For Ginger, Brooks, Todd, and my students at Santa Ana College – all Californians whose lives have been shaped and enriched by living in this veritable Pacific Eldorado

Illustrations

Foreword

Janet Fireman

(Editor, California History)

California was America’s dearest object of desire in the mid-nineteenth century, when Manifest Destiny fueled the nation’s expansionism. In the 1840s the United States engaged in a desperate quest to acquire California from Mexico, without knowing how very fabulous, how rich, how beautiful, and how loaded with potential the object of its desire actually was. That unknown capacity exceeded all expectations as time passed; that greatest gift of the nineteenth century, as some have said, is a gift that keeps on giving. California is full of surprises, and is famous for imagination and reinvention. One of those surprises is a new system of construing California’s history, as the following pages illuminate. Pacific Eldorado: A History of Greater California tracks the customary chronology, probing the depths and heights of economic, political, and cultural events; but it also introduces a crystal clear yet completely new lens through which to view the region’s past.

Ironically, the inspiration for Pacific Eldorado is as old as the sea. In fact, it is this grand body of water, the Pacific Ocean, the largest and deepest on earth, which once extended over surface that is now California land. The chapters herein describe how the state’s location came to be where and what it is: Even California, and 47 percent of Californians, started somewhere else and traveled to their current spot on the earth’s surface. That creation story of geological migration and accretion established a place over time and became a space like no other, favored by nature and supplied with plentiful resources that people hunted, extracted, nurtured, harvested, pumped, processed, sold, bought, and consumed. The fruit of these natural advantages – most famously gold – defined the state with a come-hither allure, offering prospects grasped, snatched, or secured by Californians from pre-statehood times onward. Capitalizing on the sea, its natural border, and crossing the Pacific and making it a part of their reality, Native Californians, Spaniards, Californios, and Mexicans, as well as peoples from across the Pacific in several directions, had already set the Pacific Eldorado project in motion by the time the United States took over in 1848.

A liaison of location and history furnishes the framework. From its geological assembly millions of years ago to its initial peopling by the first immigrants perhaps 20,000 years ago, through explorations and colonization by Spain, Mexico, and the United States in the past nearly 500 years to the present, California’s promise has been broader, deeper, and grander than its borders. Beginning with nature, topography, and natural resources and ending with facts and figures expressing California’s economic, political, financial, and cultural power and impact in the Pacific world and beyond, Pacific Eldorado draws a through-line from that distant beginning to our time. All this comes with risks and contests: these pages summarize our present concerns and forecast the future demographic and environmental challenges to the state for retaining its remarkable status. We and those coming up – the population is estimated to reach 50 million by 2025 – must be mindful of our drinking water, air quality, climate change, the marine ecosystem, and clean energy.

What does Pacific Eldorado deliver to the reader that is unavailable elsewhere? The answer lies in California itself: recognized world-round as special, appealing for its scenic variety, entertainment and recreational attractions, climate and resources, and bountiful possibilities. All this we take for granted. That California faces the Pacific Ocean is appreciated, but even though the long coastline is lionized, the essential truths of relationships between California’s location and what Californians have made of that have been ignored. Thomas Osborne brings a new contribution to current discourse about California and its past to reveal a grand tapestry of connections and a multi-hemispheric pattern of interaction with the Pacific world. From the original position California occupied in the American ideal – a foothold on the distant shore – he proffers a parade of Pacific ventures available to the nation because of California’s location, its profusion of natural resources, and the cornucopia of human capital, innovation, and imagination that the diversity of Californians have put into operation.

Reading Pacific Eldorado stimulates an understanding of the logical pairing of globalization with California. Our minds also focus on the inescapable: the wide Pacific and our entire world are narrowing through digital communication. Even so, the opportunities in our information age are simultaneously expanding the world. Analysis of the Pacific Eldorado concept is yet to be undertaken in the historical literature, but this new reckoning surely will spark broadened consideration of California’s links to the Pacific world. Those powerful trans-oceanic links, as this cutting-edge text shows, may best explain why the Golden State was so coveted in the mid-nineteenth century and remains even more so today.

Preface

“The flashing and golden pageant of California,

The sudden and gorgeous drama, the sunny and ample lands, … 

Ships coming in from the whole round world, and going out to the whole world,

To India and China and Australia and the thousand island paradises of the Pacific …”

Walt Whitman, “Song of the Redwood-Tree” (1874)

Whitman’s enchanting “Song of the Redwood-Tree” has had a strong basis in the historical record. While this poem omits the gritty details of how “crimps” (owners of boardinghouses for sailors) strong-armed prospective crewmen into sea duty in San Francisco waterfront saloons, it still captures the alluring relationship California has had with the Pacific world for the past 500 years and more. Providing a comprehensive account of that past, Pacific Eldorado simultaneously illuminates the historical stepping stones to the state’s twenty-first century prominence in the Pacific Basin and globally. In doing so, it aspires to be among those on the cutting edge of internationalizing state and local history and giving the state’s long-time Pacific connections their due.

In other words, Pacific Eldorado narrates the story of a “greater California,” a place whose history in numerous instances extends well beyond the geographical boundaries of the state. These “beyond the borders” connections challenge the prevalent notion of an isolated early California and suggest the need for a history that weaves the local, the national, and the international into a coherent narrative. For example, if Navy Lieutenant Charles Wilkes’s epic maritime expedition (1838–42), which brought him to the San Francisco Bay area, is even mentioned in current California history textbooks, they offer virtually no coverage of how that exploration connected California to America’s “manifest destiny” of conquering North America and expanding transpacific commerce. In short, the relationship between California and the Pacific world that Walt Whitman expressed in verse, and which the historical record supports, seems to have gone little noticed in current chronicles of the state.

This textbook aims to help students better understand the state’s fascinating and complex history by placing it squarely within the context of Pacific geological processes resulting in land formation, prehistoric Pacific voyaging leading to early settlement, international transpacific commerce, Pacific immigration, Pacific imaginings that have infused the “California Dream” of a better life for all, and America’s expansion beyond its western shoreline and into the world’s largest ocean basin. This means a spatial re-framing of California’s past. Anticipating this fresh approach to California history, Kevin Starr wrote in Clio on the Coast (2010): “Even further down the road, into the twenty-first century, lay the challenge of integrating the Pacific Coast and the nation behind it into a comparative history of the Asia/Pacific Basin of which it was a part. China, Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines, Hawaii, Chile, Australia, and New Zealand, after all, and the other Asia/Pacific places as well, had long since been important components of the California story.” Started two years before and independently of this call for a Pacific-centered California history, this is the first textbook to take up Starr’s challenge to historians of the Golden State.

The major theme of this volume could be described as follows: From its beginning, California’s history has been shaped increasingly by its Pacific Basin connections – connections that have derived largely from the state’s resources, which is why “Eldorado” appears in the title. Throughout California’s past, such resources have included sea otter pelts, lumber, whale oil, hides and animal fat (tallow) used for candle-making, gold, borax cleanser, petroleum, farm products, films and media works, Silicon Valley computer technologies, and more.

The book’s five related supporting themes include:

Organizationally, the textbook’s 14 chapters move chronologically from the geologic formation and earliest peopling of California into the second governorship of Jerry Brown in the years 2011–12. All chapters open with an overview of the topic at hand, followed by a Timeline. Each chapter includes a brief Pacific Profile essay, featuring a person whose life and/or contributions exemplify the role of the Pacific in shaping California history. In some instances such persons have been well known (railroad magnate and former governor, Leland Stanford) and in other instances they have not (restaurateur Norman Asing). Some called California home (former governor, Hiram Johnson); others just visited (mariner and explorer Alejandro Malaspina). The intent has been to humanize the state’s past, helping readers see California’s Pacific maritime and other connections through the lives of real people. Each chapter ends with a brief Summary, Review Questions, and a Further Readings section that offers an annotated list of written sources for those who wish to explore the “flashing and golden pageant” of Pacific California in more depth and detail.

T.J.O.
Laguna Beach and San Francisco

Acknowledgments

As solitary as researching and writing are, looking back I had a lot of help from many wonderful, thoughtful people in doing this project. A short list of those who were instrumental in providing this help would include:

1

Beginnings: From Fire and Ice to Indian Homeland

Fire and ice forged the physical setting of California’s storied past. No matter how extensively humans have altered that setting with mining activities, transportation systems, aqueducts, and various other built structures, nature always has been integral to the state’s history. Before there was a human record there was pre-history, or a time of beginnings, by far the longest period in California’s timeline. During this genesis California literally rose from the Pacific, at times spewing flames and volcanic ash. Violent thrusts from below the Earth’s surface formed mountains and valleys that later would be carved by huge rivers of ice. Before these glaciers began melting, some 15,000 years ago, America’s first human inhabitants began making their way by foot and watercraft from Asia to North America. On reaching the New World, these mammoth-hunting migrants trekked southward and eastward, some settling in what would become California. Their seagoing Asian counterparts navigated North America’s coastline southward to the Channel Islands and mainland. These trekking and sailing Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, peoples were the first human occupants of this remarkable land. Some scholars speculate that Polynesian and Chinese Pacific voyagers visited Indian California centuries before Europeans arrived in the province.

Landforms

Not only was California born of the Pacific, also it is situated on the Ring of Fire, an intercontinental perimeter of volcanoes and earthquake faults that line the Pacific Rim in a sweeping arc from Japan to Chile. Like many other areas along the Ring of Fire, the state’s varied landmass was assembled over time from geologic fragments of rocks and sediments, called “terranes,” lying on the crust or floor of the Pacific long after the Earth was formed some 4.6 billion years ago. Before these fragments began uplifting from the ocean, North America’s western shoreline extended to about where the Rocky Mountains are situated today. West of that ancient coastline loomed the vast, heaving Pacific.

According to widely accepted plate tectonics theory, formulated by geologists in the mid-1960s, California’s landmass has evolved over hundreds of millions of years. The process has been global and ongoing. Eons ago 20 huge subterranean masses of material, called plates, comprised the Earth’s crust and upper mantle. These plates meandered due to heat and pressure from deep within the planet, creating continents. The largest of these subterranean masses, the Pacific Plate, lies beneath roughly two-thirds of the ocean by that name. The eastward-moving Pacific Plate collided with the western edge of the North American Plate in a zone somewhat west of the Rockies. At the point of collision the Pacific Plate subducted, that is, pushed beneath the North American Plate, thereby generating enormous heat. The heat, in turn, melted subterranean basalt rock that combined with deeply buried sediments to produce ores – including gold that in the mid-1800s sparked a worldwide rush to California – while pushing up the Earth’s crust and forming granite outcroppings. In this way western mountains and their basins came into existence. The initial collision was followed by subsequent ones, called “dockings” or “accretions,” that assembled California’s topography, which included offshore volcanic islands. “Wherever you stand in this state,” says geologist Keith Heyer Meldahl, “if your feet are on bedrock, the odds are that you’re standing on an immigrant [piece of ground], reeled in by subduction from the far reaches of the Pacific in the process of assembling California.” About 30 million years ago, when the area for the most part assumed its present geographical configuration, these west-to-east collisions stopped and a lateral south-to-north movement of the Pacific Plate began that continues to this day.

This lateral movement has had major consequences for the region, especially in terms of earthquakes. The Pacific Plate has been moving northwestward at about 2 inches a year. Consequently, part of Baja California was carried over millions of years to the coastline and interior reaches of southern California and up to San Francisco. This movement has been characterized by gnashing and grinding along the Pacific–North American plates’ subduction zone. Stresses from the lateral movements of the two plates force an unlocking of surface-area terrain on both sides of the fissure known as the San Andreas Fault. The forced unlocking of these blocks results in powerful earthquakes along this fault system that extends from Point Reyes Peninsula just above San Francisco southeastward for 350 miles to the mountains of southern California. Earthquakes along that fault line have devastated cities, leaving many dead and striking fear into survivors. Such was the case in 1906 when much of San Francisco was flattened and burned (due to ruptured gas lines and water mains in the city) by a severe earthquake along the San Andreas Fault. Since 1769, when the Spanish began colonizing the province, there have been 117 measured or recorded earthquakes along this fault. Geology and geography augur more to come on this and other faults in the state.

Volcanoes, plate tectonics, earthquakes, winds, and waves have formed California’s coastline, offshore islands, mountains, and basins or valleys. That coastline, with its many picturesque coves and tree-crested cliffs, is one of the most photographed and tourist-visited in the world, extending 1,264 miles in length. Monster waves, or tsunamis, generated by distant earthquakes, have on occasion reportedly reached 195 feet in height before bombarding northern California’s shores. Such a wave struck just north of Humboldt Bay in 1913. Less noteworthy yet still powerful currents of wind and sea have been sculpting coastal California for eons.

Figure 1.1 California topography. The variation in the state’s topography is unmatched nationwide. Based on Mary Hill, California Landscape: Origin and Evolution, revised edition (Berkeley: University of California Press 1985), p. 24.

Reprinted by permission of University of California Press.

Inland from the coast, mountain ranges and plateaus of dramatically varying elevations dominate most of the state’s nearly 100 million acres of surface area. America’s third-largest state, after Alaska and Texas, California features at least half a dozen ramparts.

Two mountain chains and a high plateau occupy much of the far northern reach of the state’s boundaries. The Klamath range is located in the northwest corner of the state. Two major rivers, the Klamath and Trinity, flow through the mountains’ gorges, emptying into the Pacific. To the east the volcanic-created Cascades, which lie on a north–south axis from Washington to northern California, feature such peaks as Mt. Shasta (14,162 feet) and Mt. Lassen (10,457 feet), both of which resulted from thunderous, fiery eruptions along the Pacific Ring of Fire. Mt. Shasta’s volcanic origin goes back about 50 million years ago, while Mt. Lassen is around 200,000 years old. The Modoc Plateau, covered with rugged lava flows and site of an 1873 war between whites and Indians, is tucked in the northeastern corner of the state.

Slightly south of the Cascades, California’s highest range – the Sierra Nevada – begins its more than 400-mile span along part of the state’s eastern boundary. This relatively young rampart, the world’s longest and some 50 million years old (according to a team of Stanford scientists), is still rising, unlike the Appalachians in the eastern United States. The twin jewels of the Sierra, some say, are the glacial-carved Yosemite and Hetch-Hetchy valleys. The former is world-renowned for its granite cliffs and majestic waterfalls; the latter was transformed into a reservoir for San Francisco in the early twentieth century. A major obstacle to early overland migrants and the major construction challenge to builders of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad, the Sierra boasts the highest peak in the contiguous 48 states – Mt. Whitney (14,495 feet). Fifty other Sierra peaks measure above 13,000 feet. The eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, which rise abruptly out of a largely treeless basin, are especially steep as those who have hiked in that region will attest.

Beyond impressive recreational opportunities and perhaps unparalleled aesthetic endowments, the Sierra Nevada range has been a storehouse of riches in pelts, ores, timber, and water. For, example, Chinese miners in the 1850s referred to the Sierra as Gam Saan, Gold Mountain. Other valuable ores, like tungsten (used in weapon-making), were mined in the twentieth century. Rivers flowing from the Sierra, like the Feather and Tuolumne, have furnished hydroelectric power and water to farmers and thirsty Californians. Sapphire-blue Lake Tahoe, the state’s largest body of fresh water, is but one of the many lakes carved by Sierra glaciers.

The Great Basin – comprising parts of Utah, Arizona, and California – lies just east of the Sierra. Its historical importance has much to do with the early twentieth-century diversion of the Owens River into an aqueduct built to provide the inhabitants of Los Angeles with water. The resulting conflict between Owens Valley farmers and the City of Los Angeles became a major event in California’s more recent past. East of Owens Valley the White Mountains extend across the state border into Nevada.

Close to and paralleling the Pacific seaboard, the Coastal Ranges run much of the length of the state from Cape Mendocino down to Point Conception. The ranges were formed by the same subduction process, described above, which produced the state’s larger landmass. Younger than the Sierra Nevada, the Coastal Ranges – with some exceptions – generally ascend to between 3,000 and 4,000 feet. In addition to shale and sandstone, a good deal of serpentine, the state rock, can be found in these mountains.

Situated between the Coastal Ranges and the Sierra, the 450-mile-long and 50-mile-wide Central Valley was once immersed in sea water. The retreating ocean left in its wake what would evolve into one of the most fertile and productive farmlands in America, watered by the southward-flowing Sacramento River and the northward-flowing San Joaquin River. Together these two rivers formed a delta region in the state’s interior that remains linked to the Pacific by San Francisco Bay’s tributaries. The Bay’s narrow entrance and 400 square miles of inlets, which render Stockton and Sacramento Pacific ports, make it one of the world’s finest natural harbors.

Two more ramparts complete the mountainous profile of California. The southern end of the Great Valley gives way to the Transverse Ranges, so called because they extend for about 250 miles along an east–west axis that stretches to the offshore Santa Barbara Channel Islands. Still farther south, the Peninsular Ranges form the northernmost extremity of mountains that run the length of Baja California.

The state’s final landform comprises the adjoining Mojave and Colorado deserts, occupying California’s southeast corner. Death Valley, located in the Mojave, has the distinction of being the lowest point (282 feet below sea level) in North America. South of Death Valley, the Colorado Desert stretches to the Mexican border.

Climates

Just as California’s land mass was Pacific-born much the same is true for its climates, which are as diverse as its topographic features. Rainfall, temperature, and sunlight vary so significantly throughout the state that meteorologists speak of its micro-climates. Even within distinct geographical areas climates, especially temperatures, can fluctuate dramatically on a seasonal basis. Since the beginning of European settlement in California, climate has become increasingly important in shaping the state’s economy.

As elsewhere, California’s climates are influenced by many variables including wind patterns, ocean currents, and high-elevation mountains. The dominant weather pattern is for the westerly winds (precipitation-bearing onshore winds from the Pacific) to blow during the winter months, depositing rain – and in some places snow – from the northern to the southern end of the state. These somewhat warm winds have a swirling effect that draws colder ocean water to the surface, creating coastal fogs from the resulting air–moisture mix and condensation. Inland from the fog-shrouded coast, high-elevation mountains intercept the moisture carried by the prevailing westerlies while blocking their flow eastward. Hence the much drier and often arid weather east of the Coastal, Sierra Nevada, San Gabriel, and San Bernardino mountains.

The flow pattern of the westerlies is largely inoperative in the spring, summer, and early fall months when hot, dry winds blow from interior deserts toward the ocean. In southern California, for example, the Santa Ana winds often produce drought conditions, which, in turn, have resulted in hazardous fires. The Witch (Creek) fire in October 2007, for example, destroyed more than a thousand homes north and east of San Diego. Drought and Santa Ana wind gusts of up to 100 miles per hour forced the closure of many schools; the entire town of Julian was evacuated. Such wildfires have become more frequent and severe in recent decades.

Drought and wildfires occur throughout California despite the plentiful rainfall in the northern as compared to the southern part of the state. Temperatures rarely rise above 70 degrees Fahrenheit (F) in the northwestern corner of the state, where average annual rainfall exceeds 100 inches. The Mojave Desert in the southeastern part of the state represents the other end of the climate continuum. There temperatures can swing from below freezing in winter to summer highs above 120 degrees F. The average annual precipitation is 1.5 inches. In Furnace Creek, Death Valley, located in the Mojave, the American heat record was set on July 10, 1913, when the thermometer reached a hellish 136.4 degrees F! In what is billed as “the world’s toughest foot race,” athletes compete annually in the Badwater ultra-marathon, a grueling 135-mile run from Badwater, Death Valley to Mt. Whitney – from the lowest to the highest elevations in the 48 contiguous states. The race is held in mid-summer when Badwater temperatures reach a blistering 130 degrees F.

The most problematic and consequential aspect of California’s rainfall pattern is that three-fourths of the state’s water supply originates in the mountain snow packs in the northern third of the state while more than three-fourths of the demand comes from agriculture and the teeming population in the southern two-thirds. As a result, the state has constructed one of the world’s most extensive systems of aqueducts and dams to redistribute water to the otherwise parched farmlands in the Central and Imperial valleys as well as to Southland residents.

From this survey it is clear that there is no single California climate. Still, to the extent that there is a public image of such a climate, that image is based on the so-called Medi­terranean weather conditions that prevail along the coastline from Santa Barbara to San Diego. The weather in this region is the most moderate in the state; summers are warm and dry and winters rarely get down to freezing while rainfall seldom exceeds 12 inches. This rare climate is found only in three parts of the world other than California and the Mediterranean Basin: central Chile, the Cape of South Africa, and southern and western Australia.

Such an ideal climate is marred principally by firestorms (already discussed) and smog. Smog (a term concocted from the words “smoke” and “fog”) is an unhealthy gray haze created when nitrous oxide, an air pollutant, reacts with sunlight to produce ozone. In the Los Angeles Basin the ozone is trapped by a combination of mountains, westerly winds, and temperature inversions. Instead of the ozone escaping into the atmosphere, which would happen under normal conditions, it is blocked by warmer air above it and sealed in the Basin by nearby mountains. Consequently, the ozone stagnates near ground level causing respiratory and other ailments among humans, and in the lower-elevation forests it slows tree growth, particularly that of the ponderosa pine. Smog has been a serious problem in southern California at least since the mid-twentieth century.

While air quality has suffered because of smog, the otherwise ideal Mediterranean climate in the Southland has spurred the regional economy. The movie and aircraft industries located in the region largely because of the weather. As a beach culture emerged in the twentieth century, bathing suits and other ocean-oriented apparel gave rise to a very profitable sportswear enterprise.

Plants and Animals

California’s diversity of climates is matched by that of its plants and animals. From prehistoric times – when mammoths, mastodons, camels, and saber-toothed tigers roamed much of the area – to today, the environment has proved conducive to life in its many forms.

Redwood trees rank among the state’s most prominent plants. These stately giants grow almost exclusively along the coast from Big Sur to Humboldt County and in Yosemite and Sequoia national parks. Only a small number grow outside California – in Oregon and China. Those growing in coastal California, Sequoia sempervirens, are the tallest living things in the world, ascending to heights of 370 feet or more. Sierra redwoods, Sequoiadendron giganteum, have the largest mass of any life form on Earth. The General Sherman tree in Sequoia, for example, is 273 feet high and 36.5 feet thick at its base. Its lower branches alone have more bulk than any single tree growing east of the Mississippi River. Redwood trees are both insect- and fire-resistant, yet require the heat from blazes in order to reproduce. Such heat causes the cones, which remain on the trees about 20 years, to burst and drop their seeds on the scorched ground where competing vegetation no longer remains. Rain and sunlight will then bring about germination. The life cycle that will follow is a long one: scientists have dated many living California redwood trees at more than 2,000 years old, to the time of Jesus of Nazareth and the Roman Empire. Experts consider such specimens as “old growth;” unfortunately, only 5 percent of the original two million acres still exist. Because of their sheer majesty and other distinctive qualities, the California legislature has designated both the coastal and Sierra redwoods as the official state trees.

In addition to redwoods, other notable California trees exist. The bristlecone pine, Pinus longaeva