California

California

Traveling Back in Time

Californians have always been a people on the move, starting with Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conqueror of Mexico. In 1535 Cortés sailed north in search of an island, according to the book “Las Sergas de Espalandián” by Garcia Ordóñez de Montalvo, “very close to the side of the Terrestr... Read on

California

Traveling Back in Time

Californians have always been a people on the move, starting with Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conqueror of Mexico. In 1535 Cortés sailed north in search of an island, according to the book “Las Sergas de Espalandián” by Garcia Ordóñez de Montalvo, “very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise.” Instead, he became the first European, albeit in an unofficial capacity, to glimpse what he decided was the upper part of a “peninsula,” an extension of today’s “Baja California.” In the 1500s, however, “Baja (lower) California” referred to Mexico, while “Alta California” was the territory that Cortés had sighted.

Most history books focus on the 1542 voyage of Portuguese seaman Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, who sailed under the Spanish flag. The two ships he commanded dropped anchor near present-day San Diego, Santa Monica and San Pedro and other places along the California coast. Cabrillo’s mission was twofold. He was looking for El Dorado, Spanish for “the gilded one,” a place of legendary riches thought to exist somewhere in the New World. The odds were that El Dorado was somewhere in California, corresponding to de Montalvo’s description that “... on the whole island, there was no metal but gold.” Cabrillo was probably also on the lookout for the Northwest Passage, a shortcut to the wealth (and markets) of the Orient.

Sebastian Vizcaíno, another Portuguese skipper hired by the Spanish crown, stopped off in California on his way to Manila in 1602. He discovered Monterey Bay, and sung the praises of this natural harbor to such an extent that it later became a destination of the first Spanish overland party. In the meantime, however, English adventurer Sir Francis Drake with his “Golden Hind” arrived in 1579. He came ashore, it is believed, in Point Reyes (although Santa Barbara is another possibility), where, crowned by enthusiastic Indians, he claimed “Nova Albion” for Queen Elizabeth and “Herr Succesors Forever.” In 1763, the French and Indian War (as it was known in America) or the Seven Year’s War (as it was known in Europe) established England’s domination across the northern part of the New World. A worried, strongly Catholic Spain thus decided to send a military and religious expedition to finally settle “Alta California” during the second half of the same decade. Thus, the unlikely combination of spiritual and military might, represented by Franciscan friar Fra Junípero Serra and Gaspar de Portola, respectively, was to create Mission San Diego de Alcala, the first European outpost in Alta California (1769). Portola tried in vain to find Monterey Bay; instead his small band of troops discovered San Francisco Bay. California was taken from its Native American inhabitants practically without a shot having been fired. Serra, the “Apostle of California,” succeeded in his intent of setting up missions along “El Camino Real” (the Royal Road) from San Diego up to Sonoma, but many of the submissive Indians who were baptized died of unknown diseases introduced by the white man. During the same period, the Russians were exploiting the fur trade in Alaska, and, lured by the abundance of California sea otters, founded a military outpost at Fort Ross, just north of present-day jenner.

The flag of the newly-formed Republic of Mexico flew over Monterey, the capital of Alta California in 1822, and American politicians began to think that owning the territory could be highly advantageous. The Mexicans secularized the missions in 1833, and doled out millions of acres of mission-owned land to Spanish-American settlers known as Californios. The rancheros era in California was vividly portrayed by Henry Dana in his book “Two Years Before the Mast”. It was an era in which Yankee merchant seaman braved the long voyage from the East around the Straits of Magellan, and traded items necessary to every day life in exchange for a precious cargo of cattle hides. After a period of rising tension and border skirmishes, the U.S. declared war against Mexico on May 13, 1846. This prompted explorer John C. Fremont and a band of U.S. patriots in Sonoma to hoist the “Bear Flag” — a banner of a bear facing a red star — and proclaim the independent “Bear Flag Republic.” The newly-founded nation lasted only until July 7, when U.S. naval officer John Drake Sloat sent an envoy ashore to demand that the military commandant of Monterey surrender. The Mexican army officer handed the matter in an extremely diplomatic fashion: he sent word that all his soldiers would simply withdraw from Monterey. Sloat raised an American flag over the Customs House and declared “henceforth California will be a portion of the United States.”

The State was admitted to the Union in 1850; two years earlier John Marshall had found a gold nugget on property near Sacramento belonging to John Sutter, thus triggering a world-wide “Gold Rush.” The population of San Francisco exploded from a few hundred to 25,000 in the space of three years, and spawned the fast-living, fast-dying “Barbary Coast.” A “Silver Rush,” smaller in scale, would place in the Sierra Nevada foothills at the end of the same decade. California’s focus turned to agriculture, especially in the Central or San Joaquin Valley, wine making in the Napa and Sonoma valleys, as well as logging in the far North during the second half of the 19th century, and the local economy was boosted by ever-increasingly important railroad links. Chinese-Americans, Italians, and Portuguese joined California residents in setting up a thriving fishing industry. Then on April 18, 1906, early in the morning, San Francisco experienced a massive earthquake which killed 500 people and destroyed, together with the fire that followed it, much of the city. Slowly the town rebuilt and became bigger than before. At the same time, southern California became renowned as a vacation resort and the fledging capital of the movie industry, and oil was soon discovered offshore there. The 1920s and 1930s saw many a Californian still employed in reaping the bounties of agriculture, a pattern that was to change slightly during World War II, when the defense industry boomed. The 1970s and ’80s brought the development of firms specializing in electronics and technology, exemplified by the Silicon Valley, and in service-related industries, while California as a vacation spot has never waned in popularity.

Geographic Shiftings

Californians live right on the edge, in a moral and often physical sense. Millions of years ago the State was completely underwater, and, due to the expulsion of molten rock from the earth’s core, mountain ranges were uplifted and a tectonic plate was formed that pushed against the far edge of the continent. Between the two is a network of cracks and fissures, the most prominent being the San Andreas fault, stretching 270 miles. The Bay Area sits squarely on the San Andreas fault, as testified by the occurrence of major earthquakes in 1906 and 1989.
To the north, the volcanic mountains of the Cascade Range are thought to be extinct, although the probability cannot be classified a certainty. The geographic shiftings in California which created the mountain ranges and the often rugged coastline and carved out the beautiful valleys continue still today.

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