“Extensive swamps of bitumen”

Yesterday I visited the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, which occasions this short posting about events far from New England.

While Bostonians spent 1769 continuing to complain about British soldiers stationed in town, the Spanish official Gaspar de Portola led an expedition north from Mexico.

On 3 August the Franciscan friar Juan Crespi wrote in his diary of that journey:

We proceeded for three hours on a good road; to the right were extensive swamps of bitumen which is called chapapote.

We debated whether this substance, which flows melted from underneath the earth, could occasion so many earthquakes.

The locals who had made that “good road” had used the tar for thousands of years to waterproof baskets, mend pottery, decorate jewelry, and more. But this was the first time Europeans had seen the tar pits.

In 1781, the year that the British, American, and French forces fought the decisive siege of Yorktown, Gov. De Portola founded a colonial settlement called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles.

That settlement grew into the city of Los Angeles. It contained the tar pits, which locals continued to mine for building material, then to drill for oil, and now explore for fossils and host countless school field trips.