Near this site on March 31, 1776, Lieutenant Colonel Juan Bautista de Anza, Father Pedro Font, and a small group of settlers and soldiers passed through while traveling to investigate the place now known as the San Francisco Delta. They had recently left the Presidio in Monterey, California, where Anza had brought 240 people 1,800 miles from Sonora, Mexico, to colonize the Bay Area. By 1777, the newcomers had helped establish three Spanish-controlled settlements in San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Jose. On March 31, Anza and his men encountered several Indians; some fled, others waited for them, and one offered food. At Alameda Creek, they heard an unfamiliar language, and at San Lorenzo Creek, they surprised and terrified a lone man. For local tribal peoples, these encounters led to decades of disruption, dislocation, suffering, and change, first under Spanish rule, then under the Mexican and American governments, in the homeland of the Tuibun, an Ohlone-speaking people.