The Spanish explorer
Juan Cabrillo sighted the port of San Diego for the first
time in 1542, and baptized the region with the name of
California, by the imaginary island of a novel written
by Montalvo in 1510. Sir Francis Drake arrived near Point
Kings, to the north of San Francisco, in 1579, where "the
white reefs and borders" remembered Dover to him.
In 1602, Sebastián Vizcaíno put most of
the names of the place, still conserved; its exaggerated
description of Monterrey as a perfect port took the later
explorers to make the region a military and administrative
centre.
The Spanish occupation began in 1769, and combined the
convenience with a missionary enthusiasm. Fray Junípero
Serra established for the first time a small mission and
a military prison in San Diego, before arriving in June
of 1770 at Monterey. In 1804, from San Diego to San Francisco
was a chain of 21 missions, united by the Royal road.
The baptized native Americans were used as workers. When
Mexico obtained its independence in 1821, in theory it
also acquired the control of California. Nevertheless,
the Americans were beginning to arrive, in spite of the
immense difficulty to accede to California: 3 months by
sea passing through the Cape Horn, or 4 months by land
in a covered cart.
Although the non native population only consisted of 10,000
inhabitants in 1846, the increasing belief that it was
the manifest destiny of the United States to cover the
continent from coast to coast soon took to the Mexican-American
war. Practically all the battles took place in Texas;
Monterey was taken by the United States Navy without a
single firing, and in January of 1847 the Americans controlled
all the West Coast. In 1850, California became the thirtieth
first state of the United States.
Accidentally, only 5 days before the treaty that finished
the war were signed, gold nuggets were discovered in Sierra
Nevada. The gold searchers arrived, in the craziest migration
of history; it took only 15 days to leave the auriferous
fields clean. The end of the transcontinental railroad
in 1869 was a decisive step. It took only 5 days to arrive
from New York, and the price war made the tariffs to go
down.
It was thought that California was immune to the worse
effects of the Great Depression of the decade of 1930,
thanks partly to the prosperity images spreaded by its
film industry. From the dusty basin of the Middle West
whole families packed all its properties and they started
off for the farms of the central valley. The heavy industry
arrived during World War II, as shipyards and aircraft
factories, and many workers and military personnel remained
there later.
As home of the Beat generation writers during the 50´s
and the hippies in the 60´s, and host of political
movements and ecological radicals, California is in the
vanguard of the cultural change.
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