Page 18 - 2020 Travel Guide to California

HISTORY
BY DAVID ARMSTRONG
Land of Immigrants and Entrepreneurs
California has always sparked new beginnings and innovation
THE GOLD RUSH
The California Gold Rush (1848-1855)
brought a tide of people to the state and
turned the sleepy hamlet of San
Francisco into an “instant city.” Later, in
1859, miners discovered gold in Mono
County east of the Sierra Nevada, where
the town of Bodie swelled to 10,000
people in 1880. The mill and houses in
Bodie State Historic Park, above, date to
1861. Today, Bodie is a well-preserved
ghost town.
The Spanish Franciscan friar blessing an
adobe church at Mission Basilica San Diego
de Alcalá 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 2020, 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 were themselves starting over in the
New World. The Spanish built 21 Roman
Catholic missions, from San Diego in the
south to Sonoma in the north, from 1769 to
1823. In converting native communities to
Christianity, the newcomers overwhelmed
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