by  Fernando Favela  ·   Interview  ·  BajaTraveler.com

photos Courtesy  Edgar Lima, Alan Ehrgott, BajaTraveler®

The Man Behind the Book

Some people write about Baja California. Alan Ehrgott lived it first. In 1975, as a graduate student in conservation biology at UC Riverside, he did something that most people would consider reckless and a handful would call visionary: he strapped on a pack and walked the entire length of the Baja peninsula — 1,200 miles in 110 days — tracing the old Camino Real through desert, volcanic sierra, and forgotten mission ruins.

What he found in the caves of the Sierra de San Francisco changed the course of his life. The rock murals painted by the Cochimi people centuries before any European arrived were not, he understood, mere decoration. They were a historical record — precise, intentional, and largely unread by the outside world.

That revelation set Ehrgott on a fifty-year path of research that ran parallel to a distinguished career in environmental conservation. As founder and executive director of the American River Conservancy for three decades, he protected more than 27,000 acres of Northern California habitat and won the National Wilderness Conservation Award in 2017. He is now retired, living in Coloma, California, with his wife Cindi.

His debut book, The Elusive Conquest of Queen Califa — California History Revisited, published by FriesenPress in 2025, is the distillation of everything those fifty years taught him about a peninsula that, as he puts it, refused to be conquered.

A Name Born from Fiction

Before Ehrgott could write the story of Baja California’s Indigenous peoples, he had to dismantle the story that Europeans told themselves before they ever arrived. The name California, he argues, is not geography — it is literature. In 1510, Spanish writer Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo published a chivalric romance featuring a mythical gold-laden island ruled by a Black queen named Califa. The word itself likely derives from the Arabic caliph, a direct echo of 800 years of Moorish occupation in Spain.

When Hernán Cortés wrote to King Charles requesting funds for his northward expeditions from Mexico City, he borrowed phrases from that novel. The Island of California became a royal objective — an extraction mission built on a literary hallucination. What followed was 162 years of catastrophic colonial failure: scurvy, drought, alkali soil that rejected every European crop, and Indigenous peoples who used the land itself as their most effective weapon.

The Jesuits finally succeeded where the military had not — not by bringing gold, but by bringing corn mush and faith. The book traces that arc with the precision of a historian and the narrative instinct of a novelist, anchoring its argument in the figures of Cali, a gifted Cochimi healer, and her shaman husband Ponto, who understood what the conquistadors never could: that this land’s wealth was biological, not metallic.

The Land That Refuses to Lie

— You’ve described the moment you first stood in front of the Palmarito mural as an epiphany. What happened in that cave?

“Early that morning, the rays of dawn spread over the Tres Virgenes volcanoes, took root at the top of the volcanic and sedimentary layered cliffs above us, and then spread downwards to inflame the painted surfaces of the mural. At the highest apex were three figures that caught and held my attention. A man, a woman, and a mountain lion. They knew each other. They were a significant story, deserving enough to occupy the equivalent of the New York Times front page headlines. With time, I found linkages to other figures in the mural. Storylines unfolded. I was excited, feeling I was on the precipice of understanding a new form of hieroglyphics.”

— The name California may derive from Arabic. Do you think people living in California today have any sense of that root?

“No, I don’t. The California history taught today in schools within the State of California is the history of Alta California beginning with 1767 and the expeditions of Junipero Serra. For centuries, California included both Baja and Alta California — it wasn’t until 1848 that an international border separated the two. In my mind, the history of California began with Montalvo’s novel in 1510 and his frequent use of phrases with Arabic origins.”

— Cali and Ponto resist the Spanish not with weapons but with ecological knowledge and psychological warfare — including a peyote vision engineered for Cortés himself. How much of that is historical record?

“It is a marriage of both. We know that Cortés made several forays into the north central Cape region and that the failure of his colony at La Paz was the beginning of a psychological depression and bankruptcy. We also know that peyote was a popular trade commodity used by Indigenous populations throughout the Pacific Southwest for 5,000 years as a means to connect with the Great Spirit. The peyote vision of Cortés is fiction, but it was engineered to connect the dots in his journey — from successful conquistador to his fate as a broken man, guilt-ridden and bankrupt.”

— The Spanish spent 162 years failing to colonize Baja before the Jesuits succeeded. What does that tell us about the nature of conquest?

“I think it was Winston Churchill who said that the propaganda of the victors becomes the history of the defeated. The Jesuits were booted out of California after 70 years, and the Indigenous peoples were largely conquered by pandemic diseases introduced by their European invaders. At times this leaves an empty void — as if to ask, what was accomplished? And then I realize that life will find a way. And it did in Baja California through Indigenous women who bore children with Spanish soldiers and created a whole new population of adaptive and happy residents still living within the Sierras of Baja California.”

— After fifty years of studying this peninsula, what worries you most about its future?

“The drive to extract earth resources to fuel economic development and its consequential population growth beyond sustainability is a major concern. I applaud the creation and protection of bioreserves and cultural sites, and pray they remain intact and repel despotic forces whose sole goal is simply to reinforce supply lines for profitable gain.”

— If Cali could see Baja California in 2025 — the resorts, the golf courses, the whale-watching boats — what do you think she would make of it?

“Cali would have mixed feelings. She would be amazed at the gains some had achieved in a material sense, with increased recreation, less desperate survival and extended lifetimes. She would also be concerned at the loss of spiritual and physical connections to life forces and the Great Spirit.”

— Do you see conservation and storytelling as two expressions of the same calling?

“Absolutely. I want to know that my life was consequential — that my pursuit of conservation and storytelling left a small but indelible mark on our collective history and survival.”

— What do you want a reader to feel in the last moment they close this book?

“I would want the reader to feel they were entertained and appreciative of a slower, more immersive form of travel and discovery. I would hope the reader had attained a greater appreciation of Baja California, its unique biological diversity and the complexity of its human history. I would also want the reader to become more introspective and appreciative of conquered peoples — even if their sole importance lies in their art, their survival, and the contributions they made to our collective gene pool.”