clock train. Most bought tickets to Los Angeles. A reporter noticed most of them bought round trip. Two of the 138 accepted help from the city's reform committee.
In 1911 Glenn Curtiss made the first successful seaplane flight off North Island, from the water of the Spanish Bight. In 1912 the Navy put three planes and three fliers on North Island. The government bought North Island in 1917, and in 1919 the Navy made San Diego a home base for the Pacific Fleet.
The city went after the Navy on purpose. The Chamber of Commerce gave a hundred and thirty five acres, and the city added tidelands, for a training station. Congressman William Kettner brought it down from San Francisco. The Naval Training Center was commissioned on June 1, 1923.
Ryan Airlines in San Diego built the Spirit of St. Louis for Charles Lindbergh in about sixty days, for a little over ten thousand dollars. Donald Hall designed it.
Lindbergh flew it out of San Diego on May 10, 1927. Ten days later he took off from New York, and on the night of May 21 he landed outside Paris, thirty three and a half hours and 3,610 miles later.
In 1935 Reuben Fleet moved Consolidated Aircraft from Buffalo to San Diego for the flying weather. It opened in October with about eight hundred people. By 1943 it employed somewhere between forty one and forty five thousand, depending on whose count you use.
The same year, Balboa Park hosted a second world's fair, the California Pacific International Exposition. It ran in 1935 and again in 1936, and drew about seven and a quarter million visitors over the two seasons.
The 1940 census counted 203,341 people in the city. By 1943 the estimate was about 390,000, not counting the military.
Not everyone stayed. In April 1942 San Diego's Japanese families were ordered out under federal orders, including the tuna fleet families who lived in houses built out over the bay. On April 7 about eleven hundred and fifty people left by train for the Santa Anita racetrack, on six days notice.
After the war the money kept coming from defense. General Dynamics bought Convair in 1953, and the Atlas missile was built here. Its first successful flight was on December 17, 1957. An Atlas put John Glenn into orbit in Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962.
The other postwar engine was science. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography had been in La Jolla since 1907. In 1960 it became the core of a new University of California campus, founded on November 18, 1960. That June, San Diego voters had given twenty seven acres on the Torrey Pines mesa to Jonas Salk, and the Salk Institute opened in 1963.
On August 2, 1969, the San Diego Coronado Bridge opened. The car ferry stopped running the same day.
The land under the bridge had been promised to Barrio Logan as a park. In 1970 the state moved to build a Highway Patrol station on it instead. On April 22, 1970, somewhere between two hundred fifty and five hundred residents walked onto the site and stayed. Twelve days later the city traded for the land, and Chicano Park was born. Its murals went up on the bridge pillars over the next two decades. In 2017 it was named a National Historic Landmark.
That same year, 1970, three hundred people met in the basement of the U.S. Grant Hotel for the first San Diego Comic Con.
C. Arnholt Smith was the most powerful businessman in the city. The papers called him Mr. San Diego. He owned the U.S. National Bank, and he owned the Padres from their first season in 1969.
In October 1973 his bank failed with $1.3 billion in assets. The FDIC's own history calls it the first billion dollar bank failure in the country. He sold the Padres to Ray Kroc in 1974. In May 1979 a San Diego jury convicted him after an eight month trial, and in January 1985, when he was eighty five, the Supreme Court let the conviction stand. He served his time at an honor camp, working as a gardener.
He was not the last. In 2005 a San Diego County congressman, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, pleaded guilty to taking at least $2.4 million in bribes and went to federal prison.
On the morning of September 25, 1978, a Pacific Southwest Airlines jet coming in to Lindbergh Field collided with a small plane over North Park. All 135 people on the airliner and both people on the small plane were killed, and seven people died on the ground. The federal investigators found the airline crew had lost sight of the small plane and not told the tower. ## 1978 to 1985: downtown comes back
By the 1970s the old blocks around Fifth Avenue had run down badly. A group led by Tom Hom pushed to save the buildings instead of clearing them, and in 1980 the Gaslamp Quarter went on the National Register of Historic Places, sixteen and a half blocks of it.
In August 1985 Horton Plaza opened, a shopping center designed by Jon Jerde on the blocks around the plaza Horton had laid out. It drew twenty five million visitors its first year. Downtown has been filling back in ever since.
Most of San Diego's shape was decided by a few deals. Horton's auction set the downtown grid. The Navy deals of the 1910s and 1920s put the bases where they are, and the neighborhoods that grew up around them. Consolidated and the war filled in the mesas. The university put a second center in La Jolla. If you know which deal made a neighborhood, you know a lot about why it looks the way it does.
Current numbers for the center of the city are in the downtown market report, and every community we track is on the Market Journal IQ home page. The places in this story that have their own full history are listed on the stories page.
How much land Horton bought. Most of the record, including the Journal of San Diego History and the City of San Diego, says about 960 acres. The San Diego History Center's own timeline says 800, and one Journal article says 1,000. The price, two hundred sixty five dollars, is not in dispute, and twenty seven and a half cents an acre matches 960.
How many died of scurvy in 1769. One count says twenty one sailors and some soldiers by mid May. Another says about half of the combined crews. A third puts the eventual toll from disease at more than sixty. We have said dozens, and close to half by some counts.
How many attacked the mission in 1775. The Journal of San Diego History says warriors from at least fifteen villages. Pourade's history says about six hundred. The figure of eight hundred that gets repeated has no source we could find.
How many Americans died at San Pasqual. Kearny's own report said eighteen killed. Later records give nineteen killed and three more who died of wounds. California State Parks gives eighteen on one document and twenty one on another.
When the Spanish post on Presidio Hill began. The state landmark record says the hill was occupied as a military post on May 17, 1769 and formally made a presidio on January 1, 1774. Many accounts tie the presidio's founding to July 16, 1769, the mission's date.
The date of the Lelia Byrd fight. Pourade dates the ship's stay March 17 to 21, 1803. The state landmark record for Fort Guijarros dates the action March 22 and names a different Spanish commander.
When Antonio Garra was executed. One Journal article gives January 10, 1852, and the San Diego History Center timeline gives January 17.
How long Wyatt Earp was in San Diego, and what he ran. The sources agree he arrived during the boom, around 1887. Some say he stayed about two years and some say into the mid 1890s. The three gambling halls named here are from Pourade. Some accounts also give him an oyster bar on Fifth Avenue; others say he was only a regular there. We have not printed the oyster bar.
When the Hotel del Coronado opened. The hotel celebrates February 19, 1888, the first meal in the dining room. Pourade gives January 29, 1888. We have said early 1888.
Consolidated's peak payroll. Reuben Fleet's San Diego History Center biography says 41,000 in 1943. The Journal of San Diego History says 45,000. We have given the range.
More San Diego history: stories from around the county, one place at a time.