Project updates

The Wikipedia editing relating to the Portola expedition led (as WP editing always does) to many other California history articles needing improvement and/or correction. Most WP articles eventually get pretty good if enough editors take an interest. Articles about small-to-medium sized CA communities, however (including many of those later established at Portola campsites), tend to have only a few editors and few reliable sources. Where scholarly online sources are lacking, the oft-inflated claims of local boosterist websites go uncorrected.

The current program is twofold: 1) continue to discover and read early CA history sources, and 2) after finishing a CA history book, to go back through it again looking for passages to be used as WP citations. That was a lot of fun with the Crespi diary. Next up for that treatment are several books from SCPL:

• Fages, P., Priestley, H. I., & Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía (Mexico). (1937). A historical, political, and natural description of California. Berkeley: University of California Press. 
• Hutchinson, C. A. (1969). Frontier settlement in Mexican California: The Híjar-Padrés colony and its origins, 1769-1835. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• McKittrick, M. M. (1944). Vallejo, son of California. Portland, Or: Binfords & Mort.