Many of them weren't populated.
From Wikipedia:
San Francisco CA: In 1835, Englishman William Richardson erected the first independent homestead, [21] near a boat anchorage around what is today Portsmouth Square. Together with Alcalde Francisco de Haro, he laid out a street plan for the expanded settlement, and the town, named Yerba Buena, began to attract American settlers.
Los Angeles - Well there was a town there: The settlement remained a small ranch town for decades, but by 1820 the population had increased to about 650 residents.
San Jacinto: If you're talking about TX, there wasn't any town or city there back in Mexican times and there still isn't.
Gonzales - You'd think this would be a pre-existing Mexican town, but: Gonzales is one of the earliest Anglo-American settlements in Texas, the first west of the Colorado River. It was established by Empresario Green DeWitt as the capital of his colony in August 1825. DeWitt named the community for Rafael Gonzáles, governor of Coahuila y Tejas. [5] Informally, the community was known as the Dewitt Colony.
How about Corpus Christi? Corpus Christi was founded in 1839 by Colonel Henry Lawrence Kinney as Kinney's Trading Post, or Kinney's Ranch. It was a small trading post to sell supplies to a Mexican revolutionary army camped about 25 miles (40 km) west.
Goliad, Nacogdoches, and San Antonio were Mexican towns in early TX. There may have been a few more.
I think many more of the place names in California date back to towns .... usually missions with very small populations. You can't just assume though that someplace with a Spanish name was Mexican territory populated by loads of Mexicans prior to the Mexican war. Consider Montana, Colorado, Nevada which had zero Mexican settlements. The Mexican population in its northern territories was very sparse even in the areas where settlements existed like CA, NM, and TX. |
