History
Five Spanish expeditions led by de Portolà, Ortega, Fages, de Anza and Amador passed over Alameda Creek between 1769 and 1795. El Camino Viejo between Pleasanton and Mission Pass crossed it near Sunol. Mission San José, in Fremont, was dedicated in 1797. The Mission thrived for 49 years until the Mexican Government's Secularization Order liquidated mission lands in 1834. Alameda Creek was the boundary of the mission lands and the 17,000-acre (69 km2) Rancho Arroyo de la Alameda granted to Jose de Jesus Vallejo, who built a flour mill near the mouth of Niles Canyon. The mill and the importance of the canyon as a passage through the hills led to growth of Niles (which in 1956 became part of Fremont, California) in the 1850s. A favorable climate, excellent soils, and a fast-growing population helped agriculture to boom. Early roads led to landings where small ships would load grain and other foodstuffs for transport to market. Completion of the Central Pacific Railroad through Niles Canyon in 1869 was essential to completion of First Transcontinental Railroad that terminated in Alameda, California that same year. The Western Pacific was also routed through Niles Canyon, connecting Sacramento, California and San Jose, California in 1906.
Read more about this topic: Alameda Creek
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“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
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the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)