Visions of California

The German artist Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff made this sketch of California seals along the coast sometime in between 1803-1807. Unlike seals, the otter were usually swimming along the coast on their backs. Otter skins were the first lure that brought people from the United States to California. This image of the California coast is one of the few contemporary to the earliest visits of U.S. Americans to today’s Orange County. (Honeyman Collection) The Otter Trade and the First U.S. Citizens in Orange County In the year 1776 the opposite coasts of what would become the continental United States represented two very different stories in European colonialism. On the east coast that year, the American Colonies formally declared their independence from the rule of King George III of Great Britain. That same year, on the west coast, in what would later become Orange County, St. Junípero Serra led the Spanish colonial government in the establishment of Mission San Juan Capistrano in the ...