Precedent to later social conditions of ease, the careful student will find in the lives of the earlier settlers of Alta California a strong, vital, self-sacrificing religious impulse, which, upon Pacific as upon Atlantic shores, induced the initial movement in a civilization which moved to its attempted end indifferent to climate or environment, and using the material only to subserve the interests of the dominant spiritual. Junípero Serra, with his mission settlers of 1769, was in subtlest ways akin to the Pilgrim Fathers of the preceding century. As Los Angeles was but a humble dependent on San Gabriel Mission, its beginnings may best be traced in connection with the history of the mission fathers, the earliest colonizers and civilizers of the sunset land. Their unstinted and self-sacrificing devotion to the Indians of California, their great mission trade-schools, where not only the salvation of souls but the training of the minds and hands of the neophytes was undertaken, their wise administration of their trusts, both spiritual and material, make this initial movement in the colonization of California one of the brightest incidents in the story of the Golden West. Out of the mists of romance which envelop the earlier explorers of the Pacific Coasts appear the forms of Cabrillo and Vizcaino, the first historic visitors to Southern California. It may be that Francisco de Ulloa had in 1539 gained from the Pacific a glimpse of the land, or that Hernando de Alarçon from the Gila country saw the plain of Los Angeles in 1540. Sure it is that Cabrillo in 1542, and Vizcaino in 1603 visited San Diego and San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles. The latter landed at San Diego, seeking a suitable port for ships engaged in trade with the Philippines, dug wells, and erected a church tent for three friars who were of the party, and then for 166 years this "fair land without snow" drops out of history. It is left to its Indian residents, left treasuring its resources for future generations, for new peoples. [Illustration SAN DIEGO MISSION. FOUNDED 1769.]