Page 14 - 2015 Travel Guide to California

HISTORY
BY DAVID ARMSTRONG
A Land of Immigrants
and Entrepreneurs
Innovation and starting fresh are embedded in California’s cultural DNA
ALCATRAZ ISLAND
Alcatraz dominates San Francisco
Bay beyond the former Coast Guard
Station, which is now restored as
part of Crissy Field in the Presidio,
itself part of the Golden Gate
National Recreation Area (GGNRA),
the largest urban national recreation
area in the USA. Alcatraz has been
present in the popular culture since
its time serving as a maximum-
security federal prison from 1934 to
1963. Both Alcatraz Island and the
Presidio of San Francisco are
National Historic Landmarks.
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 engi-
neer launching a high-tech startup in Palo
Alto in 2015, 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
by explorers, soldiers and missionaries, who
SONGQUAN DENG/SHUTTERSTOCK. OPPOSITE: MARIUSZ S. JURGIELEWICZ/SHUTTERSTOCK; LOWE LLAGUNO/SHUTTERSTOCK; ANDREA VISCONTI/SHUTTERSTOCK
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