California: history and heritage

About California: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE California Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

California has been reinvented again and again. Native nations speaking dozens of languages lived here for thousands of years; Spain built a chain of missions; Mexico divided the land into ranchos; the Gold Rush of 1848 brought the world; and in the twentieth century Hollywood, aerospace and Silicon Valley made it the dream factory of the modern age.

At a glance

Population: 39,538,223 (US Census Bureau, 2020 Census), the most populous US state.

Peoples: more than a hundred native nations; Spanish and Mexican Californios; and newcomers from across the Americas, Asia and Europe. California has no single majority group: Hispanic or Latino residents are the largest.

Native nations, Spanish missions, a gold rush and a dream factory: California keeps reinventing itself.

Shaped by: Spain (from 1769), Mexico (1821–1848), the United States from 1848, statehood in 1850, the Gold Rush, the railroads and the twentieth-century migrations.

UNESCO World Heritage: Yosemite National Park, Redwood National and State Parks, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House in Los Angeles, part of “The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright”.

Native California

Before Europeans arrived, California was one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth, home to peoples such as the Ohlone, Chumash, Tongva, Miwok, Pomo and Kumeyaay. Many of their nations live in California today, and the state has one of the largest Native American populations in the United States.

The missions

Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed into San Diego Bay in 1542. In 1769 Spain founded the first of twenty-one Franciscan missions at San Diego, linked by El Camino Real, the royal road. The missions, from Carmel to Santa Barbara, are now among California’s oldest buildings; for the native peoples gathered into them, they brought disease and forced labour as well as a new faith.

Mexican California

After Mexico won independence in 1821, the mission lands were divided into vast cattle ranchos, and Californio culture of vaqueros, adobe houses and fiestas took hold. In 1848, at the end of the Mexican–American War, California passed to the United States.

The Gold Rush

In January 1848 gold was found at Sutter’s Mill on the American River. Within a few years some 300,000 people had arrived from across the world, and California became a state in 1850. Chinese workers built much of the Central Pacific Railroad, completed in 1869, and San Francisco’s Chinatown is the oldest in North America.

Rail, film and tech

Oranges, oil and the railroads built Southern California; Hollywood made films from the 1910s; aerospace grew during the Second World War; and from the 1950s the orchards of the Santa Clara Valley became Silicon Valley. The Golden Gate Bridge (1937), Yosemite and the Pacific Coast Highway draw visitors from everywhere.

Our advice: visit one mission, such as Carmel or Santa Barbara, drive part of Highway 1, and spend a day in Yosemite: California’s history and landscape in a single trip.

Sources

Population: US Census Bureau, 2020 Census. History: California State Parks; California Missions Foundation; National Park Service (Yosemite); California Native American Heritage Commission; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “California”.

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