CACalifornia History

California skipped a step every other western state had to take. It was never an organized United States territory. Between the American conquest in 1846 and admission in 1850 it was run by army officers acting as military governors, and when Congress deadlocked over what to do with it, Californians stopped waiting. Forty-eight delegates met at Colton Hall in Monterey in September 1849, wrote a constitution that banned slavery, and had voters ratify it in November. A state government took office and began operating months before Washington recognized it.

The most crowded coastline north of Mexico

Before European contact roughly 300,000 people lived in California, speaking on the order of eighty languages from several unrelated families. That is one of the densest populations in North America outside the farming civilizations of Mexico, and almost none of it depended on planted crops. The economy ran on acorns, salmon, shellfish and deliberately set fire, which cleared understory and kept the oak groves productive. The Chumash of the Santa Barbara Channel built sewn plank canoes called tomols and traded out to the islands. The Yurok, Karuk and Hupa held the salmon rivers of the north, the Ohlone and Coast Miwok the bay, the Yokuts the tule marshes of the San Joaquin, and the Kumeyaay, Cahuilla, Tongva and Mojave the deserts and the southern coast.

Missions, ranchos and a Russian fort

Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sailed the coast for Spain in 1542, Francis Drake careened his ship somewhere north of the bay in 1579, and Sebastian Vizcaino named Monterey in 1602, after which Spain ignored the place for a century and a half. Colonization began in 1769, when Gaspar de Portola marched north and Junipero Serra founded the mission at San Diego. Twenty more followed, ending at Sonoma in 1823. Los Angeles was founded on September 4, 1781 by forty-four settlers, most of them of African and Native ancestry from Mexico.

The missions were labor systems as much as churches, and the coastal Native population fell catastrophically inside them from disease and overwork. Mexico won independence in 1821 and secularized the missions in 1833 and 1834, breaking their estates into roughly 800 private rancho grants and turning California into a cattle economy that shipped hides and tallow to New England shoemakers. Russia had planted Fort Ross on the Sonoma coast in 1812 to grow food for its Alaskan colony, then gave up and sold it to John Sutter in 1841.

Twenty-five days as a republic

On June 14, 1846 a party of American settlers rode into Sonoma, took General Mariano Vallejo prisoner in his own house, and raised a homemade flag with a star and a badly drawn grizzly bear on it. The Bear Flag Republic lasted until July 9, when word came that the United States and Mexico were at war and Commodore John Sloat had already raised the American flag at Monterey. The fighting was short but real, including a bloody American defeat at San Pasqual near San Diego that December. Andres Pico signed the Treaty of Cahuenga on January 13, 1847, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred the province formally on February 2, 1848.

Gold nine days early, and the bill for it

James Marshall picked flakes of gold out of a millrace on the American River at Coloma on January 24, 1848, nine days before that treaty was signed. Neither government knew. Once President Polk confirmed the news in December the rush was on: the non-Native population went from about 14,000 in 1848 to more than 250,000 by 1852, and San Francisco grew from a village of roughly a thousand to a city of 25,000 in two years. Statehood came out of that surge. Congress admitted California free on September 9, 1850 as the thirty-first state, but only as part of the Compromise of 1850, whose other half was a far harsher Fugitive Slave Act.

The rush was catastrophic for the people already there. An 1850 state law titled the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians permitted the indenture of Native children and forced labor for anyone convicted of vagrancy, the legislature funded militia expeditions against Native communities, and a foreign miners tax was aimed first at Mexicans and rewritten in 1852 to target Chinese miners. California's Native population, around 150,000 in 1848, had fallen to roughly 30,000 by 1870. Chinese laborers then built the Central Pacific east from Sacramento through the Sierra for Stanford, Huntington, Crocker and Hopkins, meeting the Union Pacific at Promontory Summit in 1869. California politics repaid them with an anti-Chinese state constitution in 1879 and heavy lobbying for the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Aqueducts, studios, shipyards and silicon

At 5:12 on the morning of April 18, 1906 a rupture along the San Andreas fault shook San Francisco, and the fires that followed burned for three days and destroyed most of the city. Los Angeles solved a different problem by taking someone else's water. William Mulholland's 233-mile aqueduct from the Owens Valley opened on November 5, 1913 and drained that valley's farms into the San Fernando Valley. Another Mulholland structure, the St. Francis Dam, failed on March 12, 1928 and killed more than 400 people downstream.

The rest arrived in waves. Oil came in at Signal Hill in 1921. Filmmakers came west for the light and the distance from patent enforcers, and the first studio opened in Hollywood in 1911. Something like 300,000 people fled the southern Plains for California in the 1930s, and in 1936 the Los Angeles police chief sent officers to the state line to turn them back, a stunt the papers called the Bum Blockade. The war did the rest: Kaiser's four shipyards at Richmond quadrupled that town, and migration from the South took California's Black population from about 124,000 in 1940 to more than 460,000 in 1950. The same war produced Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942 and the removal of about 110,000 Japanese Americans to camps including Manzanar and Tule Lake, both inside California.

Afterward the state built for growth. The 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education gave it a three-tier public university system, and in 1962 California passed New York as the most populous state. William Shockley opened a transistor lab in Mountain View in 1956, eight of his researchers walked out in 1957 to start Fairchild Semiconductor, and two of those founded Intel in 1968, which is how the Santa Clara Valley became Silicon Valley. In June 1978 voters passed Proposition 13, capping property taxes and reshaping how the state has paid for everything since.

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