After traveling about a league and a half through a pass between low hills, we entered a very spacious valley, well grown with cottonwoods and alders, among which ran a beautiful river... Toward the north-northeast there is another river bed which forms a spacious water-course, but we found it dry. This bed unites with that of the river, giving a clear indication of great floods in the rainy season, for we saw that it had many trunks of trees on the banks. We halted not very far from the river, which we named Porciúncula.

-Fray Juan Crespi, diarist of the Portolá expedition of 1769, describing the Spanish discovery of the L.A. River.