uring the first third of my life, it was considered an unusual statement of fact that I was born in California. Not that I'd begin conversations by saying "I'm Sean, and I was born in California." But I'm saying it here as an introduction.It isn't necessary to read this introduction to enjoy the rest of my story. But it will help to understand that like all Californians, my heritage is that of migrants.1 From the Gold Rush to 2010 the majority of Californians were migrants, most from the United States. To be candid, stating "from the United States" reflects a belief that while Californians are Americans, California is not a comfortable nor logical part of the artifice called United States. More about that later.....
On my father's side we're Irish. My paternal grandfather repaired and painted railroad cars which would not be unexpected. On my mother's side we're half Pilgrim - part of the New England Puritans - and half Confederates from the South. This heritage frames how I see America.
During the summer school "vacations" I visited cousins on my father's side in Southern California who also were born in California. All of our parents were migrants.Even though we were all in California, it was a long trip - about an eight hour drive back then.
But I flew, mostly on United Airlines DC-3's and Convair CV-340's. Being a child flying alone was unusual, but then again this was in the early 1950's when most Americans had never been on an airplane. It had to have been an expensive adventure for someone like me in a family that did not have a lot of money.
In fact, when you drove around California it felt like driving through different states, if not different countries. And it still does, with its mountains and deserts and valleys and coastlines.
Indeed there are three Californias, based upon geographic discontinuity. So building upon the purpose of this introduction, I want to offer readers a shared knowledge-base about the three Californias, Southern California, Northern California, and The Land of Nod.
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
This desert attracts people looking for that almost dreamlike lifestyle that sees no weather seasons - it's always summer.
Except, of course, when those deluge rains arrive sending flood waters through the canyons, flushing out cars with residents and burying houses in mud.
Nonetheless, about 24 million people live in Southern California which also is culturally influenced by its immediate proximity to the Sonoran Desert which begins in Mexico.
After all, no confusion exists about name sources such as Mission San Buenaventura, Pueblo de Los Angeles, or San Bernardino de Sena Estancia, that would lead sane Southern Californians to think that they live in a former English colony with a history in common with North Carolina.
And when talking about cultural influences, Southern California is home to Hollywood, a neighborhood in the central region of Los Angeles. The name Hollywood is used to commonly refer to the film and television entertainment industry which has had as a significant role in forming the culture of Southern California and the areas Spanish/Mexican history.
So it shouldn't surprise anyone that the first movie filmed in Hollywood, In Old California, a silent movie directed by D. W. Griffith in 1910, was a melodrama about the Mexican era of California.
After Griffith and others established Hollywood on the map, Southern California began to see a substantial population growth which ballooned during and after WWII.
If California were divided into the three states indicated in the map above, of the 52 states in population Southern California would be the third most populous state and in area would be the 24th largest state.
While I visited relatives in Southern California when I was a kid, I have never lived there. Living there might have made my stories more interesting simply because my uncle was a producer for a major TV/radio network. But no "Hollywood" memories exist in my mind.
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
Essentially the exterior edges of Northern California are defined by the Central Valley Watershed with the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the east, the Tehachapi Mountains on the south, the Coast Range Mountains on the west, and the Klamath and Cascade Mountains on the north.
The interior of Northern California is defined by water - the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, their feeders, and adjacent marshlands.
The history that drives the culture of Northern California which is as different from that of Southern California as the history of Massachusetts is from that of North Carolina. But while the course of history of the East Coast states dramatically shifted in 1860 with the Civil War, the course of history of the Californias dramatically shifted in 1848.
It is a historical period best told from the perspective of one man and of his family, that man being John Augustus Sutter Sr., a German-Swiss immigrant. Before leaving behind his wife and five children in Burgdorf, Switzerland, in the Spring of 1834 to begin his travels in the Americas, Sutter studied to gained fluency in Spanish and English in addition to Swiss French.
In Le Havre, France, Sutter boarded the ship Sully which arrived in New York City on July 14, 1834. For the next five years he traveled across North America. To make a long story short, his westward travels reached the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1838. There he mingled in the Euro-American community, dining with the Consuls of the United States of America and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and cultivating shipping merchants.
In the Spring of 1839 Sutter hired the brig Clementine to take himself, 10 Native Hawaiians laborers and several other followers, provisions, and general merchandise to New Archangel (now known as Sitka), the capital of the Russian-American Company colonies in Russian America.
This was in the later years of the Russian-California period (1812–1842) when the Russian-American Company operated Fort Ross and had named the present-day Bodega Bay as "Rumyantsev Bay", both of which were in The Land of Nod though they did not know that then.
An expansive colonization program of California had been presented to the Russian Imperial Court in 1824 but because of internal Russian politics was delayed. Alexander I's death and the subsequent 1825 Decembrist Uprising halted the considerations for an extensive Russian commercial colonization of California.
Sutter had formulated a plan of establishing a colony in Northern California’s Central Valley. Reportedly, while in New Archangel Sutter socialized with Governor Ivan Antonovich Kupreyanov who aided Sutter in determining the course of the Sacramento River.
After a month in New Archangel, the Clementine then sailed for Alta California, arriving on July 1, 1839, in the small seaport town of Yerba Buena (now San Francisco) in Alta California, Mexico.
Sutter's plans required that he obtain a land grant by traveling to the capital of Alta California, Monterey, to seek from the governor, Juan Bautista Alvarado, permission to settle in the territory. Alvarado saw Sutter's plan of establishing a colony in Central Valley as useful in "buttressing the frontier which he was trying to maintain against Indians, Russians, Americans and British."
The governor stipulated however that for Sutter to qualify for land ownership, he had to reside in the territory for a year and become a Mexican citizen, which he did on August 29, 1840. Construction was begun in August 1839 on a fortified settlement which Sutter named New Helvetia, or "New Switzerland." When the settlement was completed in 1841, on June 18, he received title to 48,827 acres at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers.
All seemed well until 1845 when the rumblings of U.S. ambitions appeared to be leading to a war with Mexico. A Francophile, Sutter threatened to raise the French flag over California and place New Helvetia under French protection, but at the beginning of the Mexican-American War in 1846 California was occupied by the United States.
Sutter and others at first supported the establishment of an independent California Republic but when United States troops under John C. Fremont briefly seized control of his fort, Sutter did not resist because he was outnumbered.
On February 2, 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed ending the war. In that treaty, the United States agreed to pay Mexico $18,250,000 and Mexico formally ceded California to the United States. However, nine days earlier, on January 24, 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California, beginning the California Gold Rush (1848–1855).
Together, these two events destroyed Sutter’s plans. After all, he was a Mexican citizen of German-Swiss descent who resisted the U.S. occupation of California. And at the beginning of the Gold Rush, there was no law regarding property rights in the goldfields and a system of "staking claims" was developed which interfered with Mexican land grants.
To avoid losing everything, Sutter deeded his remaining land to his son John Augustus Sutter Jr. who had come from Switzerland in September 1848 and promptly started plans for building a new town he named Sacramento
What Sutter and others reasonably saw as their future of ranching in a quiet pastoral setting, was about to be shattered.
When news of the Gold Rush had spread around the world, and an overwhelming number of gold-seekers and merchants began to arrive from virtually every continent. Initially, the largest group of 49ers were Americans, arriving by the tens of thousands overland across the continent and along various sailing routes. Then Australians and New Zealanders learned the news from ships crews and thousands sailed for California.
Then 49ers arrived from Latin America, particularly from the Mexican mining districts near Sonora and from Chile. Gold-seekers and merchants came from Asia. The first immigrants from Europe arrived in late 1849 resulting in the fact that 90,000 people arrived in California in 1849, about half by land and half by sea. About 50,000 to 60,000 were Americans, and the rest were from other countries.
By 1855 at least 300,000 gold-seekers, merchants, and other immigrants had joined the 8,000 in California. While a majority came from within the United States, there were tens of thousands of Mexicans, Chinese, Britons, Australians, French, Latin Americans, Filipinos, Basques, and Turks. Persons from small villages in the hills near Genova, Italy, were among the first to settle permanently in the Sierra Nevada foothills; they brought with them traditional agricultural skills, developed to survive cold winters. A modest number of miners of African ancestry (probably less than 4,000) had come from the Southern States, the Caribbean and Brazil.
The 49ers drove Native Americans out of their traditional hunting, fishing and food-gathering areas and most of those that didn’t starve to death were slaughtered in the resulting conflicts.
The Gold Rush stimulated economies around the world in ways never experienced. Farmers in Chile, Australia, and Hawaii found a huge new market for their food; British manufactured goods were in high demand; clothing and even prefabricated houses arrived from China. The return of large amounts of California gold to pay for these goods raised prices and stimulated investment and the creation of jobs around the world. In other words, the terms "California Dream" and the "golden state" were inexorably tied to international free trade because the Pacific sailing ship was the only convenient means to transport goods and materials to San Francisco.
However, with the Civil War going on Lincoln and the Republicans were about to change the transportation situation. The East Coast was not going to allow that Pacific free trade to go on unchallenged.
In order to assure a permanent occupation of the area west of the Transcontinental Divide on the map above, during the Civil War President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 authorizing the creation of two private railroad companies, the Central Pacific in the west and the Union Pacific in the mid-west.
The 1,912-mile continuous railroad line would connect the existing eastern U.S. rail network at Omaha, Nebraska/Council Bluffs, Iowa with the Pacific coast at the Oakland Long Wharf on the San Francisco Bay was completed in 1869. The new line crossing the Transcontinental Divide would reach the Pacific and connect to existing railroads serving the Atlantic Seacoast.
Though the companies were created June 28, 1861, two months after the Civil War began, financial feasibility was in question. The Act created a federal government program granting of lands directly to corporations, both for railroad rights-of-way plus allowing the railroads sell land to create towns and farms and ranches.
The other problem was finding workers.
On the east side of the Divide to work for the Union Pacific Railroad came immigrant workers from British-occupied Ireland. They came across the Atlantic from Northern Europe, landing in former British colonies.
Soon signs would appear saying "No Irish Need Apply" partly because of Catholic religion of the Irish and partly because the British cast a discriminatory shadow over the Irish as non-English speaking natives in a colony.
As noted in When the Irish Weren’t White:
Like finding out a song you thought was new is actually a
100-year-old remake, the Irish were simultaneously accused of stealing all the good jobs and branded as 'lazy' and 'shiftless.' They were also thought to be the nonwhite 'missing link' between the superior European and the savage African based on stereotypes from the early American media....
In British eyes, the Ireland and its indigenous population was not significantly differently from their other colonies such as India or Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Simply, the Irish weren't WASP. No reason existed for Americans not-of-Irish-descent to think differently.
The immigrant workers on the west side of the Divide came from Asia across the Pacific to what was former Catholic-Spanish Mexican territory to work for the Central Pacific Railroad. They were Chinese, of a different race who spoke a language even stranger than Irish Gaelic.
Ultimately, in the spring of 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur. This act provided an absolute 10-year moratorium on Chinese labor immigration.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first law implemented to prevent a specific racial group from immigrating to the United States. It was repealed 61 years later by the Magnuson Act on December 17, 1943. That was after the United States ended up in WWII fighting on behalf of China while rounding up descendants of immigrants from Japan and put them in concentration camps.
His dream shattered even before the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, Sutter sought from Congress recovery of his losses associated with the Gold Rush. He received a pension of $250 a month as a reimbursement of taxes paid on the Sobrante grant at the time Sutter considered it his own. He and wife Annette moved to Lititz, Pennsylvania, in 1871, across from the Lititz Springs Hotel, the present-day General Sutter Inn.
Meanwhile, back in Northern California in the latter part of the 19th Century, the farming activities of the new migrants required draining of the Central Valley marshlands generally referred to as sloughs.
A very large variety of crops and orchards were, and are, grown in the Central Valley including rice in flooded paddy fields. Extensive levee systems exist today, in an effort to protect lands from the frequent flood levels of the rivers.
Most Americans and, indeed, most Californians have no idea of the scope and size water storage and distribution related public works in California. These facilities have made possible a huge population growth, particularly in Southern California and Silicon Valley.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Central Valley Project (CVP) is probably the most significant public works in California. Extending 400 miles through central California, the CVP is a complex, multi-purpose network of dams, reservoirs, canals, hydroelectric power plants and other facilities.
Construction of major CVP facilities began in 1938 with breaking of ground for Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River near Redding in Northern California. Over the next five decades, the CVP was expanded into a system of 20 dams and reservoirs that together can hold nearly 12 million acre-feet.
Water from the CVP provides an annual average of 5 million acre-feet of water for farms; 600,000 acre-feet of water for municipal and industrial uses (enough water to supply about 2.5 million people for a year); and water for wildlife refuges and maintaining water quality in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
In 1960 work began on the California State Water Project including 10 storage and 11 other dams, 8 power plants, and 701.5 miles of canals ot provide drinking water for more than 23 million people and generating an average of 6500 GWh of hydroelectricity annually. About 70% of the water provided by the project is used for urban areas and industry in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area, and 30% is used for irrigation in the Central Valley.
After the Gold Rush population explosion, Northern California's population grew more slowly. It wasn't until after WWII that the towns of the Central Valley began to expand into the farmland.
If California were divided into the three states indicated in the map above, of the 52 states in population Northern California would be the 18th most populous state and in area would be the 22nd largest state.
Born in Northern California just before the end of WWII, it was home to my childhood from ages 0 to 11. Then we moved.
THE LAND OF NOD
"And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden." - Genesis 4:16
As can be seen on the map at the beginning, there is a part of State of California I call The Land of Nod. It is the coastal area west of Northern California running from the Oregon Border through Santa Barbara County.
Located in southwestern Santa Barbara County is Point Conception, a headland on which a lighthouse with the same name is located along California's Pacific Coast. The Final Draft Master Plan Framework and other documents related to California Marine Life Management Act note: "In general terms, geography, oceanography, and biology combine to divide California marine fisheries and other marine life into two major regions north and south of Point Conception."
But why call it The Land of Nod? It is a fanciful choice, but not without a certain logic. Just follow the green line on the map to the right.
Some settled in our Land of Nod, east of Eden. Later even more came, this time by ship from Spain.
The Spanish missions dot the the map of the Land of Nod. Mexico made Monterey in The Land of Nod the capital city of Alta California. The gate to the gold fields of the Gold Rush was the Golden Gate. Because of its climate, coastline and bays, rich farmlands, and other natural wonders, people are attracted to the Land of Nod where Silicon Valley drew those who created the energy of the 21st Century.
Before I was 11 we regularly visited The Land of Nod traveling to the North Coast Redwoods, to San Francisco, and to the Monterey Bay. When I was 11 we drifted to The Land of Nod to live. And except for brief periods to attend universities for special reasons, I have lived in The Land of Nod since that time.
Millions of others have drifted here also. If California were divided into the three states indicated in the map near the beginning of this post, of the 52 states in population The Land of Nod would be the 11th most populous state and in area would be the 41st largest state.
The stories that follow are about a life here.
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Footnote:
1I don't use the term "immigrant" because it is a legal term based upon the artificial construct of government ruling a particular area of the Earth. And I need to explain why I view all Californians as migrants or of migrant heritage. As Wikipedia explains: "Native plants are plants indigenous to a given area in geologic time." In California the Coastal Redwood spanned the Northern Hemisphere 65 million years ago while their beginning was much earlier, in the Upper Cretaceous, about 110 million years ago. The most commonly accepted model of human migration to the New World is that peoples from Asia crossed the Bering land bridge to the Americas some 16,500 years ago. But let's say that's wrong and to be generous they migrated 50,000 years ago. The point is no Californian is descended from any mammal that existed here in time measured in geologic time. The Coastal Redwoods had been here for millions of years when the first human migrated into California.
