Page 18 - 2024/2025 Travel Guide to CALIFORNIA

HISTORY
A LAND OF IMMIGRANTS AND ENTREPRENEURS
Innovation and new beginnings are embedded in California’s cultural DNA
CALIFORNIA LIGHTHOUSES
When migration to California began in earnest in the 19th century, lighthouses became necessities to protect ships skirting the rough rocky coast. Many of the lighthouses were remote and hard to reach on land, and the job of keeping the lights burning was a challenging and difficult one, especially in bad weather when they were needed most. The Point Reyes Lighthouse, above, was built in 1870 and served until 1975. Now it is managed by the National Park Service and is open for tours as one of California’s, and the nation’s, historic lighthouses.
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 rail- road 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 2020, all have some- thing in common: starting over.
The United States is said to be a place where the world comes to begin again—to reinvent itself. 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 beautiful 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
16 2024-25 TRAVEL GUIDE TO CALIFORNIA
BY DAVID ARMSTRONG
ALISA_CH/SHUTTERSTOCK. OPPOSITE: SERGEY NOVIKOV/SHUTTERSTOCK; WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; MARIUSZ S. JURGIELEWICZ/SHUTTERSTOCK; MEUNIERD/SHUTTERSTOCK