The Western History Project

The Players Meet the People Who Made California The Plots Learn the Strange Tales The Places See the Towns They Built Glossary & Miscellanea San Francisco The Birth of the Modern World The Gold Rush The Find that Energized America The Comstock Lode The Greatest Silver Strike in History and the Big Bonanza The Transcontinental Railroad The Train that Transformed the Nation The Alaska Grab The Making of a Monopoly

Western History Links All of the most fact-packed sites. Buena Vista Winery See photos of California's earliest great viticultural estate, in Sonoma. These may be the first pictures ever taken of the state's wine industry. Napa Soda Springs In its day, Soda Springs epitomized the western version of Victorian elegance. This is where the California lifestyle achieved a perfection we will ever envy and never duplicate. Old-Time Napa Resorts White Sulphur Springs, The Napa Valley Ranch Club, Lokoya Lodge...

"The cowards did not start for the Pacific Coast in the
old days; the weak died along the way. And so it was that
we had then not only a race of giants, but of gods."
~ Bret Harte ~

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The Western History Project is an outgrowth of the interest of several individuals in the facts and lore of Manifest Destiny and the specific role of the San Francisco watershed in that world-shaking concept.

When Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York World, wrote in 1844, "Go West, young man," it was little more than a philosophical sentiment. Young America still perched for the most part on an Atlantic seaboard, and inland settlements consisted of small towns barely connected to the wider country by dirt tracks in the wilderness. The United States of America unavoidably looked west if only because it existed at the far edge of the continent. But it was six months to a year away by any extant modes of travel, and the proposition that it belonged to America could not easily be justified.

Oregon had British claimants, and south of there, Russia pursued a fur trade extending almost to San Francisco Bay. The Californios and their ranchos dominated everywhere else, legacies of the Spanish Empire and the government of a recently independent Mexico. In truth, it was a land up for grabs, and the United States, just a half-century old itself, was far from the mightiest contender.

It took those gods and giants, risking their lives, their families and their worldly possessions, to claim the West; only then did government follow. Those pioneers of the 1850s, 60s and 70s created a new world little perceived today, and San Francisco shined at its center. The habits of life, behavior and consumption established at that time went on to infuse the country and the world with a new sensibility that fundamentally changed humanity's view of the future.

This is the legacy of San Francsico and the West.

To those living monuments, and the people who built them, this site is dedicated.

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All Contents Copyright Western History Productions 2006