Preface: Yerba Buena.

1) Yerba Buena

Before the Spanish arrived, the San Francisco Peninsula was home to the Ohlone. "Ohlone" is the collective name used today for the many Indigenous groups who lived between San Francisco Bay and Monterey Bay. The word comes from one of those groups, the Oljon (or Olhone), a tribelet on the San Mateo coast. The Spanish called the people of this coast costeños, "coast dwellers," which English-language scholars turned into "Costanoan." In the late twentieth century, descendants came to prefer "Ohlone" as a matter of self-definition, and scholars followed.

The Ohlone were never a single tribe. They lived in a network of some fifty to sixty independent tribelets, each with its own territory, its own leader, and often its own dialect. A small tribelet numbered a few dozen people, a large one several hundred. Most held a few permanent villages and a number of seasonal camps.

Each tribelet was led by a chief, who could be a man or a woman. The chief was less a ruler than a coordinator and distributor of resources. Authority rested on three things: lineage, since the office was often inherited; wealth, measured mainly in shell beads and access to hunting and gathering grounds; and prestige, earned by settling disputes and leading ceremonies. The chief controlled the communal stores of acorns and dried fish and decided how they were shared. Chiefs presided over weddings, funerals, and seasonal rituals, and represented the tribelet in trade, alliances, and marriage negotiations with its neighbors. Without any central government, this arrangement kept the peace across the region and kept the use of land in balance.

Nor did the Ohlone speak one language. Drawing on the work of the linguist Catherine Callaghan and the historian Randall Milliken, scholars generally divide Ohlone into eight related languages, each tied to a region. Karkin was spoken along the Carquinez Strait, around present-day Martinez and Benicia. Chochenyo belonged to the East Bay, from Oakland and Berkeley south to Fremont; it is the language the Muwekma Ohlone are working to revive today. Ramaytush was spoken on the San Francisco Peninsula, whose people were among the first drawn into Mission Dolores. Tamyen was the language of the Santa Clara Valley, around San José and Mission Santa Clara. Awaswas was spoken in the Santa Cruz Mountains and along the Santa Cruz coast. Mutsun belonged to the country around Gilroy, Hollister, and San Juan Bautista, and it is the best documented of the eight; it stands at the center of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band's revival work. Rumsen was spoken around Monterey and Carmel, where Spanish contact came early, with the founding of Mission San Carlos in 1770. Chalon was spoken in the Salinas Valley, near Mission Soledad.

This was typical of Indigenous California: many languages, deeply local societies, and borders drawn by ecology. A tribelet's territory ran from a few square miles to a few dozen, usually bounded by rivers, ridgelines, or shoreline. Each tended to include oak woodland, wetland, grassland, and streams, so that food could be found year-round: acorns, fish, berries, and the deer that followed their seasonal routes. Neighbors visited one another, but entering another group's land meant observing protocol, through ceremony or gifts. The Yelamu of the northern San Francisco Peninsula fished the ocean and the bay. The Tuibun lived in the freshwater marshes of the East Bay shore, around today's Coyote Hills near Fremont. Groups like these traded and intermarried across the bay, but none could cross into another's land at will.

Trade and marriage tied the tribelets together. Shell beads, feather ornaments, salt, chert, and stone mortars moved from group to group, and obsidian from as far as the Sierra Nevada and beyond reached the Bay Area. People commonly married outside their own tribelet. This exogamy kept languages and customs circulating across the region, and each marriage carried economic obligations: gifts of food and crafts, and visits back and forth at festival time. Neighboring tribelets also held seasonal ceremonies together, including acorn harvest gatherings, healing rites, and dances.

The result was a decentralized, federated society: no empire and no common language, yet closely coordinated in its ecological and spiritual life. Many Ohlone descendants in the Bay Area today still identify with particular groups. The Muwekma Ohlone trace their roots to Chochenyo speakers and the Amah Mutsun to Mutsun speakers, while the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation brings together Rumsen Ohlone and Esselen descendants, the Esselen being a neighboring people with a language of their own. These communities are reconstructing their languages from mission-era manuscripts and linguistic records, forming tribal councils and education programs, reviving ceremonial dance, and pressing for land return and the protection of shellmounds in urban planning.

The Spanish "Discovery"

At the end of the fifteenth century, the two Iberian sea powers divided the "New World" between them. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) split the globe and gave Spain most of the Americas. Spain's early aims were the gold and silver of Mexico and Peru and a Pacific trade route linking its American colonies to the Philippines. California was never the destination. It was an unknown northern edge.

The name itself came from fiction. Around 1510, the Spanish writer Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo published Las sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián), a romance about an island called California, rich in gold and ruled by a warrior queen named Calafia. When Spanish expeditions reached Baja California in the 1530s, they took it for an island, and the name stuck. Later voyages showed it was a peninsula, but the island reappeared on European maps in the seventeenth century and lingered there until the mid-eighteenth.

In the 1530s, Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, sent expeditions to the northwest and led one himself. They reached Baja California, but a settlement at La Paz failed in the face of drought, scarce water, and harsh terrain. In 1542, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed up the coast of Alta California, the first European to do so. Sixty years later, in 1602, Sebastián Vizcaíno sailed north from Acapulco and charted the coast in far greater detail, naming San Diego, Santa Barbara, Carmel, and Monterey, the last in honor of the viceroy of New Spain, the Count of Monterrey. Vizcaíno praised Monterey Bay as a safe anchorage and recommended settling it. No one acted on his advice for more than a century and a half.

By the mid-eighteenth century, Spain saw its North American empire under threat. Russian fur traders were moving along the Pacific coast from Alaska, and Britain was extending its reach across the continent. Spain feared that if it did not occupy Alta California, another power would take the Pacific coast. Its answer was to hold the land chiefly with missionaries, backed by a thin line of soldiers. This was the origin of the California mission system.

Spain's formal arrival came in 1769. The governor, Gaspar de Portolá, and the Franciscan friar Junípero Serra led an expedition north from Baja California by land and sea, a few hundred people in all: soldiers, Christian Indians from the Baja missions, herders, and settlers. They founded outposts and churches as they went.

Where the Spanish built missions, they tried to control villages by drawing in their chiefs. Missionaries invited chiefs to be baptized and given Christian names, and many accepted under pressure. Baptism brought a chief's people into the mission and, in Spanish eyes, placed their land under the Church. Traditional leadership collapsed, and a society organized by territory gave way to the hierarchy of the mission. The first Native person baptized at Mission Dolores was Chamis, a twenty-year-old Yelamu man of standing, renamed Francisco Moraga. His family's marriages had helped make peace between the Yelamu and their neighbors. Within a generation, disease and the conditions of mission life had killed most of the peninsula's Native people; by 1800, roughly eight in ten were gone.

The missions existed to turn Indigenous people into Catholics and into a labor force. Tens of thousands of Ohlone, Tongva, Chumash, and others were drawn or forced into them, baptized, renamed, and forbidden to speak their own languages. They farmed, herded, and built by day and were confined within mission walls at night. Disease, malnutrition, and punishment drove death rates extremely high. For Indigenous people, the missions meant cultural and demographic catastrophe. For Spain, they stood for civilization and order.

In 1776, the year of American independence, the Spanish founded their sixth California mission on the San Francisco Peninsula: Mission San Francisco de Asís, known as Mission Dolores. That same year they built the Presidio, a fort at the northern tip of the peninsula, to guard against the British and the Russians. The settlement that grew up beside the cove in the 1830s, under Mexican rule, was called Yerba Buena, "good herb," after a wild mint that grew on the hills. The United States seized it in 1846, and in 1847 it was renamed San Francisco. Then came the Gold Rush. In early 1848 the town had fewer than a thousand people. By the end of 1849 it had about 25,000 and had become an international port. Sailing ships, merchants, brothels, gambling halls, and theaters crowded the waterfront. From the start, the city carried an air of adventure, disorder, wildness, and openness.

2) The Gold Rush

The story starts simply. On January 24, 1848, at Coloma on the South Fork of the American River, the carpenter James W. Marshall was building a sawmill for the landowner John Sutter when he spotted flakes of gold in the tailrace. Sutter wanted it kept quiet. He planned to build a business in farming and lumber and did not want his land overrun by gold seekers. The news got out anyway, first by word of mouth. The first diggers were locals: mill hands, Mexicans, and Hawaiians. As newspapers and merchant ships carried the story, San Francisco boiled over. Merchants, sailors, and adventurers walked off their jobs and headed inland to dig.

Nine days after Marshall's discovery, California changed countries. To see how, we have to go back to Texas.

The Backdrop: Texas

When Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, it inherited a vast northern territory that included Texas. Texas was thinly settled, mostly by Native peoples and a few Hispanic ranchers. To develop the frontier, the Mexican government in the 1820s let American settlers in, on condition that they become Catholic and obey Mexican law. Thousands of Anglo settlers came, bringing the English language, Protestantism, and slavery. By 1830 they outnumbered the Mexican residents.

Stephen F. Austin (1793–1836) led the way. Born in Virginia, he took over a colonization grant his father had received just before Mexican independence, had it confirmed by the new government, and in the early 1820s brought in the first three hundred families of American settlers. Known as the "Old Three Hundred," they became the earliest and most influential Anglo community in Texas. Austin is remembered as the "Father of Texas," and the state capital bears his name.

In 1829 Mexico abolished slavery, angering settlers who relied on enslaved labor to grow cotton. In 1830 it barred further American immigration into Texas. Tensions rose. Austin at first sought more autonomy for Texas within Mexico, not independence. He went to Mexico City in 1833 to press the case and was imprisoned for more than a year. By the time he was released, he had come around to independence.

The man in power in Mexico City was Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794–1876), among the most controversial figures in Mexican history. He began his career as a royalist officer fighting for Spain, switched sides in 1821, and became a national hero in 1829 by defeating a Spanish attempt to retake Mexico at Tampico. He held the presidency on and off, by most counts eleven times. In 1835 he moved to centralize power and abolish regional autonomy, provoking resistance from Anglo settlers and from Mexican-born Texans, the Tejanos, alike. That fall, armed rebellion broke out.

Santa Anna led an army north himself. On March 2, 1836, delegates declared Texas independent. Four days later his troops stormed the Alamo in San Antonio and killed nearly all of its roughly two hundred defenders; "Remember the Alamo!" became the Texans' battle cry. Weeks later at Goliad, on Santa Anna's orders, some four hundred Texan soldiers who had surrendered were executed. On April 21, at San Jacinto, Sam Houston's army caught Santa Anna's forces off guard and routed them in about eighteen minutes. Santa Anna was captured the next day and forced to sign treaties ending the fighting.

Houston (1793–1863), also born in Virginia, had fought in the War of 1812 and moved to Texas in 1832, where he quickly rose to command its army. He served twice as president of the Republic of Texas and, after annexation, as a U.S. senator and then governor. In 1861 he refused to swear loyalty to the Confederacy and was forced out of office. The city of Houston is named for him.

The Republic of Texas modeled its constitution closely on that of the United States, slavery included. The United States recognized Texas in 1837, but annexation stalled over the balance between slave and free states. Mexico never recognized Texas independence, and when the United States annexed Texas in 1845, the conflict came to a head. The United States claimed the border was the Rio Grande; Mexico insisted it was the Nueces River, farther north. Americans were in the grip of Manifest Destiny, the belief that the nation was destined to stretch to the Pacific, and Washington wanted not only Texas but California and New Mexico.

The Mexican-American War

In 1846, President James K. Polk sent troops into the disputed land along the Rio Grande, where they clashed with Mexican forces. Congress declared war in May. American forces soon held the key points in California and New Mexico. In March 1847 they landed at Veracruz and marched on Mexico City, which fell in September. Santa Anna, back in power, led Mexico's defense and lost again. Polk's envoy, Nicholas Trist, was recalled in the middle of negotiations but refused to leave and kept talking until he had a treaty.

It was signed on February 2, 1848, at Guadalupe Hidalgo, just outside Mexico City. Mexico accepted the loss of Texas, with the border at the Rio Grande, and ceded California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, about half of New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. The United States paid $15 million and took over about $3.25 million in claims that American citizens held against Mexico. The country grew by nearly a third and gained a Pacific coast. Counting Texas, Mexico lost about half its territory, a trauma that shaped its politics for generations.

Who Was Already There

Because California had been Mexican, Mexicans were there when the gold appeared: rancheros, laborers, and miners. They were among the first to hear the news and the first to dig. Mexico had centuries of gold and silver mining behind it, in places like Zacatecas and Guanajuato, and many Mexican miners were far more skilled than the farmers and carpenters arriving from the eastern United States. Once the news reached Mexico, miners and merchants poured north, especially from Sonora. Sonoran miners founded the gold-country town that still bears the name Sonora, in Tuolumne County.

Hawaiians were there too. The Kingdom of Hawaii, then independent, was a waystation on the Pacific routes between North America and Asia, and many Hawaiians worked as sailors and laborers on whalers, merchant ships, and fur-trading vessels, so they reached California's ports with the ships. When the news reached Honolulu, some sailors jumped ship; others sailed to San Francisco and headed for the diggings on arrival. Early mining records often list "Kanakas," as Hawaiians were called, as a separate group.

In 1849 the news reached the eastern United States and the rest of the world, and people came by the tens of thousands. They became known as the Forty-Niners. Some went overland from Missouri on the Oregon and California Trails. Others went by sea, around Cape Horn, or by ship to Panama, across the isthmus, and north on another ship. Alongside the Americans came Chinese, Chileans, Peruvians, Mexicans, Australians, and Europeans. By 1852 about 20,000 Chinese had arrived, roughly a tenth of California's population.

In a few years San Francisco grew from a small port into the capital of the Gold Rush, and California became one of the places on earth where people were moving in the greatest numbers. The diggings had little law. Robbery, violence, and racial discrimination were everywhere, and Chinese, Latin American, and Native people were routinely driven off. With its population surging, California became the thirty-first state in 1850. The easy surface gold ran out quickly, and mining shifted to deep shafts and machinery that demanded capital and technical skill. Ordinary miners could not keep up, and many turned to farming, trade, or railroad work. Many Chinese, shut out of the mines, opened laundries, restaurants, and stores, laying the economic foundation of their community.

3) The Chinese

Word of the gold reached the East Coast slowly and was widely doubted. In the summer of 1848, Colonel Richard B. Mason, the military governor of California, toured the diggings and wrote a detailed report confirming the finds. An army lieutenant, Lucien Loeser, carried the report east along with a tea caddy holding about 230 ounces of gold. On December 5, 1848, President Polk told Congress that "the accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service." After that, no one doubted. In 1848 California's non-Native population was under 15,000. In 1849 alone some 90,000 people arrived, and by 1852 the population had passed 250,000.

How the Mining Changed

In the first years, 1848 and 1849, the tools were simple and almost anyone could use them. The gold pan was a shallow iron or tin pan swirled in a stream until sand and gravel washed away and the heavy flakes stayed behind. It cost almost nothing. The rocker, or cradle, named for its shape, was already in use in 1848: a wooden box that a miner rocked while pouring in water and gravel, with cleats and a cloth at the bottom to catch the gold. It could process far more gravel than a pan. The gold lay in shallow river deposits and was easy to find. Farmers, cooks, and tailors dropped everything to dig. It was the most romantic and open stage of the Gold Rush, when anyone might strike it rich.

Overwork exhausted the easy deposits quickly. From about 1850, miners turned to the long tom and then the sluice box, long wooden troughs fed by a steady stream of water; miners shoveled in gravel, and riffles along the bottom caught the gold. This took a team. Crews built wooden flumes to bring water from higher ground, and dozens of men might work a single claim, moving gravel by wheelbarrow. Mining was beginning to industrialize. Claim systems emerged under rules set by local mining districts, and whoever first worked a spot held the right to it. Competition sharpened and conflict became constant, and foreign miners, especially Mexicans, Chileans, and later the Chinese, were forced out. By the early 1850s, a man working alone could barely get by.

In 1853 hydraulic mining arrived. High-pressure water cannons called monitors blasted apart whole hillsides and washed the debris through long sluices to separate the gold. It was enormously productive and enormously expensive, requiring dams, ditches, flumes, and pipe. Hard-rock mining, which followed gold-bearing quartz veins underground, needed blasting powder, timbering, and hoisting machinery, and cost even more. Companies and investors bought up large stretches of mining land, and independent miners became wage laborers. Many Forty-Niners went home broke. Foreign miners, the Chinese above all, could not compete with capital and moved into service work: cooking, laundry, tailoring. Hydraulic mining choked rivers with silt and buried farmland downstream, damage serious enough that a federal court effectively shut it down in 1884. By around 1855 the fever had broken. What began as a dream open to everyone had become an industry run by capital.

The mining country had little law. Miners carrying gold dust back to town were often robbed on the road. Vigilante justice was common, and a theft or a debt dispute could end in a lynching. Ethnic conflict was bitter. White American miners used mining camp meetings to drive out Chinese and Mexican miners, and the state backed them with law. The Foreign Miners' Tax of 1850 charged $20 a month, a heavy sum at the time, and exempted white miners who could become citizens; in practice it fell mainly on Mexican and South American miners, since few Chinese had yet arrived. So many foreign miners left rather than pay that the tax damaged the mining economy. It was repealed in 1851, and in 1852 a new tax of $3 a month, later raised, was aimed squarely at the Chinese.

The Chinese Immigrant Experience

Most of the first Chinese who came for gold were from the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong: from the four counties of Siyi (Sze Yup), namely Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui, and Enping; from the three counties of Sanyi (Sam Yup), namely Nanhai, Panyu, and Shunde; and from Xiangshan, today's Zhongshan. After the First Opium War (1839–1842), southern China's economy was in distress. Opium spread, taxes were heavy, and the land could not support the population. The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) brought war and upheaval on top of that. In the villages the legend of Gold Mountain took hold, and families spent everything they had to send a son across the Pacific.

To the Chinese of that time, San Francisco was Gold Mountain, Gam Saan (金山). After gold was found in Victoria, Australia, in 1851 and many Cantonese went there as well, Melbourne became the New Gold Mountain (新金山), and San Francisco became the Old Gold Mountain, Jiu Jin Shan (旧金山), the Chinese name the city still carries.

Most sailed from Hong Kong to San Francisco, usually on American or British ships. The crossing took two months or more. Disease, storms, and hunger were common, and some did not survive it. A ticket cost several years of a farmer's savings. Many traveled on the credit-ticket system: a merchant or broker advanced the fare, and the migrant repaid it out of his wages in California. This was debt, sometimes crushing debt, but it was distinct from the coolie trade that shipped contract laborers to Cuba and Peru on far more coercive terms. Almost all the migrants were men. Qing law formally forbade emigration, custom kept wives at home to care for their husbands' parents, and American law, above all the Page Act of 1875, later kept Chinese women out. For decades the Chinese community was overwhelmingly male.

San Francisco was the first stop. Newcomers usually stayed in Chinatown and then went to the mines through the district associations, the huiguan (会馆), organized by home county: the Ning Yeung Association for people from Taishan, the Kong Chow Association for people from Xinhui, and others. The associations provided lodging, loans, work, and protection. Most Chinese miners went to the Sierra Nevada foothills and the rivers of the Sacramento basin. Many avoided the rich claims that white miners fought over and worked instead the streams and tailings whites had abandoned, pulling gold out of ground others had given up on through patience and collective labor. They kept their costs low, lived frugally, and endured harsh conditions. Exclusion and violence drove many out of the mines and into towns and cities. There they opened laundries, a trade they came to dominate; restaurants serving stir-fries and pastries, first to Chinese customers and increasingly to whites; and tailor shops and grocery stores supplying the mining camps and towns. In leaving the mines for the urban economy, they laid the economic foundation of Chinatown. ⛰️