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- [00:00]
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- [02:00]
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- [03:03]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
A black bear roams through the wooded mountains of Southern California. Thick furred, broad shouldered, immensely strong, it trundles through canyons and pine forests on its daily quest for food. Berries, acorns, insects, eggs. Nothing is off limits to this survivor. With long claws and a nose seven times sharper than a bloodhound, the bear wanders free, disregarding boundaries. He is the monarch of the mountains. Other creatures, fierce and fragile, animate the vast California wilderness. Condors soar on silent wings, casting shadows on the desert floor. Antlered elk, taller than men, move with stately calm through coastal forests. In arid grasslands, coyotes track their prey. People live here too. Oh, lots and lots of people. But it is the bear. Muscular, adaptable, singularly resourceful. That is California's emblem, emblazoned right on its state flag. The proud symbol of strength, independence and resilience. Right Here in the 31st State of the United States of America. Hey there, it's Don here. Glad you dialed up another episode of American history hit. Thanks for listening. California. You need only say the word and a panorama of awe inspiring images is conjured. Sun drenched coastlines, endless highways, towering redwoods, magnificent deserts, dreamscapes that could make an ad executive salivate. And if natural beauty isn't enough, then how about economic power? The Golden State has been selling what it makes and grows for generations with supreme success. If California was its own country, its GDP would rank fifth in the world behind only the U.S. china, Japan and Germany. Life on the Left coast has always seemed bigger, riskier and richer than most anywhere else. From gold to grapes, from aerospace to algorithms, California defines the American impulse to innovate, expand and reinvent. Sometimes the very person you are to dig down into the early history of this fabled land of milk and honey. We're joined by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Michael Hiltzik, whose remarkable new history, Golden State the Making of California was released earlier just this year. Greetings, Mr. Hilsig. We might make a lot of people on the east coast jealous today. I should know, I'm from New Jersey. The west is the best, according to Jim Morrison. I bet he was talking about California, A history of the 31st state in book form is a daunting task. What spurred the project, part of what.
- [05:52]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Spurred it is that I am a Californian now. I was born on the East Coast, I was educated on the east coast and I moved here in 1981. And I've just come to love and respect this state. And also, of course, over the last few years, California has really taken a place as a leading factor in American politics. And I just thought that 30 years after the last major one volume history of California, it was a good time to take another look and take another run at this subject.
- [06:23]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
We could go all the way back to the early man's arrival on the west coast of North American continent 12,000 years ago. Some claim a lot earlier and fascinating fact. Indigenous societies thrived in this part of the world. By the time of first contact with Spanish explorers in the 1530s, there were about 300,000 indigenous people already living in California. 13% of the entire native born population of North America already the place to be in the 16th century. That's a lot of people over the 1500s.
- [06:54]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
That's right. That was a huge population. There were a lot of tribes and they lived for the most part peaceably with one another. I mean, there were conflicts now and then, mostly prehistoric economic conflicts, but they bartered with each other, they shared, they traded, they lived together.
- [07:11]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
This conversation, of course, we have to contain ourselves and order this kind of into three parts. Spanish California, Mexican California and then American California. That's kind of the broadest outline of what this history involves. So let's start with Spanish California. When did the Spanish first come to California? And was it by land or sea?
- [07:29]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Well, it was by sea and it was really sort of in the mid 16th century. Spanish conquistadors. Cortez was the major personage who came to what became California around that time. And he was here looking for gold and jewels.
- [07:46]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
They thought it was an island, really. Right. Baja, I suppose, made it seem that way. This was 40 years after Columbus and they were really just figuring out the lay of the land.
- [07:55]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
That's right. Basically there was not a lot of mapmaking that went on in that period. And yes, for the longest time they thought Baja was an island. And in fact, the Spanish maps continue to show California as an island even long after it was widely known that it was not an island, that the exploration had been of a peninsula and then of a coast.
- [08:18]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
I think it might be a kayaking trip I did in the Gulf of California that would have suggested this to the Spaniards. I mean, everything is so Big. I can't imagine being a European arriving here and trying to grasp this new place that they were looking at. It's just extraordinary. The tribes in this area you mentioned already very peacefully settled. What accounts for the different culture in the West?
- [08:43]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
The tribal California, let's say it was to a great extent agrarian, but there was also a lot of livestock raising in that period of time. But it was more or less a sedentary group of tribes. They grew their own food, they hunted. Rabb. This is sort of a cliche, but they lived on the land, and they lived in the territory that they found, and they exploited what they needed. And they were not trading with outsiders. They were trading with each other.
- [09:12]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
It's also the topography, as I understand. I mean, you have very forbidding mountains there, not too far from the coast, then deserts in the south. You end up with populations that can't move around like they might have in the Midwest and so forth. Plus, the bounty is good. There's harvest, there's fishing. The closeness and proximity and all that topographical factor makes warfare really an untenable thing, isn't it?
- [09:36]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Well, that's right. These were not tribes that were ranging far and far to expand their territory. They lived in territories where they had lived for many generations, and in the areas where they were neighbors with other tribes, that's where they might have had conflicts that would lead to violence.
- [09:55]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
135 different native dialects. I'm amazed, the more I do this podcast, how often old culture, ancient culture, speaks through to the modern age. It's really an extraordinary factor. 1542, the mainland is reached by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, who journeys up as far as modern Santa Barbara. How does the name California come to pass?
- [10:17]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
You know, Nobody is really 100% sure about that. I mean, there have been theories over the millennia. Some thought that it derived from some Greek vocabulary, some thought Latin. The most persistent theory goes back to a series of written sagas about a mythical character named Andeon and his son Esplandia. And one of these books depicted a war in which a queen, Calapia, whose territory was known as California, basically affiliated herself with the Spanish jests, so to speak, that predated the first arrival of the Spanish in what we now know of as California. And somehow that name got attached to a small part of what we now know as California. Though it's unclear how well the conquistadors knew this book or these books, how well their crewmen knew these books. But these books were certainly known to Cervantes, who put them into Don Quixote. In fact, Don Quixote fed himself on these exploits. And there's a scene in Don Quixote in which these books are burned by Don Quixote's neighbors to try to wean him from these myths that he had really deep ended into.
- [11:40]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
This land is so far afield from where they have developed colonies. They don't really colonize the Spanish. They don't really colonize California until the late 1700s, which is quite amazing. Is it missionary work that really triggers the effort, or was it the search for gold?
- [11:54]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Well, it was a search for gold and rumors and stories of cities of gold. The man of gold in Spanish, that would be El Dorado. And the Spanish came here basically in search of these riches that really started the Spanish explorations. And there was a long period of really about 140 years in which the Spanish lost interest in the west coast of the Americas. But then they came back and they really started exploring and basically moving up the coast and into the heartland more seriously, as you said in the 1700s.
- [12:30]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
Right. It is the mission system that really ends up reshaping this land and the culture that's there, the native culture. This was, I guess, a tried and true system from South America, I suppose.
- [12:40]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Yeah. Well, it started really. It was the Spanish court that actually brought the missionaries into California. And it started with the Jesuits. The Jesuits came to California, and along the east coast of Baja, they started setting up missions. Then the Jesuits fell into disrepute in the Spanish court, and the responsibility for developing California was given over to the Franciscans. And it was the Franciscan missionaries that really did take on the mission, so to speak, of civilizing California, civilizing the tribes. And their notion was, we're going to bring Christianity to these heathens and these pagans, really. And that was a big part of that period of California history.
- [13:25]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
I suppose we should define it when I say mission system. It's, you know, within a day's ride of each other. Are these missions that. Well, I guess it would be longer distances than that, come to think of it. You have San Diego and Santa Barbara, San Francisco, eventually. These are all churches, essentially. Missions and communities around these churches that are set up as bases, I guess forts were also involved. Obviously, there was a military aspect to this.
- [13:50]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Well, there was a military aspect aspect. The military. The Spanish military was, for a time, happy to have the missionaries take on the task of basically exploiting the tribes for labor and for economic development. So that's what happened. The missions were basically economic features of the landscape the missionaries would bring tribal members into their missions, into their territories, and they would put them to work raising crops and raising livestock. Now, the original natives were not entirely happy about that. And there were any number of rebellions by tribespeople who they had come under the lash of the missionaries and then of the Spanish military. So they would rebel, they would be punished, they would be executed, they would be basically manipulated for decades.
- [14:46]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
Was there a larger plan articulated as to what this mission would accomplish? Was this the building of a nation?
- [14:52]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
No, I don't think it was the building of a nation as such. It was really just exploiting the original natives for labor. And the agricultural development was really to make the mission self sustaining. But the underlying search really always was for material riches.
- [15:10]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
Yes, those converts, those indigenous people who had been converted, were required to live within this walled mission, which was a whole enclosure that was more than the church itself. It was a whole settlement. And they're taught Spanish, their religion, all these, the skills for physical labor, all of this is part of this community building, I suppose is a nice word for it. And it remains in place until the system is abolished in 1834. That's how modern this gets, right?
- [15:37]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
I think that's true. I think the difference between Spanish California and Spanish Mexican California, it can be a little vague, but yes, eventually the Mexican settlers wanted to be independent or they wanted to have their own representation. So that's what happened. By that time, Cortez had long been back, he had gone back to Spain. You know, his era had ended. And what we now know of as California was basically being run first out of Mexico and then out of Monterey, which became sort of the governing seat of Mexican California starting around the early.
- [16:16]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
1800S, around 1808, specifically, life really changes in the western hemisphere. The Spanish colonies all throughout this area, from North America Central and down the south, are pushing back against Spain. This is the time of Simone Bolivar. The whole reason we have the Avenue of Americas in New York City, which is to say this anti colonial movement that takes place in the early 19th century. Mexico becomes independent in 1821. How did the policies around land trade and the missions shift at this time as a new society begins to emerge in California?
- [16:52]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
The Spanish court was operating at long range. Obviously, not only were they far from the east coast of North America, but they were even farther from the west coast. So the Spanish population on the west coast just felt themselves neglected. They really wanted to be self governing. And that's eventually what happened.
- [17:15]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
Yeah, these missions become replaced at this point by ranches, essentially an entirely unique culture is rising. You can trace this back. If you're driving around la, for example, you see all these names, La Cienega and La Brea. All of these are references to these former rancheros that these early Mexican Californians began to create. And they in turn become more connected to foreign merchants and trappers and explorers. The whole place becomes more globalized, doesn't it?
- [17:42]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Well, that's true. And I think you have to keep in mind as well that for the Spanish, and that is the Spanish Mexicans, they were concerned about the incursion into their lands by explorers and exploiters from other countries, and particularly Britain, France and Russia. So they thought that being self governing would basically help them to preserve their economic opportunities on this territory under independent Mexico.
- [18:12]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
California, as you say, opens to foreign trade and settlement. This begins this movement towards a sort of diversity in California. I'm generalizing, of course, but you have a definite thing happening because of its proximity of the Pacific Ocean. Essentially naturalized foreigners who are converted to Catholicism can now own land. And governors were encouraged to make outright land grants. But this was beyond the native population, so to speak, the Mexican and California population, wasn't it?
- [18:42]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Well, the Mexican population in California, really, they were in control for a long period of time. The tribes, of course, were not treated as factors. The original natives were basically overrun. The population of native tribes fell from 300,000, as you said, when the Spanish first arrived, to 150,000 or less. And that's because the settlers brought disease. The mission practice of basically bringing all of the laborers into close quarters on the mission premises fostered the spread of disease. The punishments helped basically reduce these populations. So I think you can't say that the Spanish intended to reduce the population of natives, but that was certainly the outcome. The appearance of smallpox and syphilis really debilitated the original occupants or the original human occupants of this land.
- [19:42]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
And what happens in California is reflecting a worldwide movement, a secularization. First of all, we're moving into the mercantile era as people are realizing that making money can be quite a cause in their lives. And so that is reflected in the way that Mexico is operating in California. And so that parting ways with the Franciscan missions and that sort of lifestyle is replaced by this trade and these merchants and so forth. That's happening. And this is sort of going hand in hand with the spreading west, the manifest Destiny cause of America. So there's Americans coming in as well. This is all becoming quite a brew, isn't it?
- [20:17]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Well, it is. And the American settlers, that is settlers and Colonists who came from the east and the Midwest, their numbers grew so great and so quickly that they became a real concern for the Mexican California. And we began to see conflicts between the Mexicans and the Americans. As the American settlers began to think of themselves as an outpost of the United States of America, they began to agitate for military assistance and then ultimately for annexation by the federal government and then statehood.
- [20:51]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
Yeah, there's a lot of commonality between what's happening in California and what happened in Texas, isn't there? There's a lot of things in, in common.
- [20:58]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
That's exactly right. And the Mexican authorities after the annexation of Texas, they saw the incursion of settlers from the east of the United States as sort of an advanced vanguard to do what happened in Texas to California. And that's why there was so much concern when the level of colonialization began to grow and settlers began to come in great numbers.
- [21:24]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
It's an incredible theme to follow when you realize, I mean, we take it for granted now, California and Texas being part of the United States. But to look at Manifest Destiny through the lens of Mexican California is a fascinating shift and really, you know, reorients you as to how this, this continent was Americanized as we're so used to it now. And all this sort of happens in the early tens and twenties of the 1800s. When we come back, we'll talk about that American chapter of California.
- [22:02]
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- [23:02]
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- [23:46]
After Dark Myths Podcast Hosts (Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney)
Summer is finally here. But for those of you just like me who are counting down the days until the leaves turn golden, the nights start drawing in, and it's finally acceptable to spend a whole weekend binge watching true crime in your PJs. After dark myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal can transport you there right now, twice a week, every week. Tudor Murder, Ancient Ghosts, Victorian Mysteries. Our podcast has you covered. I'm Maddy Pelling. And I'm Anthony Delaney. And we are friends and historians who love to find out about the darker side of history. Join us on the scaffold for Anne Boleyn's final moments. Step inside Tutankhamun's tomb, which is apparently cursed. Watch a jury deliberate the fate of the last three women to be hanged for witchcraft in England. Find us every Monday and Thursday wherever you get your podcasts. And now on YouTube, After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal is created by the award winning network history hit.
- [24:53]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
So, Michael, the American incursion, we'll call it, of Mexican California really begins in, as I said, before 1810s, into the 20s. And a lot of that has to do with a theme we're even used to today, advanced settlements, illegal settlements, perhaps, people coming in and setting up and then making like they're at home.
- [25:12]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
That's right. And the more American settlers ended up in California, the more they agitated for the annexation and they weren't concerned about how that would happen. If it took military action, that was fine with them. They would have, I think, preferred, or at least the real incumbent settlers would have preferred for it to happen peaceably. President Polk, who came into office basically around this period, he wanted to annex California and he had a plan to do it peacefully. And as we know, that didn't really happen the way he anticipated. We ended up with the Mexican War, and it was the Mexican War that really resulted in the annexation of California.
- [25:55]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
And that's the 1840s. So we're talking about a 20 year period of this settlement and various events that reflect this increasing Americanization that happens which is largely driven by commercial interest. And also we need to really nail down what has happened with these lands because that's really what defines the whole shift. You had these mission lands that were originally obviously Spanish, those are commercialized and begin to get granted, ranches become part of life, and then those break down and we end up in a classic real estate situation, don't we?
- [26:27]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Well, that's right. And you know, an interesting fact is that the Mexican land grants, these were land grants basically to settlers, became a factor in the development of California for close to 60, 70 years. And I think we still see Mexican land grants being brought into way in real estate transactions in California, even somewhat to this day. But it was noticed by observers from the United States that the system of Mexican land grants was basically going to interfere with the American development of California. Horace Greeley wrote extensively about this and he said that you have to do something about these Mexican land grants because they are obstacles to the development of this new territory.
- [27:14]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
By 1843, California's population includes fewer than 100,000 native people. As you mentioned, that has dropped down for all those usual reasons. Around 14,000 other permanent residents, approximately 2,500 foreigners, non Hispanic white people. Of those about 2,000 had immigrated from the United States by 1840. So you don't need to remember the numbers, just know that. But prior to the Mexican American War, there's a whole lot of different people who are living in California. And that has a lot to do with the push for war. We've planted ourselves there. Back in Washington, those under the Polk administration are saying, geez, this is already happening. Why don't we just tip this over and that essentially becomes the movement that enables the Mexican American War to happen, Right?
- [28:04]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Well, that's right. And I think one of the telling episodes of this period is the so called Bear Flag Revolt. And the Bear Flag revolt was basically a gang of settlers who had started out centered around what is now Sacramento and what was then Sutter's Fort. Johann Sutter had established it. And this group of settlers decided that they wanted to establish the California Republic. And what they were going to do was they were going to ride about 50 miles west to Sonoma where as far as they knew there was a garrison of Mexican soldiers and they were basically going to invade the garrison and take it over and then basically declare the California Republic. As it happened, they did that. They got to Sonoma. And what they discovered in Sonoma was that it was such a quiet place that the Comandante had sent the garrison home Two years earlier. So there was basically nobody to fight. But anyway, they arrived, they placed the Comandante in custody. The Comandante was there with a small group of family members and some other Mexican settlers. And then the invaders basically painted a flag basically on a piece of linen. They painted what they said was a grizzly bear. They put a red star on it and the words California Republic. And they ran it up the flagpole and the square and that flag, the bear flag as it was known. The features of that flag are still features of the California state flag, although they've been dressed up and they've been modernized and they've been basically redesigned. And that's the flag that we've got. But it started out as this sort of shred of a flag in 1846.
- [29:54]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
And you can have a nice dinner a half a block away from that very building in Sonoma today. It's all right there. The Mexican American War. Of course we have covered this and we're not going to go into detail here. There's an episode of American history hit which delves deeply into this. It's episode 130. Encourage you to listen to it. President James K. Polk Lies Warmongering and the Myth of Success. And that title suggests why we're not gonna talk about it. Cause there's so much that happens in that short period of time that is the reason that we have another third of this country after it's over, which is by 1848 in California. How much of the action of that war happens there? Little or none. Right?
- [30:36]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Well, there wasn't much of it for the most part. When the American forces were battling Mexican forces, the American forces just won handily. They outmanned the Mexican. There were one or two places where the Mexicans actually prevailed. There was the so called Battle of San Pasqual, which is down around present day San Diego, in which the American soldiers had to be rescued by the American Navy, which had to send basically troops up there to relieve and basically besieged group of American military. But yeah, the Mexican War, it was clear that the United States was going to prevail as it did. And this ended in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which basically annexed Spanish west of North America to the United States.
- [31:27]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
I always wonder about the Gold rush and how strangely coincidental it was with the Mexican American War. It happens of course in 1848 or 1849 more famously. But the gold is discovered in 1848. How aware were the Americans of gold's, you know, availability in California?
- [31:46]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Some of the Americans were aware that There was some gold, but they didn't find it until James Marshall found it at a place known as Sutter's Mill. And this was a place not far from Sutter's Fort, where Sutter basically wanted to establish a grain mill and a lumber mill. And he thought that was going to make his fortune. Marshall was out there building the mill and in a sluice way one morning he saw a glint in the water, picked it up and realized it was gold and then brought it to Sutter and said, you know, I have this great discovery. The gold rift started among Californians in 1848 and then it spread nationwide and in fact globally in 1849 when President Polk announced to the world that gold had been found in California.
- [32:36]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
Whoops. And that jolts the place. By 1860, you know, just before the Civil War, California's population has reached 308,000 people, nearly triple what it was in 1847. You can't overstate the effect of the Gold Rush on the western United States, really, but certainly California, it was transformative.
- [32:55]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
And in my book I talk about how you can really divide California history and its period into the pre Gold Rush and the post Gold rush periods.
- [33:04]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
A big part of that is how much gold was found, which is an extraordinary, not only that, but also silver. I mean, I mean it's an outrageous wealth that is tapped into as a result of that rush. And therefore, of course, we're going to make it a state, claim this place and make it official. Let's talk about statehood and how California was made official at this point. August 1848, the treaty ending the war transfers California to the US but it leaves governance unclear. Talk to me about the nitty gritty of how they created a state out of this.
- [33:36]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
The settlers, the American settlers in California in this period really felt themselves neglected. They had to pay duties on goods that they imported, but they didn't have any voice in Washington, so they really started agitating. And there was this sequence of military governors who were basically appointed by the federal government who ran California. And finally there was one of these governors who said, you know, if we don't do anything, we're going to have so many settlers here that are discontented that they may declare themselves an independent country, so we better do something. And he basically ordered on his own authority, and it may have been questionable authority. A constitutional convention for California. And with delegates to this convention, they included settlers, they included native Mexican born Spaniards and even some representatives of the tribes. They basically went out and they wrote a constitution, a state constitution in 1849, even though California was not a state. And they then established a state legislature, even though California was not a state. The major goal of the state legislature was to appoint senators who could go to Washington and agitate for statehood. And that's exactly what happened.
- [34:56]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
The extraordinary fact is that even then, it's huge. You know, California is over 800 miles long. Back in those days, I mean, with transport and all the rest of it, it's impossible, I would think, to manage a landmass that large. And yet they bite it all off and try.
- [35:14]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Although during the Constitutional Convention there was a long debate over where should the boundaries of the state of California be? And there was concern that if the boundaries encompass too large a territory, then there would be real problems over slavery policies. So they pared it back in order to reduce the prospects that the debate over slavery in Washington would interfere with their desire for statehood. And they mapped out territory that's exactly the territory that we see today, the state of California. Now, at that point, California was really Northern California. It was mostly the Bay area and some of the coastal zone coming down toward past Monterey and towards Santa Barbara. But there wasn't much of Southern California that had a voice in what was going on.
- [36:07]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
Well, there was no water. Why would you want to live there? That was the.
- [36:10]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Exactly. Water policy then as now, is one of the great conflicts of California politics and always has been and probably will be, at least for decades to come.
- [36:31]
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- [38:20]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
That ban of slavery was fateful. Fall of 1849. Those delegates that are meeting in Monterey right during that constitutional convention of sorts is when they choose to do that. How were they on that side of it? What were the forces at work that were calling that shot?
- [38:35]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Well, it's well known that in that first constitution, slavery was banned. That's often misinterpreted as basically a moral position. In fact, slavery was banned because the gold prospectors and the whole gold economy had a lot of delegates to their constitutional convention. And they were concerned that 49ers, or Argonauts as they were known then, would come into the gold zone with slaves and this would give them basically a leg up on prospecting and extracting gold from the landscape. So at the same time that the Constitutional convention banned slavery, it also banned the import of free men into California. And obviously it banned the import of slaves. It was an economic choice that was being articulated.
- [39:28]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
September 9, 1850, President Millard Fillmore grants California statehood. This creates a whole new kind of governance, obviously, which is lucky because there's a lot of lawlessness out there at that time. And San Francisco has a strong desire to control this. They create what's called a vigilance committee. And thus we begin the prison system in California, I suppose, right?
- [39:49]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Well, sure. The committee of vigilance, as it was known, basically was the creation of business interests in San Francisco. And their concern was that Post Goldworth San Francisco was a violent place and essentially a lawless place. And to the extent there was law enforcement, it was incredibly corrupt. So the business interests basically created their own rump law enforcement group. And this was the vigilance committee. They went out there, they basically cleared the ruffians out. They imprisoned wrongdoers offshore in ships and then deported them as far as they could. They cleaned up San Francisco pretty well, although there had to be a second committee of vigilance down the line and then a third committee even further than that just to maintain peace and order in the Bay Area, which was the center of California at the time.
- [40:45]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
The next gold rush really is the railroad. When the railroad comes to California, you begin to see real estate getting carved up like crazy. And that is the beginning of large scale farming. The Central Valley. It is also eventually the beginning of Southern California because they extend this railroad down from San Francisco towards what becomes Los Angeles, only possible because of that railroad. It's a huge transformation that has everything about the modern world perfectly teed up, you know, for the time of that development. It really is that kind of alignment, isn't it? The stars are aligned.
- [41:20]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Well, that's very well put. Basically the impetus for the railroad started around the time of the Civil War because the Union was concerned that California was so distant from the governing center of the United States, they were afraid that it might well join up with the Confederacy and that would be a big problem. And that was why the first laws that were passed to essentially subsidize the construction of a transcontinental railroad were passed under Lincoln. Now at the same time, civic and business leaders of California, and once again, we're still talking about San Francisco, they understood that for further development, to basically meet their ambitions to turn San Francisco into a world class city, it needed access to markets in the Midwest and the East. And the only way to get that access was through a railroad. So they were agitating for the construction of a railroad just as the federal government was showing an interest in the construction of the railroad. And that's why we finally got the transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific, which ran from Omaha to the Rockies. And then the Central Pacific, which ran not from the Pacific coast but from Sacramento and it ran east. And those two lines met at Promontory Summit, Utah in 1869. And that was the first transcontinental railroad and that was a great achievement. In San Francisco, the driving of the golden spike was greeted with the church bells, the city hall bells range. The news wire services had sent telegraphers up to Promontory so that they could deliver real time notification that the golden spike had been driven and that we now had a single line running from the Mississippi all the way to California.
- [43:11]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
Yeah, it's so interesting. At the same time you have the advent of professional tourism, you know, like this idea that you should go somewhere comes with both the steamboat earlier back east, but also the railroad. And California is just the perfect, glorious destination for so much of this. And you end up with these gigantic hotels that are built and the terminus of so many of these railroads are tourist destinations. It plants the seeds for everything that comes afterwards. It's extraordinary. It amazes me, as a big fan of California myself, how much we see the microcosm of America within those state borders. That's what's so incredible about the history of the state and the economy of it, really. It has everything there.
- [43:56]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Right. Well, we're flashing forward a little bit, but as I wrote in my book, basically, California today is seen by the right wing, by Republicans, as an outlier, you know, a wild liberal place. But the fact of the matter is that today one out of eight Americans lives in California. And the way I put it is California really is America. And to understand America, you really need to understand California. And if you want to understand California, it helps to understand America. This is very much a part of the nation and a driver of politics and economics nationwide.
- [44:37]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
The undeniable potency of that state, economically, politically, everything about it necessitates the pushback against it by anyone who is opposed to values of people that are living there. And the reality of the place, really, that it is such a cultural mix. But that's what's so important to recognize. And we can wrap this up on this note, I think, is the diversity was always there. The sense of California was always there after the Mexicans and traded over to the Americans. What we have today was basically already in the cards for all the obvious reasons and less obvious. But it's all in your book, Golden State the Making of California, written by our guest today, Michael Hiltzig, who is a very, very accomplished journalist and author. So thank you very much, Michael. You're making me want to go back to California and visit my sisters who were very smart and moved there.
- [45:26]
Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
Right. Well, thanks for having me. This has been great fun and a great.
- [45:35]
Don (Host of American History Hit)
Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit as you've made it this far, why not like and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit A podcast from history. Hit.
- [45:53]
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Michael Hiltzik (Guest, Journalist and Author)
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