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HISTORY |
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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.
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