![]() ![]() laws, and instead create a publicity campaign in those states to encourage acceptance, The Los Angeles Times reports. Gay rights: Democrats in the State Senate want to repeal a 2016 travel ban to states with anti-L.G.B.T.Q. Gavin Newsom’s plan to transform San Quentin State Prison deserves national attention, Bill Keller writes in an opinion essay. Population changes: The number of immigrants has increased in the country’s 21 most populous counties, but many of these counties, like Los Angeles County, are still losing residents to suburbs, exurbs and other regions of the country. (Hunt, the state assemblyman known as the “Father of San Bernardino County,” had two wives and is believed to have had the most children - 21, as well as 154 grandchildren - of any state legislator in California history, said Jackie Peterson, a California State Library spokesperson.) ![]() ![]() A 30-minute drive northwest, through a harsh landscape that looks like the set of an old Western, barren but for a few ranch houses and yuccas, I recently spotted the Mormon Trail Monument, an old wooden wheel that points to the nearby mountains, where the pioneers entered - and eventually departed - the San Bernardino Valley.Īs the California colony expanded, Young became increasingly concerned that its residents were straying too far from the church, and that some had perhaps become disillusioned with some of its practices, including polygamy. In downtown San Bernardino, at the palm-tree-lined entrance to a towering county courthouse, a green sign marks the site of the Mormon Stockade, the first place that the Mormon colonists lived when they arrived in California. Hunt wanted his new territory to be wide enough to incorporate not just the growing Mormon settlement but also all existing and potential future routes from Southern California to Salt Lake City, which was a goal of Young’s, according to the historian Tom Sutak. In 1852, Jefferson Hunt, a well-known Mormon settler, was elected to the California State Assembly - and at the top of his agenda was creating San Bernardino County. That gave the Mormon community political power in the region. The newly formed San Bernardino, about 60 miles east of the city of Los Angeles, fell within the boundaries of Los Angeles County and within a year became its second biggest city. They began to grow their settlement, building houses, devising a street grid and planting fruit trees and vineyards.Īt the time, the height of the gold rush, San Francisco was the political center of California - which had just joined the union in 1850 - and the southern half of the state was still referred to as “the cow counties” because of all the undeveloped land, Gonzales told me. Upon arriving in California, the Mormon travelers bought a 35,000-acre plot of land known as Rancho San Bernardino from the Lugo brothers, part of a prominent Los Angeles family, said Nathan Gonzales, who teaches history at the University of Redlands. In 1851, Brigham Young, the head of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the governor of the Utah Territory - it wasn’t yet a state - dispatched an envoy to Southern California to plant a Mormon colony that he hoped would expand the church’s influence, gain converts and chart a snow-free wagon route to transport goods from the Pacific Coast.Īccording to the historian Edward Leo Lyman, 437 Latter-day Saints, traveling in 150 covered wagons, made the treacherous 600-mile journey from central Utah to Southern California through the rocky Cajon Pass, “undoubtedly one of the most arduous pioneer treks in American history.” (An imposing sandstone outcropping in the pass named the Mormon Rocks honors their voyage, though, of course, Native tribes lived near these rocks for hundreds of years before Spanish or Anglo settlers arrived.) The reason for its vast size? A Mormon settlement that took root in Southern California almost two centuries ago. You can see on any map of the 58 counties of California that San Bernardino dwarfs all others. ![]() It’s bigger in area than nine states, as well as Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium and dozens of other countries, as advocates of a recent push for county secession often point out. SAN BERNARDINO - Stretching across more than 20,000 square miles, from the edge of the sprawling Los Angeles metropolis in the west to California’s desert border with Nevada and Arizona in the east, San Bernardino County is by far the largest county in the lower 48 states. ![]()
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