Around half a million people - almost half the
population of what is now the US - were living in
tribal villages along the west coast when the
Spaniard
Juan Cabrillo first sighted San
Diego harbor in 1542, and named
California
after an imaginary island (inhabited by Amazons)
from a Spanish novel.
Sir Francis Drake
landed near Point Reyes, north of San Francisco, in
1579, where the "white bancks and cliffes"
reminded him of Dover. In 1602
Sebastián Vizcáino
bestowed most of the place-names that still survive;
his exaggerated description of
Monterey as a
perfect harbor led later colonizers to make it the
region's military and administrative center. The
Spanish occupation began in earnest in 1769,
combining military expediency with missionary zeal.
Father
Junipero Serra first established a
small mission and
presidio (fort) at San
Diego, before arriving in June 1770 at Monterey. By
1804 a chain of 21 missions, each a long day's walk
from the next along the dirt path of
El Camino
Real (The Royal Road), ran from San Diego to San
Francisco. Native Americans were either forcibly
converted into Catholicism or killed; though not all
gave up without a fight, disease ensured that they
were soon wiped out.
When Mexico gained its independence in 1821, in
theory it also acquired control of California.
However, Americans were already starting to
arrive, despite the immense difficulty of getting to
California - three months by sea via Cape Horn, or
four months overland in a covered wagon. Though the
non-native population was a mere ten thousand in
1846, the growing belief that it was the Manifest
Destiny of the United States to cover the
continent from coast to coast, evident in the
aggressively imperial policies of President James K.
Polk, soon led to the Mexican-American War .
Virtually all the fighting took place in Texas;
Monterey was captured by the US Navy without a shot
being fired, and by January 1847 the Americans
controlled the entire west coast. In 1850 California
became the 31st US state.
By chance, a mere nine days before the signing of
the treaty that ended the war, flakes of gold
were discovered in the Sierra Nevada. Prospectors
flooded west, in the most madcap migration in
history; it took just fifteen years to pick the
goldfields clean. The completion of the transcontinental
railroad in 1869, built using Chinese laborers,
was a major turning point. The crossing from New
York now took just five days, and a railroad rate
war brought fares down to as little as $1 for a
one-way ticket.
California was perceived as immune to the worst
effects of the Great Depression of the 1930s
- thanks in part to the images of prosperity
promulgated by its now-established film industry
. From the Dust Bowl Midwest, entire families of
" Okies " packed up everything they
owned and set off for the farms of the Central
Valley, though they often found bleak terrain and a
hostile attitude to newcomers. Heavy industry came
during World War II , in the form of
shipyards and airplane factories, and many workers
and military personnel stayed on afterwards.
As home to the Beats in the Fifties and
the hippies in the Sixties, and a host of
radical political and ecological movements since,
California was at the cutting edge of cultural
change. However, the illusions of the Flower Power
days were shattered by the violence of the 1969 rock
concert at Northern California's Altamont Speedway,
and once the anti-Vietnam War struggle was over,
popular culture seemed to withdraw into smug
self-satisfaction. The junk-bond boom of the
Eighties, however, crash-landed in a tangled mess of
scandal, and for California the Nineties kicked off
with a stagnant property market, rising
unemployment, escalating gang violence and racial
tensions in LA, and an appalling death toll from
AIDS in San Francisco - compounded by earthquakes,
drought and flooding . Yet despite all
the problems, and with more-conservative
Californians fleeing the state for more hospitable
climes in Colorado and Arizona, at the turn of the
millennium the state continues to attract countless new
migrants from the rest of the US and the world,
who continue to provide much of the economic growth
and cultural vitality of this dynamic, ever-changing
place.
