On September 4, 1781, a group of forty-four settlers from New Spain founded the pueblo of Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles on the Porciuncula River, on the site of what is now downtown Los Angeles. Governor Felipe de Neve had drawn up the plan for the Californias.
Spain wanted a chain of farming towns that could hold Alta California against Russian and British traders working the coast, so the settlers received land, tools and seed, and the plan set out a plaza, a church and irrigated fields fed by a ditch from the river. The settlers came from Sonora and Sinaloa, and most were of mixed Indigenous, African and European descent. Eleven were children.
The settlement was small. By 1800 the pueblo held a few hundred people, and for most of the next century it was a cattle town whose hides and tallow went out by ship. Mexico took over in 1821. The missions were secularised, and large amounts of land moved into private hands. The United States took California in 1848, and the town was incorporated as a city in 1850.
Two later decisions made Los Angeles what it became. The Southern Pacific railroad arrived in 1876 and set off the first land boom. The aqueduct opened in 1913. It carried water from the Owens Valley and gave the city a supply that let it grow far past what the local river could support.