A Brief History
The first wave of California immigrants arrived somewhere between 20,000 and 35,000 years ago — wandering Asiatic tribes who entered the American continent via the Bering Strait, which at that time was dry land, or perhaps covered in ice. In the succeeding centuries, their descendants continued to push south and east, and eventually spread out to people the whole of the continent from Alaska to Patagonia. The tribes who decided to settle in what is now California were fortunate in their choice of homeland. The climate was very pleasant, and food was sufficiently plentiful for them to avoid the constant warfare that plagued many tribes elsewhere in the Americas.
The Indian tribes lived in harmony with nature. Anticipating 1960s flower children seeking drug-induced enlightenment, medicine men drank the juice of the jimson weed to provoke revelatory hallucinations. However, not even their wildest visions prepared them for the arrival of bearded men armed with swords and crossbows, in whose wake the Indian population plummeted from a peak of 275,000 to a mere 16,000 at the start of the 20th century.
The Spanish Missions
The first Europeans landed on the California coast in the 16th century — Spanish explorers in search of gold, seeking to extend their Mexican empire northward. In 1542 Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese mariner in the employ of the Viceroy of Mexico, landed at Point Loma, at the mouth of San Diego harbor. He sailed on past the “Bay of Smokes” (San Pedro in present-day Los Angeles), and on through the Santa Barbara Channel. During a scuffle with Native Americans he broke his leg and contracted gangrene, which was to prove fatal, but his crew pushed on as far as Oregon. They found few good harbors, however, and no sign of gold, and had to return empty-handed.
In 1579 England’s Francis Drake, during the round-the-world trip that earned him his knighthood, took a break from harrying Spanish treasure galleons and stopped for repairs at Point Reyes (Drake’s Bay, just north of San Francisco). He claimed the whole coastal territory for Queen Elizabeth I, but England was being kept busy with other concerns and no attempt was made to settle the new territory.
In 1769 the Spanish began to settle in California, establishing a string of military garrisons (presidios) and religious missions. The first was built in San Diego in 1769, and then in 1770 Monterey was founded as capital of Alta (Upper) California. The long peninsula of Baja (Lower) California remained separate and ultimately became part of Mexico.
These early missionaries, who were led by the Franciscan friar Junípero Serra, were all tough and courageous men, who faced hunger and hardship when their first agricultural efforts failed. Their plan was to convert the Native Americans to Christianity, teach them European farming methods as well as other skills and crafts, and then return the land to them before moving on to set up another mission somewhere else.
The missionaries remained active well into the 19th century, and encouraged Spanish settlers by establishing California’s first towns, the pueblos. By 1804 they had created a chain of 21 missions that stretched all the way from San Diego north to Sonoma.
Two notable localities were first settled during this period. In 1776 a presidio and a mission were built near the mouth of the beautiful bay discovered by Gaspar de Portolá in 1769 — it was named the Misión San Francisco de Asís.
The first two pueblos to be founded were the Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe, near San Francisco, and, in the south, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Río de Porciúncula — “The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels by the River Porciúncula.” Founded in 1781 with a total of 46 inhabitants, most of whom were Native Americans, its name was mercifully shortened over time to — you guessed it — Los Angeles.
At this time, California was not considered a particularly attractive proposition by its Spanish overlords. Distracted by the Napoleonic wars raging in Europe, they finally abandoned the territory when Mexico declared its independence in 1821.
The Mexicans
As far as California was concerned, the Mexican takeover was practically bloodless. In fact, California’s 26 years of rather loose Mexican administration (1822–1848) were characterized by a series of bloodless revolutions. The governorship at Monterey changed hands 11 times in a period of five years, not counting three governors whom Mexico City had dared to impose and whose authority was then completely ignored. There was some half-hearted fighting between northerners and southerners for control of the property and lands left by the Spanish missionaries, half of which was meant to be returned to the Native Americans but never was.
California grew into a territory with just one industry — cattle ranching, for the sale of cowhide and tallow. In the meantime, the old crafts were abandoned and California started to earn a reputation as a place of leisure.
The American Pioneers
The first Americans to come to California from the eastern states were Boston fur traders taking the Cape Horn route at the end of the 18th century. They didn’t stay for long, but gradually other traders and fur trappers began to arrive overland through Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico, settling only in small numbers until the famous covered wagons began their heroic treks of the 1840s. The hardships the pioneers suffered in the Sierra Nevada mountains, Death Valley, and the Mojave Desert became the stuff of California legend, the most tragic being the fate of 87 pioneers who set out from Illinois in 1846. While attempting to cross the Sierra Nevada, George Donner’s wagon train became snowed in, and from November until February was stuck high in the mountains north of Lake Tahoe, at a point now known as the Donner Pass. Just 47 people survived, and then only by resorting to cannibalism.
Just simple farmers seeking a place in the sun to work a piece of land, the pioneers came at a time when territorial expansion was much in vogue — the French in the Pacific and Algeria, the British in Africa and the Far East. The United States was eager to get in on the act and so, during the war with Mexico over the annexation of Texas, California was suddenly regarded as a useful addition to the spoils. United States forces captured Los Angeles in 1847, and the Mexicans capitulated at Cahuenga. A treaty of American annexation of California was signed on 2 February 1848. Meanwhile, unknown to the American and Mexican signatories, gold had been found in the Sierra Nevada foothills only nine days earlier.
The Gold Rush
The find that caught the whole world’s imagination was made by one James Wilson Marshall, a carpenter, at John Sutter’s sawmill on the American River at Coloma, which lies midway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. He had found flakes of 23-carat gold in the river gravel and, in the following year alone, 6,000 prospectors poured in from Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, Mexico, Peru, and Chile, and proceeded to dig up $10 million worth of the precious metal. In 1849 the Gold Rush really began, with 40,000 fortune hunters from all parts of North and South America scrabbling for the $30 million worth of gold.
By 1852, at the peak of the mining boom, there were over 100,000 prospectors in the region, all fiercely individualistic, working away at their personal, private stakes rather than banding together in organized syndicates.
There was also another fortune to be made — this time from the service industries — and San Francisco, home of the banks and manufacturers of mining equipment, began to grow into a metropolis. All kinds of con-men and hustlers flocked in to part the diggers from their gold dust. One of the more enduring spin-offs of the Gold Rush was the hard-wearing work trousers sold by the Bavarian immigrant and entrepreneur, Levi Strauss. Originally made from tent canvas, and later from the twill-weave cotton known as denim, Levi’s jeans are now world famous.
Lured by the promise of increased federal revenues from the newly discovered gold, the United States Congress admitted California as the 31st state of the Union in 1850.
Statehood
The early years of statehood were marked by a rough-and-ready kind of justice. In the absence of a well-established judiciary or organized police force, law and order was enforced by vigilantes, and summary hanging was the usual sentence.
The Chinese arrived in the wake of the great Taiping Rebellion of 1851, seeking security and prosperity in what they were told were California’s “Golden Mountains.” They suffered both exploitation by Chinese entrepreneurs, who used them as indentured labor, and discriminatory taxation by the state legislature. The worst-treated, however, were the Native Americans, whose numbers dwindled rapidly not only as a result of disease and malnutrition but also because of systematic massacres in the 1850s by Californian militia.
In 1859 the discovery of silver (the Comstock Lode in western Nevada) caused a Silver Rush in the reverse direction, with the mining being organized almost completely from California. As the state’s economy expanded, its major priority became a transcontinental railway to connect it to the eastern markets. Engineer Theodore Judah defied all the experts by plotting a railway link between Sacramento and the East, passing right through the heart of the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky mountains. He managed to sell his idea to a San Francisco consortium that became known as the Central Pacific’s “Big Four” — Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Leland Stanford, names that continue to echo in both the streets and institutions of present-day California.
The railroad project transformed the Big Four’s personal assets of $100,000 in 1861 into a fortune of $200 million. The line, which linked up with the Union Pacific at Promontory, Utah, in 1869, was built under the most hazardous conditions, using poorly paid Chinese laborers who sometimes worked suspended in wicker baskets over sheer cliffs to hack a tenuous cutting through the steep passes of the Sierras.
The Great Earthquake
The more devout Californians were convinced God was punishing San Francisco for its gold lust and sinfulness when an earthquake, registering 8.25 on the Richter Scale, struck the city at 5:13am on 18 April 1906. The initial quake wiped out about 5,000 buildings, but the great fire that followed destroyed most of the city. With the water mains shattered, the City Fire Department could do nothing to stop the fire from spreading out of control.
The earthquake and fire together caused 452 deaths, according to official estimates, but the imposition of martial law by Mayor Schmitz (without authorization) resulted in up to 100 more dead in summary executions for looting or refusing to help the firefighters. The performance of the military was less than exemplary — as Chinatown burned, it was looted by the National Guardsmen sent to protect it.
Reform, Progress, and Oil
The San Francisco earthquake helped to focus the nation’s attention on the graft and corruption that ran right through the heart of California society. The federal prosecution succeeded in jailing only a handful of the principals involved, but the publicity was enough to make the concept of “reform” a popular one.
The reform movement, intent on breaking the political power of the big corporations, attacked corrupt practices in administration, public finances, and banking, but did nothing to oppose the businessmen’s traditional resistance to unions and more liberal labor laws. There was also a campaign of official discrimination against Chinese and Japanese immigrants, excluding them from owning land and preventing further immigration.
All kinds of produce grew large and lush in California’s fertile, irrigated soil, but the most financially profitable thing to come out of the Californian earth was oil. Drilling had begun in the 1860s but didn’t take off until 1892. By the 1920s, the derricks of the Standard, Union, and Shell oil companies had sprouted all over the Los Angeles basin. In that one decade, the state’s oil revenues were $2.5 billion, $500 million more than all the gold the Sierras yielded in a century.
Sunny, oil-rich Los Angeles was therefore the perfect place for the car to emerge as an everyday household accessory. From 1920 to 1930 L.A.’s population more than doubled, and the number of private cars increased fivefold. Noting the central position of the “pursuit of happiness” in America’s Declaration of Independence, the Los Angeles Times asked in 1926: “How can one pursue happiness by any swifter and surer means than by the use of the automobile?”
Hollywood
If you didn’t feel like pursuing happiness in a car, you could sit in the dark and dream about it in the cinema instead. The booming popularity of this new entertainment form meant that the film production companies, based originally in the East, had to find a place where they could shoot outdoors for 52 weeks a year. They finally settled in a suburb of Los Angeles, Hollywood, where there was guaranteed sunshine all the year round plus — within easy reach of the new studios — deserts and mountains as well as beaches, rivers, forests, and islands which could double for the Wild West, the Holy Land, the Mediterranean — wherever.
Hollywood soon became a mecca for dreamers. Somewhat dubious “talent schools” sprang up, catering to small-town girls who hoped to emulate film stars such as Mary Pickford. If they didn’t make it as actresses, the “schools” turned them into call girls for the producers, and in 1922 the lurid rape trial of comic Fatty Arbuckle highlighted Hollywood’s decadent lifestyle of fast cars, bootleg whisky, and drugs. The immediate reaction was the imposition of the Hays Office code of morals, which decreed that in all Hollywood films sin must be punished — it could be shown in detail, but it must always be punished.
The industry cashed in on the boom years of the 1920s. Hollywood Boulevard introduced lavishly exotic Chinese and Egyptian-style movie palaces, and film stars built homes to match in Beverly Hills, the most famous being the Pickfair mansion, a hunting lodge which Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford turned into a honeymoon estate. However, in spite of the glamour, Hollywood’s rather seedy image persisted. Boarding houses in Los Angeles sometimes advertised “Rooms for rent — no dogs or actors allowed.”
Depression and Boom
The Great Depression hit California hard. Income from agriculture dropped by 50 percent between 1929 and 1932, and one-fifth of the state’s population was on public relief. California managed to weather the downturn better than the rest of the country, however, and became a magnet for dispossessed refugees from the Dustbowl of the Midwest. “Okies,” as they were known, packed their families and belongings into rickety cars and trucks to make the epic voyage west to find work in the farms and orchards of California. Their tale of hardship, pride, bitterness, and exploitation is graphically recorded in the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Grapes of Wrath, by California writer John Steinbeck.
Then came World War II, bringing with it an enormous boom for the state’s beleaguered economy, with the United States federal government spending $35 billion in California. Overnight, ships and planes became the state’s most important products. Manufacturers such as Douglas, Lockheed, and Northrop were all located in the Los Angeles area.
In the post-war period California continued to prosper. Agriculture grew up into agribusiness; the film industry expanded into the new field of television; the aircraft industry was boosted by the space program; and semiconductor technology paved the way for Silicon Valley.
Beatniks, Hippies, and Modern Times
True to the tradition of California’s indulgence of utopian dreams, the Beat generation of the 1950s made its home in San Francisco’s North Beach district. Writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, as well as the poets that hung round Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore, advocated a free and unstructured style of writing, exemplified by Jack Kerouac’s cult novel On the Road.
Ten years on, the term “hippies” was coined for the flower children who gathered around the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. These inhabitants of what Joan Didion was to call “America’s first teenage slum” dispensed a vision of love, peace, and light, heavily laced with marijuana and more dangerous drugs, such as LSD. The sixties also produced a distinctive brand of rock music, with bands such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, and the legendary voice of Janis Joplin.
California was also in the forefront of student radicalism, beginning with the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964, and ending with the violent clashes at San Francisco State University in 1968 and the 1969 Berkeley demonstration in favor of a “People’s Park,” when protesters were sprayed with tear gas.
Black radicalism accelerated after the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965 and reached its peak with the Black Panthers in Oakland, a paramilitary organization led by Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Seale. The Watts riots were sinisterly echoed in the Los Angeles riots of 1992, when the same area of South-Central L.A. was ravaged by violence in response to the acquittal of white police officers who were captured on videotape beating a black resident.
America’s continuous social revolution has always had a prominent place in California life. Pressures for some kind of change have been alternately encouraged and resisted as the state’s volatile political establishment has swung back and forth between conservatives and progressives. Ronald Reagan, a staunch Republican and former Hollywood actor, served as governor of California between 1966 and 1974 and as president of the United States from 1980 to 1988. He was succeeded as governor of California by Jerry Brown, known to many as “Governor Moonbeam.” A left-wing Democrat who espoused Zen Buddhism and the legalization of marijuana, he also imposed environmental protection measures and energy resources long before others began to see the wisdom of such policies. In his current incarnation, Brown is the mayor of Oakland, California.
Recent earthquakes — one in San Francisco in 1989 and another that hit Los Angeles in 1994 — have served as reminders that Californians continue to live in the shadow of The Big One — the major earthquake that experts predict will strike in the next 30 years. It says a lot for the attractions of life in California — and the optimism of those who continue to enjoy it — that despite this dire prediction, millions of people still seek their future in the Golden State’s promised land.
