Spanish and Mexican Governors of California, 1769 to 1850

California had some thirty governors between Portolá and statehood, Spanish and Mexican and finally military, and the list is harder than it looks. Several men held the office twice; several held only half of it, since the civil and military commands could be split between two rivals; one governed from San Diego for six years and another moved the capital to Los Ángeles. Below, each man’s time in office is drawn to scale, and beside it is the number of documents in this archive that name him. Click any name for his records.

Bar length is time in office. Solid = governor in his own right · paler = interim or comandante · dashed outline = rival claimant. The gold dotted lines mark the turns that reshaped the office: the capital moving to Monterey (1777), the division of the Californias (1804), independence (1822), the decree making Los Ángeles the capital (1835), and the United States conquest (1846). Hover any bar for detail.

How the record counts are made. Each is the number of documents in this catalogue of 34,972 whose author or recipient line names the man, counted once per document and shown once per person against his longest term, on a square-root scale. A + marks a floor rather than a total: where a surname is shared by a whole family (Argüello, Carrillo, Castro, Pico, Alvarado, Gutiérrez, Rivera, Flores) only his distinctive name forms are counted, so the true figure is higher, and the bare surnames that cannot be attributed to one man are left out rather than guessed. A red 0 means no document carries his name on the author or recipient line. Portolá is the only one, and he is not absent from the archive: he is named inside six other records, among them the 1769 expedition diary and a roster of that expedition’s veterans. Counts are matched on whole words with accents ignored and with known spelling variants folded in, which is how Barri, at first shown here as a zero, turned out to have seven records under the copyist’s spelling “Barry.” A person page may report a different figure for the same man, because each page uses its own query; and the figure beside each name is the one his person page reports. Every name here is a link: to his person page where one exists, otherwise to a catalogue search. That search matches any mention of the name, so it returns more than the count beside it, and for a shared surname it will return other men too.

Sources. Terms of office, seats and the notes below follow Bancroft, History of California, volumes i–vi; every statement on this page was checked against that text. The record counts are computed from this catalogue. Where a claim could not be verified in that text it has been removed rather than softened. Argüello is called there the first hijo del país called upon to rule California.

In detail