California

• 1. Introduction

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  California holds a place in the American imagination unlike any other state. It is, in the same territory, home to the lowest and hottest point in North America and the highest peak in the contiguous 48 states, Mount Whitney. It is the most populous state in the union, with over 39 million residents, yet it is also only the third largest by area. Its economy, measured alone, would rank fourth in the world by nominal GDP, ahead of Japan. What explains a place this contradictory, this extreme in every direction? How did a remote stretch of Pacific coastline become the center of global entertainment, the engine of the technology industry, and one of the most linguistically diverse corners of the planet? The answers reach back more than five centuries, to a fictional island of gold described in a Spanish novel, and to peoples who had already spent thousands of years making sense of some of the most demanding geography on earth.

• 2. A Name from a Novel

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  The word "California" appears on a European map by 1541, placed there, according to a 2017 California state legislative document, "presumably by a Spanish navigator." The document acknowledged that numerous theories exist about where the name came from, but the most likely source is a 1510 work of fiction: The Adventures of Esplandian, written by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo. In that story, Queen Calafia ruled a mythical island far to the west, a land overflowing with gold and pearls, populated by beautiful dark-skinned women who wore gold armor and kept griffins for war. The fantasy was vivid enough that Spanish explorers applied it to an actual coastline. When the Portuguese captain Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo entered San Diego Bay on the 28th of September 1542, sailing under Spanish commission, he was pushing into territory that existed in European minds somewhere between the real and the imagined. Cabrillo had been sent north from New Spain by the Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza in search of trade. He reached at least as far north as San Miguel Island, but the notion of California as an island persisted long after his expedition. European maps continued to depict it that way well into the 18th century.

• 3. Before the Explorers

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  Historians estimate that at least 300,000 people were living in California before European contact, organized into more than 70 distinct ethnic groups. The land they occupied ranged from redwood forests and mountain ranges to desert interiors and resource-rich coastlines. The coastal groups included large chiefdoms such as the Chumash, the Pomo, and the Salinan, who sustained themselves through trade networks, intermarriage, and military alliances. Inland and forest-dwelling communities developed sophisticated forms of ecosystem management, including forest gardening to maintain reliable sources of food and medicine. To prevent catastrophic wildfires, indigenous peoples practiced controlled burns, a technique so effective that the California government formally recognized its benefits in 2022. The societies these people built were not uniform. Men and women typically held different responsibilities, with women managing weaving, harvesting, and food preparation, and men taking on hunting. Some societies also included people referred to in Spanish records as joyas, understood today through the concept of two-spirit identity. The Chumash called them 'aqi. They held specific ritual responsibilities around death, burial, and mourning. The early Spanish settlers regarded the joyas with hostility and attempted to eliminate them. California's linguistic landscape matched its human diversity: more than 70 indigenous languages, drawn from 64 root languages across six distinct language families, were spoken across this territory.

• 4. Colonial Imposition

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  The Portola expedition of 1769-70 marked the decisive turning point in the Spanish colonization of California. The military contingent was led overland from Sonora by Gaspar de Portola, while the religious component arrived by sea under Junipero Serra, coming north from Baja California. Together they founded Mission San Diego de Alcala and the Presidio of San Diego in 1769, the first permanent Spanish religious and military settlements in the territory. By the end of the expedition in 1770, they had also established the Presidio of Monterey and Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo on Monterey Bay. Serra went on to lead missionaries who ultimately established 21 missions along El Camino Real, the Royal Road running up the California coast, with 16 sites selected during the Portola expedition itself. Cities that today rank among the largest in the state, among them San Francisco, San Diego, and Santa Barbara, grew from these mission foundations. The Anza expedition of 1775-76 pushed deeper into the interior, and Gabriel Moraga, one of its members, gave many of California's prominent rivers their names during 1775-1776, including the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. His son, Jose Joaquin Moraga, founded the pueblo of San Jose in 1777, making it the first civilian-established city in California. Not far to the north, in 1812, the Russian-American Company established a trading post at Fort Ross on the North Coast, primarily to supply Russia's Alaskan colonies with food. The settlement attracted few settlers and failed to establish lasting trade, and Russia abandoned it by 1841.

• 5. Gold, Statehood, and Catastrophe

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  Gold was discovered in California in 1848, just one week before the United States formally annexed the territory through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on the 2nd of February 1848. The timing was coincidental but world-altering. Prospectors and miners arrived in the thousands almost immediately. Between 1847 and 1870, the population of San Francisco alone grew from 500 to 150,000. By 1854, more than 300,000 settlers had come to California in total. The political consequences were rapid: California entered the Union as the 31st free state on the 9th of September 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850, with that date becoming a state holiday. The capital moved several times in early years, through San Jose, Vallejo, and Benicia, before settling in Sacramento in 1854. What the textbooks call the California gold rush, the state's first governor called something else entirely. Peter Hardeman Burnett stated in his 1851 Second Annual Message to the Legislature that a war of extermination between settlers and indigenous people would continue until the Indian race became extinct. The state government paid around 1.5 million dollars between 1850 and 1860 to hire militias, ostensibly to protect settlers; those militias carried out massacres of indigenous people instead. Benjamin Madley estimates that from 1846 to 1873, between 9,492 and 16,092 indigenous people were killed, including between 1,680 and 3,741 killed by the U.S. Army. Scholars including Madley and Ed Castillo, along with Governor Gavin Newsom, have described these actions as a genocide. The indigenous population had already declined sharply under Spanish and Mexican rule due to Eurasian diseases. By 1846, the Native American population had fallen to around 100,000, down from approximately 300,000 before Hispanic settlement in 1769.

• 6. The Twentieth Century Remakes

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  Filmmakers drawn by a mild Mediterranean climate and cheap land established the Hollywood studio system in the 1920s, beginning what would become one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world. The Beach Boys in the 1960s helped sell an image of California as a land of easy, tanned leisure, even as the state was manufacturing 9% of all U.S. armaments during World War II, ranking third nationally behind New York and Michigan. California led all states in production of military ships at drydock facilities in San Diego, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Stanford University's decision to encourage its faculty and graduates to stay and build a technology sector instead of leaving the state seeded what became Silicon Valley, the center of the global technology industry. Meanwhile the postwar decades carried serious fractures. The state passed the Alien Land Act in 1913, excluding Asian immigrants from owning land. During World War II, Japanese Americans in California were interned in concentration camps; California formally apologized in 2020. In 1940, the U.S. Census Bureau recorded California's population as 90% non-Hispanic white. By the 2020 Census, non-Hispanic whites had fallen to 34.7% of the population, and Hispanics, at 39.4%, had become the largest single ethnic group. Riots in 1992, triggered by the Rodney King case, exposed the depth of tension between police and African American communities. Cesar Chavez organized Mexican, Filipino, and other migrant farm workers around better pay in the 1960s and 1970s. A housing bubble that had inflated modest homes from $25,000 in the 1960s to half a million dollars or more by 2005 collapsed in 2007-2008, wiping out hundreds of billions in property values. From 2011 to 2017, California endured what was described as the worst drought in its recorded history. The 2018 wildfire season became the state's deadliest and most destructive. On the 26th of January 2020, one of the first confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. was recorded in California, and a mandatory statewide stay-at-home order followed on the 19th of March 2020.

• 7. Geography as Destiny

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  Covering 163,696 square miles, California's landscape spans a horizontal distance of less than 90 miles between the bottom of Death Valley and the summit of Mount Whitney, 14,505 feet above. The highest temperature ever recorded in the world, 134 degrees Fahrenheit, was measured at Death Valley on the 10th of July 1913. The Sierra Nevada embraces Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National Park, where the giant sequoia trees are the largest living organisms on Earth; some of the California White Mountains bristlecone pines are over 5,000 years old. The Central Valley, fed by snowmelt through the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, has made California the leading agricultural state in the nation, with dairy, almonds, and grapes among its top outputs. Water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta supplies drinking water for nearly 23 million people, almost two-thirds of the state's population. About 37,000 earthquakes are recorded in California each year, most too small to feel; two-thirds of all Americans at serious risk from a major earthquake live in the state. The San Andreas Fault is the largest of several faults running through the territory. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the 1928 St. Francis Dam flood remain among the deadliest disasters in U.S. history. The largest dam removal and river restoration project in U.S. history was announced in 2022 for the Klamath River, as a recognition of the claims of California tribes, whose connections to these landscapes predate European contact by thousands of years.