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Pedro Font (ND-1781) http://tinyurl.com/PFont

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Fleas

From Font's Complete Diary 1777. Trans. Herbert Eugene Bolton, 1933.Read Online Download PDF

Reader: Kevin Hearle

Tales of California's animals—-coyotes, grizzly bears, mountain lions, and redtail hawks-—are as old as human settlement here. But sometimes the legendary animals celebrated in great stories are not the ones you notice.

In 1776 Fr. Pedro Font accompanied Juan Bautista de Anza on his second journey from Sonora to San Francisco. Ever the appraiser of the natural features of the Californian landscape, Font developed a special antipathy to one of its more common native species.

Siphonaptera, flea, drawing from Micrographia by Robert Hooke, 1665. Larger.
Make flea go away.

. . . we arrived at the campsite, which is on the banks of the San Antonio River, at the beginning of a long valley through which this river runs and emerges from the Sierra de Santa Lucia, from which also run the other rivers which I have named. At this place we were molested somewhat by fleas. We had already felt them at the missions but not so much as here, because here they are very hungry, lean, and have hard bills, and they were not few in number. These fleas appear to be a plague in those lands, especially when the weather gets a little warm, so that they are to be found not only in the houses and huts but also in the fields and on the roads, and wherever one halts they are right on hand.

The Franciscan missionary kept a log of his trip, which he latter expanded into a more detailed diary, one of our most important sources to chronicle the settlement of early California.