Page 18 - 2025-2026 Travel Guide to California

HISTORY
BY DAVID ARMSTRONG
A PLACE FOR STARTING OVER
California has always been a place for immigrants and entrepreneurs
ALCATRAZ ISLAND
Alcatraz dominates San Francisco Bay
beyond the former Coast Guard Station,
which was restored as part of Crissy
Field in the Presidio—itself part of the
Golden Gate National Recreation Area
(GGNRA) which is the largest urban
national recreational 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 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 in the
1860s to work on the transcontinental rail-
road, completed in 1869; the African
American leaving the South to build war-
ships 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 something 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,
deciding either to keep walking or to 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 2025-26 TRAVEL GUIDE TO CALIFORNIA
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