California

The original human inhabitants of what was to become California were Indians who had crossed the bridge from Asia to northern North America some 15,000 years ago. As Indian peoples spread across the continent, south and then east, they extended human habitation across the range of South and North America. Amidst this movement over generations and centuries, large numbers remained clustered in what would become California. The pleasant climate and the varieties of accessible foods—fish, game, and seeds especially—made the place attractive for permanent settlement. As the natural resources were so extensive, California Indians had little reason to make a transition to agriculture, and they remained hunters, fishers, and gatherers. They were also diverse in their cultures, with the northern Modoc and Shasta connected culturally to the nations of the Pacific Northwest, the Miwok in the central valleys, the several nations of the south, and the Mojave and Yuma in the eastern deserts. These varied groups were sedentary and generally peaceful. The plentiful natural resources and mild climate had reduced the friction associated with expansion in search of food sources.

The ships of several European nations had passed up and down the California coastline for 200 years before European settlement began. Spanish explorers landed and spied out Alta California (the name given to Upper California by the Spanish) as early as the 1540s. In spite of its physical appeal, California did not fit easily into the Spanish empire. There was no readily exploitable source of wealth, and the ocean currents and winds made it difficult to sail up the coast from Mexico.

Among those in the first expedition who established a permanent Spanish settlement in San Diego in 1769 was Father Junipero Serra, who would found many of Alta California’s missions. Spain’s resources for expansion were declining, and given the great distances in Upper California, it was the missions that became the centers of Spanish settlement. Ultimately, there were 21 missions established on important sites. The missions established effective agricultural enterprise aided by the attractive weather and fertile soil, but they were far less successful in bringing together large numbers of Indians on a voluntary basis. Instead, missionaries frequently enslaved the Indians to establish an agricultural labor system and keep it in place. Partly because of this failure and partly because of the pleasant life they enjoyed, the padres made no effort to secularize the missions and deliver them into Indian hands after a period of years. It should also be noted that the important sites and lands in Alta California were in the hands of the church rather than secular entrepreneurs, and the missionaries hoped to isolate the Indians on the missions from what they regarded as dangerous temptations of the secular world.

In 1821 Mexico revolted against Spanish imperial rule and established its independence, upon which Alta California became a state in the Republic of Mexico. As the new Mexican republic worked to establish its authority over an enormous area with a diverse population, the state of California came to exercise a high degree of independence. The appointed governors resident in Monterey were a long way from Mexico City, and the authority of the republic was weak at such a distance.

The new republic felt strongly about one aspect of life in California. In the aftermath of the revolution of 1821, the federal government of the Mexican republic turned its attention to the missions of California, which it thought exploited the Native peoples. After extended deliberations, the missions were secularized. Unhappily, the Indians themselves did not benefit from the secularization process; instead, the fertile mission lands were appropriated by large ranchos that were to spread across much of southern and central California following independence from Spain.

After 1821 the new government of Mexico also set up plans to develop the nation’s northern provinces. The new settlements would protect the distant reaches of the new, independent nation from the incursions of the Russians from the North or the Anglo-Americans from the East. Spain had used the missions to establish its nominal control; Mexico turned to independent ranchos in the hands of individual families. It was a solution to the problem appropriate to the new nation: secularization mixed with private land ownership. The spread of the rancho system was also natural because the experiences of the missions over two generations had demonstrated that California was an ideal climate and landscape for the pastoral industry.

The federal government in Mexico City now made a number of large grants to individuals. In 1820, there were perhaps 20 sizable private land holdings in Upper California; in 1840, there were 600 such tracts. Most of these new land grants were very large, up to several thousand acres. Ranchos became distinct and separate independent political, economic, and social units. They were run by families as private fiefs with total control over every aspect of life. Much of the work was done by former mission Indians, now laboring under conditions of debt peonage, or an economic situation close to permanent slavery. This semifeudal system did not owe allegiance to any central government, and other than making further land grants, the government in Mexico City exercised little influence or sovereignty in California, where the dominant influence had become that of the local ranchos.

As the pastoral industry of livestock grazing took hold on a large scale and soon prospered, the ranchos became, inevitably, involved in trade with the outside world. The traders turned out to be New England sea captains and their ships, which began to make regular stops at sites along the California coast to pick up cargoes of cattle hides and tallow. The classic description of this trade is depicted in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. Over a period of 20 years after independence, the strongest influence in Alta California was not the federal government in Mexico City but the resident trade representatives established by New England merchant companies in the port towns of California. By the 1840s, there were many such agents, of whom the most significant was Thomas Oliver Larkin. Seagoing commerce made the California ranchos wealthy, and the dependence of the ranchos on trade made the agents of trading companies enormously influential. This relationship was the beginning of a widening American influence in California affairs.

The numbers of Euro-American peoples involved remained small. In 1845, after a quarter-century of Mexican independence and on the eve of war between Mexico and the United States, the non-Indian population of California was probably on the order of 7,000. American immigration overland had begun on what would become the California Trail, a branch of the Oregon Trail. Perhaps as many as several hundred people a year were arriving in California after a transcontinental journey.

In 1846, as relations between the United States and Mexico worsened, a group of itinerant hunters and trappers organized a rebellion against Mexican rule in California with a view to its annexation to the United States. Known as the Bear Flag Revolt, this miscellaneous force was led by John C. Fremont. However, their ineffectual but sometimes violent actions were overtaken by larger events.

The outbreak of the Mexican-American War in May 1846 changed the direction of California’s history. The harbor at San Francisco Bay was considered the most important naval anchorage on the West Coast, and California had always played a central role in American expansionist plans. As part of military operations, General Stephen Watts Kearny’s army reached California in December 1846.

Kearny and Commodore Robert Field Stockton, in command of American naval forces, defeated the Mexican army at Los Angeles on January 8, 1847, and on March 1, Kearny established an American civil government in California. At the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, Mexico ceded to the United States one-third of her northern national territory, including California.

Even before the signatures had been affixed to the treaty, the U. S. plans for California were overtaken by an unforeseen event. On January 24, 1848, at the site of John Sutter’s mill in Coloma on the American River, a carpenter named James W. Marshall discovered gold. The ensuing immigration from around the world, known as the California gold rush, would change the face of California and shape its development for the next half-century. By 1850, the census of California showed nearly 100,000 people, almost all of them arrived in the previous year. This influx of humanity would submerge the Mexican population of California, call into question many of the land grants made by the Mexican government, and quickly make California an American area. The constitution drafted at Monterey in the autumn of 1850 prohibited slavery, in large part because of the fear on the part of miners that slaves would become competition for free miners. Congress conferred statehood in 1850, as part of a settlement of territorial acquisitions from the Mexican-American War known as the Compromise of 1850.

California grew rapidly in the 1850s as mining expanded and prospered; agriculture developed on the fertile soil, tended by a burgeoning population; and San Francisco became the leading metropolitan center on the West Coast, with a population that became the most cosmopolitan in the nation. To the waves of Americans who came across the continent in 1849 and 1850—and in subsequent years by sea—were added large numbers of Mexicans, Chileans, Peruvians, and Hawaiians; from Europe, Germans, English, and French; and finally Australians and Chinese. All were subject to a growing unhappiness with the influx of foreigners, and in response to such sentiments, the legislature passed a heavy tax of $20 a month against foreign miners in 1850. After extensive protests, the tax was reduced in 1851 to $4 a month.

Of these groups, the Chinese would become the most visible feature of life in California. Arriving in large numbers for the first time in 1852, they had come in response to the lure of “Gold Mountain,” the opportunity associated with the gold rush for poor men without name or education to make a fortune. The Chinese came, for the most part, as contract laborers, and of all the immigrant groups, they were the most distinctive. As the economic opportunities associated with the gold rush waned, they became the universal victims of the rising discontent against newcomers.

Indians were also targets of violence. Isolated raids against itinerant miners in the mountains were met with massive reprisals. The state government promulgated an official policy under which Indians were to be hunted down as dangerous to civil order. The Indian population in California was decimated within a decade of the opening of the gold rush.

By 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, California had completed a decade of extraordinary growth. Agriculture had begun to take hold in the central valleys. The towns of Sacramento and Stockton were growing as commercial centers. Yet it was also a time of uneasiness and civil disorder. In response to a rising level of crime and violence, “committees of vigilance” took power in San Francisco in 1851 and 1856, enforcing justice through extra-legal means. In the latter year, a private army controlled the city for three months, and several notorious characters were hung. Nevertheless, despite its uneasiness and violence, San Francisco emerged as a financial center of the West Coast as well as a cosmopolitan center of theater, literature, and journalism. In 1859, for example, San Francisco had 12 daily newspapers. They all paid tribute to the fastest-growing city in the rapidly growing Golden State.

Further reading: Walton Bean, California: An Interpretative History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973); Andrew F. Rolle, California: A History (New York: Crowell, 1969); Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 18501915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).