California: A History by Kevin Starr

Preface: A Nation-State

Where did it come from – this nation state, this world commonwealth, this California? How did an American state, one in fifty, rise to such global stature, with its $1.5 trillion economy making it, as of 2005, the fifth-ranked economy on the planet?  Never before in human history, it could be argued, had such a diverse population assembled itself so rapidly under one political system. By 2004, the Los Angeles Unified School District alone was reporting some ninety-two languages in use in its student population. The city itself, meanwhile, had become the second largest Mexican city on the planet and a ranking Korean, Iranian, Armenian, and Ethiopian metropolis. With a population of thirty-six million in 2005, California contained 12.5 percent of the population of the United States as of Census 2000. Metropolitan Los Angeles was the second largest urban region in the nation, the San Francisco Bay Area the fourth. If the five-county Los Angeles metropolitan region alone were a separate state, its 20.6 million people would make it the fourth largest state in the country.

Where had these people come from? And why were they here? What forces of war and peace, of economics, what shifts of demography and social aspiration had caused the population of California to shoot up from seven million in 1940, to seventeen million in 1962 (when California surpassed New York as the most populous state in the nation), to nineteen million by the mid-1960s when immigration laws were reformed, allowing for new migration from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East? Sponsored by Spain and Mexico in its colonial and early frontier eras, California – with 32.4 percent of its population Latino as of 2000 – was in the process of becoming the most important center of Mexican culture and society outside Mexico itself. Facing the Asia-Pacific Basin, California was likewise becoming an epicenter of Asian American civilization, with nearly 11 percent of its population of Asian origin and San Francisco on the verge of becoming the first prominent American city with an Asian American majority.

Here was an American state that by the twenty-first century had become a world force in terms of people, trade and commerce, tourism and technology, and, more subtly, a state possessed of a certain glamor, a magic even, rich with the possibilities of a better life. Here was a crossroads commonwealth. By the millennium, California was exporting some $1.7 billion in goods worldwide – mostly to Mexico, Japan, Canada, Taiwan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and mainland China, its leading trading partners (in that order), but also to twenty-six other ranking trading partners as well. The Port of Los Angeles-Long Beach on San Pedro Bay was the busiest port in the nation and one of the ranking ports of the w. orld. Five million overseas visitors were pouring into California each year by the late 1990s, and the travel and tourism economy of the state was generating more than $75 billion annually from domestic and international travelers and employing more than a million Californians before the terrorist attack of 9/11. What did the nonbusiness traveler come to see? Disneyland in Anaheim, first of all, and Universal Studios in Hollywood, followed by an array of amusement parks and outdoor attractions including the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Yosemite National Park. These dual attractions – the entertainment industry and natural beauty – virtually define the state.  In the early twentieth century, California had won the contest over the best site for the emergent motion picture industry. And this in turn established a matrix for the development of other new entertainment media – radio, records, television, video, CDs, DVDs – that were to follow. The main reason California was attracting so many visitors, foreign and domestic, was that California had long since been presenting itself to them via the various entertainment media as a land of enchantment and dreams. Much of the world tended to perceive the United States itself as, somehow, California, thanks to television programs such as Baywatch, which broadcast to millions a Day-Glo version of life on the sunny beaches of the Golden State.

At times, California seemed imprisoned in a myth of itself as an enchanted and transformed place: a myth that, in one way or another, had its origins in the Spanish colonial era. The very acceleration of California into an American commonwealth had been the result of a gold rush, with all that such beginnings implied for the perception of California as a place where human beings might break through the constraints of day-to-day life and come into possession of something immeasurable better. Such a utopian expectation also brought with it, when things did not go well – when California was wracked by earthquake, fire, and flood; when its prisons filled to overflowing; when it politics grew dysfunctional; or merely when Californians experienced the inevitable human tragedies, shock and setbacks they had come to California to escape – the common complaint that California had been hyped beyond recognition: that for all its media-driven pretenses to glitz and glamour, California was, all things considered, just another American place, and sometimes even worse than that. 

Still, it had to be admitted – even in bad times – that California noir, as disappointing as it might be, could not negate the cumulative achievement of California as a fused instance of American and global cultures. Here, among other things, nature had been supplemented and heroically rearranged so as to make possible a population of thirty-six million – an estimated fifty-five million by 2040 – which natural conditions alone could never have supported. Not since ancient Rome or the creation of Holland had any society comparably subdued, appropriated, and rearranged its water resources. Or used this water-related infrastructure, including hydroelectricity, to establish – again, so swiftly – the foundations for a mass society at once agricultural and industrialized. Or created such extensive cities and suburbs in such short order.  Or linked these built environments in an equally rapid time with highways, freeways, and bridges of comparable magnitude.

California emerged as a society with a special capacity for technology. In the nineteenth century, the locally invented Pelton turbine increased water-driven power sixfold. Pioneered in California by the heavier-than-air glider flights of John Montgomery in 1883, aviation was localized in California a few short years after Kitty Hawk, and the great names of California aviation – Lockheed, Curtis, Douglas, Northrop – became synonymous with the very planes they designed and built. In the 1930s and early 1940s, California played more than its part in the release of atomic energy. In what later would be designated the Silicon Valley, the semiconductor was invented, and from this came the digital revolution, including the Internet, also perfected in California. The millennium found California on the cutting edge of yet another revolution; bio technology.

The great universities and research institutes of California were the cause and the result of this aptitude for science and technology. It began in the American frontier era with the technology of mining, which led to the establishment of an academy of science and a state geological survey. And then, when barely out of its frontier phase, California turned to the purest science of them all – astronomy – with the construction of the first of three world-leading astronomical observatories. From this arose a scientific community that demanded – and achieved – some of the best universities and research institutes in the nation.

The very same society that was ordering and rearranging its environment through technology was also learning to revere nature as its primary symbol of social identity. From the beginning, American California was at once what human beings had made of it and what they had found there in the first place: a region of magnitude and beauty, encompassing all the topography, climate, and life zones of the planet (with the exception of the tropical), from the seashore to the desert, from the Great Central Valley at its center to the snow capped Sierra peaks guarding its eastern flank. From the beginning, American California was caught in a paradox of reverent awe and exploitative use. As early as 1860, the state had urged the setting aside of the Yosemite Valley not just because it was so grand and so beautiful, but because its very grandeur and beauty established the expectation of what California should become in its social and moral existence. A streak of nature worship – sometimes mawkish and sentimental, sometimes neopagan in its intensity, and, toward the millennium, frequently Zen-like in its clarity and repose – runs through the imaginative, intellectual, and moral history of California as a fixed reference point of social identity. A society that had consumed nature so wantonly, so ferociously, was, paradoxically, nature’s most ardent advocate.

California is an American story that from the beginning has been a global story as well. Despite its quasi-autonomous existence – the power of its economy on the world stage, the overseas offices maintained by the state government to promote international trade, the continuous diplomacy demanded by its world wide investments – California remains an American place, perhaps the most American of American places, prophesying the growing diversity of the United States. In the mid-nineteenth century, the American people, operating through their federal government, brought American California into being. By the millennium, the national importance of California had become far more than the fifty-three Californians who sat in the House of Representatives or the two women who sat in the United States Senate. California had long since become one of the prisms through which the American people, for better and for worse, could glimpse their future. It had also become not the exclusive, but a compelling way for this future to be brought into existence. California, noted Wallace Stegner, is like the rest of the United States – only more so. How California came to be such a representative American place, what has been gained and what has been lost, is the theme of this brief chronicle.

Chapter One - Queen Calafia’s Island
Place and First People

First described in a bestseller, California entered history as a myth. In 1510 the Spanish writer Garci Ordonez de Montalvo issued a sequel to his 1508 prose romance Amadis de Gaula, which Montalvo had in turn based upon a late thirteenth- to early fourteenth-century Portuguese narrative derived from French sources. Published in Seville, Montalvo’s Las Sergas de Esplandian (The Deeds of Esplandian) chronicled the exploits of Esplandian, son of the hero Amadis of Gaul, at the siege of Constantinople. Among Esplandian’s allies at the siege were the Californians, a race of black Amazons under the command of Queen Calafia.  California itself, according to Montalvo, was “an island on the right hand of the Indies... very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise,” abounding in gold and precious stones. The Californians rode griffins into battle and fought with golden weapons. Queen Calafia herself was “very large in person, the most beautiful of all of them, of blooming years, and in her thoughts desirous of achieving great things, strong of limb and of great courage.”

Equipping a fleet, Calafia had sailed to Constantinople to join the other great captains of the world in the siege against the Turks. By the end of the story, Queen Calafia and the Californians have become Christians (which involved, one surmises, giving up her promiscuous ways and the feeding of their male offspring to their griffins), and Calafia herself marries one of Esplandian’s trusted lieutenants, with whom she goes on to further adventures.

In 1863 the Boston antiquarian Edward Everett Hale, author of the well-known short story “The Man Without a Country,” sent a paper to the American Antiquarian Society in which he provided translations of key passages of Las Sergas de Esplandian and cited the prose romance as the source of the name “California.” Hale’s report was in turn reported on by The Atlantic Monthly in March 1864. Montalvo’s two tales, Hale noted, were instant bestsellers and remained so for the rest of the sixteenth century. Not until the publication of Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saovedra in two parts in 1605 and 1615 were Montalvo’s romances superseded in popularity. Don Quixote, furthermore, was not the only one to take these stories as literal fact. The Spanish in general had a tendency to conflate fact with fiction when it came to these prose romances.

In 1533 a party of Spanish explorers, sailing west from Mexico across an unnamed sea at the command of Hernan Cortes, conqueror of Mexico, landed on what they believed to be an island in the recently discovered Pacific. After 1539 they began to call the place after the mythic island of California, half believing and more than fully hoping they would find there as well the gold and precious stones described in Montalvo’s romance and perhaps even an Amazon or two. Not until 1539-40 did the Spanish discover their geographical mistake. California was a peninsula, not an island, and north of this peninsula – eventually called Antigua or Old California – was a vast northern region that the Spaniards, for one reason or another, would be unable to settle for another 230 years.

The American state of California faces the Pacific Ocean between latitude 42 degrees north (at the border of the American state of Oregon) and latitude 32 degrees north (at the border of the Mexican state of Baja California Norte). On a clear day, photographed from a satellite, California appears a serene palette of blue, green, brown, white, and red. This apparent serenity, however, masks a titanic drama occurring beneath the surface, in the clash of the two tectonic plates upon which California rests. California itself resulted from a collision of the North American and Pacific plates. Across a hundred million years, the grinding and regrinding of these plates against each other, their sudden detachments, their thrust above or below each other – together with the lava flows of volcanoes, the bull-dozing action of glaciers, and, later, the flow of water and the depositing of alluvial soil – created a region almost abstract in its distinct arrangements of mountain, valley, canyon, coastline, plain, and desert. As the California-born philosopher and historian Josiah Royce observed, there is nothing subtle about the landforms and landscapes of California. Everything is scaled in bold and heroic arrangements that are easily understood.

Fronting more than half the shoreline of the western continental United States, California – all 158,693 square miles of it – offers clear-cut and confrontational topographies. First of all, there is the 1,264-mile Pacific shoreline itself. Thirty million years ago, tectonic action formed this shoreline by detaching a great land mass from the southern edge of the Baja California peninsula, moving it northward, and attaching it back onto the continent. At four strategic intervals – the bay of San Diego in the south, Monterey and San Francisco bays in the midregion and Humboldt Bay in the north – this appended land mass opened itself to the sea and created four harbors. Formed as recently as thirty thousand years ago when mountains on the shoreline collapsed and the sea rushed in, San Francisco Bay is among the two or three finest natural harbors on the planet.

Rising from this coastline, from north to south, various mountain ranges run boldly into the Pacific. At latitude 35 degrees 30 minutes north, in the county of San Luis Obispo, these coastal mountains bifurcate into two ranges: the Transverse Ranges, veering in a southeasterly direction into southern Kern County in the interior, and the Peninsula Ranges, continuing southward down the coast.  In the far north, the Klamath Mountains and the southern tip of the Cascades move in an easterly direction toward the Modoc Plateau on the northeastern corner. Turning south from the Modoc Plateau is another, even more formidable mountain range, the Sierra Nevada – John Muir’s “Range of Light,” four hundred miles long, eighty miles wide – sealing off the eastern edge of California from the Great Basin until these mighty mountains yield to the Mojave Desert in the southeastern corner. Forty-one California mountains rise to more than ten thousand feet. The highest – Mount Whitney – is, at 14,496 feet, the second highest mountain in the continental United States. Mount Shasta in the north – rising from its plain to a height of 14,162 feet, its crowning glaciers still grinding against each other – was once an active volcano. Nearby Mount Lassen, also a volcano, was active as recently as 1921.

Thus in eons past did mountains set the stage for the essential drama of the California landscape: an interplay of heights, flatland, and coast. Coastal plains adjoin the bays of San Francisco and Monterey, and a great basin, the Los Angeles Plain, flanks the coast south of the transverse Ranges. Four hundred and thirty miles in length, the Central Valley runs through the center of the state in two sequences, the San Joaquin Valley to the south, the Sacramento Valley to the north. Open and sweeping as well are the moonlike Modoc Plateau in the northeastern corner of the state, the high desert Great Basin on the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert in the southeast, and the Salton Trough thrust itself up from Baja.

Here it is, then: a landscape of stark contrast, vibrant and volatile with the geological forces that shaped the western edge of the continent. Numerous fault lines – the San Andreas, the Hayward, the Garlock, the San Jacinto, the Nacimiento – crisscross the western edge from San Francisco Bay to the Mexican border, keeping the region alive with tectonic action. Within human memory – in 1857 at the Tejon Pass in Southern California, in 1872 in the Owens Valley, in San Francisco in 1906, in Long Beach in 1933, in the San Fernando Valley in 1971, again in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989, and again in the San Fernando Valley in 1994 – great earthquakes shook the land, destroying lives and property. At magnitude 8.3 on the Richter scale, the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906, like the Lisbon earthquake of 1775, precipitated the destruction of an entire city.

Just sixty miles from Mount Whitney, the highest point in the state, is Death Valley, the lowest point on the continent at 282 feet below sea level. Here temperatures can reach as high as 134 degrees Fahrenheit, as they did on July 10, 1913. In midsummer the central Valley can be as hot as the Equator.  Fortunately for California as a place for human settlement, however, two factors – the California Current coming down from the northwestern Pacific, and the Pacific High, a high-pressure zone a thousand miles off the coast – help moderate the heat of the interior. From the point of view of human preferences, coastal California – where settlement began and maintains its greatest density – sustains a mosaic of salubrious climates. Few climates in North America, if any, can equal that of coastal California from the point of view of human use. Like the Mediterranean, the southern littoral is warm and dry. This Mediterranean climate continues up the coast and veers inland until it meets the forested regions of the north. From Monterey Bay to the Marin headlands north of San Francisco, however, the Mediterranean climate is moistened and softened by morning sea fogs and the other mitigating influences of maritime weather. In general coastal California rarely gets below 40 degrees in January or above 72 degrees in July, in dramatic contrast to the inland heat.

There are two seasons in California, wet and dry. Rain (and, in the mountains, snow) falls typically from October to March, mostly between December and February. The rest of the year is generally sunny. Two thirds of the total precipitation falls in the northern third of the state, where some locations average as much as eighty inches of rain (or its equivalent in snow) in a year.  This rainfall and the melting snowpacks of the Sierra Nevada and other ranges water the state through a series of streams that feed into the Sacramento River running north to south and the San Joaquin River running south to north, the two converging in Suisun Bay in the Delta country on the northeastern edge of San Francisco Bay. The interior Central Valley was once an extensive inland sea, hence its rich fossil deposits. Other river systems drain the Coast, Transverse, and Peninsula ranges north and south. In comparison to the arid Far West, then, California has more than its share of water, although it is not always where it is most needed.

The barriers of mountain and desert, together with its patterns of water and climate, render California a distinct bioregion. Even before it was depicted as an island in early Spanish maps, California was a kind of island on the land, sealed of by the Pacific, the Sierra Nevada, the Klamath and Cascade ranges in the north, and the Mojave Desert in the southeast. Off Monterey looms an undersea chasm as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon, and the effects of such depths – aside from the sapphire blue of the of the Bay – can be seen in the forest of kelp hugging the shore and the biotic exuberance of innumerable tide pools. Off shore, gray whales make their annual migrations north and south to feeding and breeding grounds. Salmon, sardines, halibut, tuna, bonito, crab, and abalone abound. Dolphins, sea elephants, sea lion, seals and sea otters find abundant feeding in the fish-rich coastal seas. Sharks, barracudas, and samurai swordfish prowl, hunt, and feed through these waters.

Then there is the seacoast – a world unto itself, more than twelve hundred miles in extent. In certain regions – the North Coast, for example, or Big Sur south of Monterey – the land plunges precipitously into the sea. At other points, such as the Delta region on the eastern edge of San Francisco Bay or the south central coastal regions, a rich complexity of estuaries, tidelands, and marshes intercedes between land and sea. This littoral is in many ways its own life zone, with grunion running ashore, sandpipers skirting the dunes in carpets of low-flying silver, pelicans and herons rooting for frogs and small fish in the wetland, and everywhere, overhead, the white light and bright cries of seagulls, egrets, and other seabirds.

Just inland, extending from San Francisco Bay to the Oregon border, there once commenced a primeval forest of redwoods, which also stretched across the upper portions of Monterey Bay on the Santa Cruz peninsula. These trees (Sequoia sempervirens) and their first cousins (Sequoiandendren giganteum), flourishing in some thirty-five groves in the Sierra foothills, were the most ancient living entities on the plane, some of them four thousand years old. Equally distinct to California were great oak trees, millions of them. A vast woodland, a river of oak nearly four hundred miles in length, circled the interior of the region, with a stately procession of great trees moving up along the eastern flank of the Coast Range, then sweeping eastward across the top of the Central Valley before flowing southward through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Found here as well, in the coastal mountainous regions, was the madrone: a thick hard red tree, clinging close to the earth, that also bespoke California as a distinctive region, as did the Monterey pine and the Monterey cypress: trees evocative of the classical past, standing in Virgilian dignity along the shorelines of the Central Coast.

Above this coastal region and its adjacent interior – above, that is, the mountains of Big Sur, the oak-dotted rolling hills of the south Central Coast, the sagebrush and chaparral of the southern region – glided the mighty condor, ancient survivor of the Pleistocene, borne aloft on its nine-foot wingspan by updrafts from the Pacific. Eagles, ospreys, hawks, and the lowly buzzard, alert for carrion below, shared these skies as well. Looking down from great heights, these soaring birds caught sight of the multitudinous herds of tule elk which, by the hundreds to thousands, roamed the Coast Ranges and the marshes of the Central Valley: the western wetlands that were all that was left of the ancient sea that once filled the interior.

Because California was mountain country, it was bear country as well: the black bear, the brown bear, and the great grizzly that could rise to full height, master of all it surveyed. Shambling through the state, primeval demigods in an unwritten epic, grizzles stood at the apex of the food chain, the omnivorous predator of elk and deer on the plain, salmon and trout in the northern rivers, the fat-tailed beaver plying their ancient craft in the rivers of the interior. Even mountain lions gave way when grizzlies drew near. Native Americans considered the grizzly another kind of human being, a creature from the mythic past, a survivor from the dawn of creation.

Because California was an island on the land, its bird life was distinct, especially in the mountain forests that dominated the region. Flourishing in the vast pine woods, the mountain birds of California were lighter, paler, grayer than their counterparts in the interior of the continent, although the blue-fronted California jay seemed robust enough and, like the mighty condor, a worthy symbol of the state to come. Abundant as well were the quail flourishing in the underbrush, the flights of ducks over the wetlands, and, in the interior, over the vast Central Valley, the temporary birds of the state – flocks of Canada geese especially – flying in migration, north and south, along the Pacific Flyway. To put the matter in a nutshell (or rather, in an acorn shell, since the oak acorn was a primary nutrient for bear and Native American alike), California sustained throughout its many life zones the same plants and animals as were flourishing in the rest of the continent, albeit they had been transformed over time by the island-on-the-land nature of their habitat.   

Such a teeming plenitude of plant, animal, and bird life was quite conducive to human habitation, as the Native Americans of the region had been discovering to their satisfaction for the more than twenty-five generations since their ancestors had first settled down at various points and various ways in this mountain- and desert-guarded enclave, a semicontinent unto itself. At the initial moment of European contact in 1492, something approaching one third of all Native Americans living within the present-day boundaries of the continental United States – which is to say, more than three hundred thousand people – are estimated to have been living within the present-day boundaries of California.  This claim has been disputed by those who argue for a much larger Native American population for the continental United States, but no matter: the figures, however they compare to the rest of the continent, are still impressive. For centuries, hundreds of thousands of Native Americans had been making their homes, living their lives, in the place now called California. In time, anthropologists would describe this Native American culture according to ethnographic categories based on linguistic distinctions. The Native Americans of California, they tell us, belonged to twenty-two linguistic families. Within these categories were some 135 separate languages.

No two authoritative ethnographic maps of Native American California are ever exactly alike, but the general outline of settlement – as in the case of the landforms, flora, and fauna that helped determine patterns of Native American life – are generally agreed upon. In the mountainous, stream-rich northwest were the fishing peoples: the Yuki, the Tolowa, Karok, and Yurok, the Hoopa, Wiyot, Mattole, and Wailaki, each skilled at netting and spearing trout and salmon, each builders of impressive settlements and totems. To the west were the Wintun, the Shasta, and the Yana, the last native peoples to survive in aboriginal circumstances, their final survivor, Ishi, emerging from the forest in August 1911.  Farther south, encountered from the coast into the interior, were Pomo, the Maidu, the Lile’ek and the Wappo. The Miwok people throve in three enclaves: the Lake Miwok around Clear Lake north of the Bay Area; the Coast Miwok in what would eventually be known as Marin County; and the Miwok of the northern San Joaquin Valley. Southeast along the coast from San Francisco Bay flourished the Costanoan. Like the Coast Miwok, the Costanoan were a shellfish-gathering people, and over the centuries they left behind great mounds of shells from innumerable feasts. To the south of the Costanoan were the Esselen people of Big Sur, adept at mysticism and the healing arts, and south of them were the Salinan, followed by the Chumash, who lived in long lodges in complex social arrangements and took to the channel off the Santa Barbara coast in seagoing canoes resembling those of Polynesia. The Gabrielino were centered in what would later be known as Orange County. To the east, along the mountains and plains of San Bernardino, lived the Serrano, an inland people with connections to the coast. The Yokut inhabited the center of the Great Central Valley. The northern Paiute, Washo, Mono, and Panamint peoples lived along the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada, seasonally dividing their time between the mountains and the plain. The Tubatulabal held to the mountains of the southern Sierra, spilling into the southwestern desert. Here could also be found the Ute-Chemehuevi, a desert society related to the other peoples of the southwest.  The Luiseno-Cahuilla and the Yuman occupied the southern tier of the southeastern desert.

With so many languages, so many tribes and tribelets, so many autonomous communities, Native American California offered a paradigm of linguistic and cultural diversity anticipating the population patterns of a later era when the peoples of the world arrived in the region. Certain generalizations, however, can be made that are valid for all the Native American peoples of California. The early inhabitants of California found in their various regions more than enough flora and fauna to sustain their lives; they were, therefore, not warlike in their relationships with each other, although quasi-ritualistic conflicts over disputed territories were not unknown. Large-scale political organizations were equally unnecessary. With no need to make war, they did not develop elaborate hierarchies. With nature relatively abundant, simple and effective technologies for hunting and gathering sufficed – although in their woven storage baskets, the Native Californian women achieved an art form that was also eminently practical.  Theirs was a world of river, creek, or desert oasis, and of settlement that could easily be moved. Their therapy – their sociology even, and certainly their communal life – was centered on sweat lodges, where they warmed themselves with steam from water poured on fire-heated stones before plunging into a nearby river or lake, emerging renewed. In matters of property, they tended to be communal. In matters sexual, they tended toward balance and restraint, with full regard for the rearing of children. Their ego, as far as we can tell, was not the self-conscious, self-rewarding ego of post-Renaissance Europe, but rather an awareness of self through the rhythms of daily life, the pageant of nature, the companionable presence of spirits, and the creation myths that gave them a cosmology and a history and fixed for them a place in the world. With the exception of the acorn, a universal food, the sustenance of each region in this mosaic – distinct in its topography, its climate, its varieties of fish and game – determined the gross and subtle differences of life: the fishing people of the northeast, the shell gatherers of the Central Coast, the hunter-gatherers of the interior, the agriculturists of the southeast all had their cultures determined over the centuries by what was there in the first place, by California itself.

While external organization tended toward the simplistic, the internal cultures of the various groups offered a highly developed heritage of creation myths, totems, and taboos, together with rituals and protocols for stylized warfare and the more pervasive peace, for coming of age, sexuality, family life, birth, and death. For these people, the world was alive with spirit, and the web of life – the linkages, dependencies, and interactions among humans, animals and plants – was a continuum. The world itself was anchored in a story that had first been told when Coyote created the world and the human beings in it, and it was a continuing story in which they also were participating, from birth to death, in a flow of time that was circular, pervasive, and nonlinear. In the early twentieth century, pioneering anthropologists such as Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, Thomas Waterman, and Saxton Pope would marvel at the intricate linguistic, material, mythological and moral culture achieved by these First Californians, especially as so vividly incarnated in Ishi, the last of them to come of age in aboriginal circumstances. The late twentieth century would witness the reemergence of these First Californians as a financial and political force in a postmodernist state.  For a long time to come, however, theirs would not be an easy life as first Europe and then the United States invaded their land, wiped out their food supply, uprooted their culture, and decimated their numbers. After twenty-five generations, the First Californians would soon be encountering social forces, diseases, and genocidal violence that would bring them to the brink of extinction.