Page 16 - 2014 Travel Guide to California

HISTORY
BY DAVID ARMSTRONG
A Home for Immigrants
and Entrepreneurs
California has always been a place for starting over
A U.S. POSTAGE STAMP circa 1948 shows Sutter’s Mill, Coloma,
to mark the centennial of the discovery of gold in California, top;
square-rigged sailing ship Balclutha, built in 1886, at Hyde Street
Pier, San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, above.
TALL SHIP
Elegant sailing vessels such as
Balclutha, above, sailed the
California coast for decades before
the age of sail came to a close. Her
predecessors, the clipper ships, came
into their own during the California
Gold Rush, bringing 49ers and
supplies around the Horn from the
East Coast in record time. A typical
New York-San Francisco sailing at
that time took more than 200 days;
in 1853, the clipper Flying Cloud
made it in 89 days, 8 hours, a record
that wasn’t broken until 1989!
The Spanish Franciscan friar blessing an
adobe church at Mission Basilica San Diego
Alcata in 1769; the Chilean miner trying his
luck panning for gold in a cold Sierra
cataract in 1849; the Chinese laborer
crossing the heaving Pacific to work on the
transcontinental railroad in 1869; the
African American leaving the South to build
warships on the Oakland waterfront in 1942;
the Haight-Ashbury hippie with her wakeful
dreaming in San Francisco’s Summer of
Love in 1967; the Indian engineer launching
a high-tech startup in Palo Alto in 2013, all
have something in common: starting over.
The United States is said to be a place
where the world comes to begin again—to
reinvent itself, in the current coinage. If so,
California is the “America” of America. This
was so even in pre-history, when the first
migrants from Asia crossed the land bridge
between Siberia and Alaska, hung a right,
walked southward, found pastures of plenty,
rich marine life and heart-stoppingly beau-
tiful mountains and either decided to keep
walking or stop right where they were.
The place wasn’t called California then,
of course. That came later, the name taken
from a 16th-century Spanish novel and used
WELCOMIA/SHUTTERSTOCK. TOP: ALEXANDERZAM/SHUTTERSTOCK. OPPOSITE:B N RENEE; JAY BOIVIN/SHUTTERSTOCK; LUCA MOI/SHUTTERSTOCK
14 2014 T R AV E L G U I D E T O C A L I F O R N I A