Page 18 - 2024-2025 Travel Guide to California

HISTORY
BY DAVID ARMSTRONG
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
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