TWHP

The Places

The Players Meet the People Who Made California The Plots Learn the Strange Tales The Places See the Towns They Built 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

Up until the Gold Rush, California grew in easily defined stages, determined by initiatives taken first by the Spanish Government, and then their successors in Mexico. It all began with the string of 21 missions running from San Diego to Sonoma, built between 1769 and 1823, and was supplemented by a few adminsitrative and military posts, such as Monterey, the presidio at what is now San Francisco, and Sutter's Fort, now subsumed by Sacramento. With the coming of Americans in the 1840s, a few other other communities took shape: Benicia and Napa, for instance, and missions like San Diego and Sonoma evolved into real towns. After the discovery of gold, in 1848, camps proliferated up and down the Sierra foothills, many of those turning into genuine communities of some permanence, while a few key locales exploded as they funnelled miners toward the mountains, most notably, San Francisco at the mouth of the Bay, Sacramento, on its river, and Stockton, on the San Joaquin. In the following several decades, the regions adjacent to the Bay, the Sacramento Valley and the upper San Joaquin, filled in with farms and towns.

When silver was discovered in Nevada in 1859, it, too, experienced the same camp-to-community dynamic demonstrated in California, becoming a virtual colony of San Francisco interests. But to a degree much more pronounced than in its more salubrious neighbor, when the silver played out in Nevada boom towns, they quickly died; there were few green, fertile river valleys to keep erstwhile residents in place. Substantial population growth there would take another hundred years.

Southern California generally languished in the first 20 or 30 years after the Gold Rush, even as the northern regions flourished. Things had to settle down, people had to stop chasing the chimera of fast money, to appreciate the charms to the south. With the growth of the railroads in the 1870s and '80s and a developing appreciation of good weather and the potential provided by irrigation, Los Angeles and points south and east of there experienced their own booms. By the turn of the century, the major population centers of the state were substantially in place.

Benicia, 1847
Coloma, 1848
Folsom, 1848
Fort Ross, 1812
Honolulu, 1810
Los Angeles, 1781
Monterey, 1770
Napa, 1848
Placerville, 1848
Sacramento, 1848
Salt Lake City, 1847
San Diego, 1769
San Francisco, 1776
San Jose, 1777
Santa Fe, 1607
Sonoma, 1823
Stockton, 1849
Vallejo, 1852
Virginia City, 1860
Weaverville, 1850