EARLY EXPLORATIONS Columbus began the chain of events that led to establishment of California in 1493, while he was searching the Caribbean for the island of Mantinino. Columbus had been told that Mantinino “was peopled merely by women,” and thought this might be Marco Polo's Amazonian island “near the coast of Asia.” Although Columbus failed in his quest, the fabulous isle fascinated other navigators during the next decade. After Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo published his romance, Las Sergas de Esplandian, in 1510, Spanish navigators became familiar with both the legend and the name of California. A passage in the work reads: “Know that, on the right hand of the Indies, there is an island called California, very near the Terrestrial Paradise, which was peopled with black women ... Their arms were all of gold.” Spanish dominion in the new world was extended to the western coast of Mexico by Cortes’ conquest of the empire of Montezuma. In an attempt to push the boundary farther west and north, Cortes sent two ships commanded by his kinsman, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, on a “voyage of discovery” in 1532. Mendoza got as far into the Gulf of California as 27 degrees North before a mutinous crew compelled him to send back one of the ships. Of his own vessel, nothing but vague rumor was ever heard again. Fortuno Ximenes, pilot of an expedition sent to search for Mendoza, anchored in a small bay “near the 23rd degree of latitude,” landed, and was killed by some of the native in habitants, along with twenty of his men. The survivors reported the discovery of an island, said to “abound in the finest pearls.” On May 5, 1535, Cortes entered the little bay Ximenes had found (possibly the present La Paz) and called it Santa Cruz. He was convinced that it lay “on the right side of the Indies,” if not “near to the Terrestrial Paradise.” For more than a year, Cortes stayed in the new land, a desolate sandy waste, while the mutinous soldiers cursed him, “his land, bay, and his discovery.” Clinging tenaciously to his search for the “seven cities of Cibola” in the north, in 1539 he sent three ships under command of Francisco de Ulloa to begin a thorough survey of the coast line. Ulloa examined both shores of what he called “The Sea of Cortes,” now known as the Gulf of California, and discovered that Cortes' island was really a peninsula. Later the same year, it is said, he sailed around Cape San Lucas and surveyed the Pacific coast line of the peninsula, traveling as far as the 28th degree—some say as far as “Cape Engano, near the 30th degree.” By this time, however, Cortes had gone back to Spain, never to return. The new viceroy, Don Antonio de Mendoza, sent Cabrillo in command of the ships San Salvador and La Victoria, “to examine the western side of California as far northward as possible, seeking particularly rich countries and passages leading towards the Atlantic.” Cabrillo sailed from Navidad, a small port in Xalisco, on June 27, 1542. Slowed by adverse winds, he finally entered “a very good closed port” on September 28, which he named San Miguel—the bay of San Diego. He discovered Santa Monica Bay and the three large islands of the Santa Barbara group, and then rounded Cabo Galera (Point Concepcion) and Cabo de los Reyes (Point Reyes). The ships passed the Golden Gate without seeing it. On the way back, they found the harbor in the island of the Santa Barbara group, which they named La Posesion. There Cabrillo, who had been suffering from a broken arm, died on January 3, 1543. The command passed to his pilot, Bartolome Ferrelo. Sailing north again, the ships reached a promontory on February 26, probably Cape Mendocino, which Ferrelo named Cabo de Fortunas (Cape of Perils or Stormy Cape). Turning back, they eventually came back to their home port of Navidad. Disappointed by reports of the expedition, Spanish officials were more and more convinced that north of Mexico the New World contained “neither wealthy nations, nor navigable passage ... between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.” Later, when treasures of the Orient began to come into the port of Acapulco from the Philippines and from China, Spain found in the long continental mainland the best protection of its inland sea—the Pacific. England's sea rovers had no way into the Pacific except by rounding Cape Horn. This Francis Drake did in his 100-ton schooner, the Golden Hinde, which he anchored on June 17, 1579, in what became Drake's Bay. He named the region New Albion. SPANISH EXPEDITIONS INTO CALIFORNIA Drake's visit seems to have arisen Spain's dormant interest in California. In 1584, Francisco Gali made a much more thorough examination of the California coast than Cabrillo had 42 years before. Eleven years later, Sebastian Cermeno was directed, while returning from Manila to Acapulco, to examine the California coast, “in search of harbors in which galleons might take refuge.” After losing his own ship somewhere “near San Francisco Bay south of Cape Mendocino,” he sailed in a small boat southward along the coast, and sighted the Bay of Monterey, which he named “San Pedro Bay.” With three ships “well officered,” Sebastian Vizcaino made a second attempt in 1602 to explore the coast, sailing as far as Cape Mendocino. The first harbor he reached, “the best in all the South Sea,” he named San Diego. On November 12, Carmelite friars of his party celebrated Holy Mass ashore—the first time in Upper California. Vizcaino spent almost a year in the survey but, like Cabrillo, he missed the Golden Gate. He renamed many places named by Cabrillo in 1542, among them San Diego, Santa Catalina, Santa Barbara, Point Concepcion, the Carmel River, and Point Reyes. He also named Monterey Bay, in honor of the viceroy, Gaspar de Zunigay Acebedo, who was the Count of Monterey. After Vizcaino's visit, Spain's efforts were largely spent in attempts to colonize New Mexico rather than Upper California, though recurrent attempts were made to keep alive the pearlfishing industry on the eastern coast of the Gulf of California. The most pretentious of these was in 1683, when Don Isidro de Atondo, placing settlers, soldiers, and Jesuits at different points, planned a steady penetration of California. But the project lagged, and not until 1697 did Jesuits receive royal warrants to enter upon the reduction of California at their own expense. In that year, the first permanent colony was planted in Baja California—at Loreto by Father Juan Maria Salvatierra. Father Kino, in 1701, crossed the Colorado near Yuma, entered Alta California, and worked among the Indians of “Pimeria Alta.” By 1734, Vitus Bering was pushing exploration of Alaska, and Spain began to fear colonizing activities of Russia along the Pacific coast. Twenty years later, a new peril arose when France was swept from sovereignty in America by Britain. Spain could put off no longer the settlement of Alta California. A high officer of the Spanish “Council of the Indies,” Jose de Galvez, was sent to Mexico as visitador-general; he arrived in Mexico City in 1766. Early the following year, Carlos III of Spain issued a decree banishing all Jesuits from Spanish territories. Franciscans were to take over the mission at Loreto, which was to be the base of the operations, both military and pastoral. Captain Gaspar de Portola was appointed Governor of Baja California and ordered to proceed to Loreto to superintend the transfer of mission property. He reached Loreto with an escort of fifty soldiers, accompanied by fifteen Franciscan monks, and was joined by Galvez and Father Junipero Serra, who was made president of the missions in California. The king had ordered Galvez “to send an expedition by sea to rediscover and people the bays of San Diego and Monterey.” Galvez thought it well to send a land expedition, and Father Serra concurred with his plan. Three missions in Alta California—at San Diego, Monterey, and at an intermediate point—were to be established, as well as two presidios or military posts. On January 9, 1769, one of the ships, the San Carlos, left La Paz. Two days later, the San Antonio sailed from San Lucas. Soon after, the Senor San Jose sailed from Loreto. The vessels were loaded with ornaments, sacred vases, church vestments, household utensils, field implements, seeds, and other settlement needs. The San Antonio, under Captain Juan Perez, reached its destination of San Diego Bay on April 11, and the San Carlos did the same on April 29. However, scurvy had swept both vessels; ravages on the San Carlos had so prostrated the crew that not even a boat could be lowered. The San Antonio's boats carried the sick ashore, where they convalesced behind a temporary stockade. The march by land was no less long and painful. Forces were divided into two columns, one under an army captain, Fernando de Rivera, and the other under Portola. With the latter went Father Serra. The columns took different routes, each driving a herd of cattle. Rivera's party reached San Diego on May 15; Portola's route was more difficult, and his party did not arrive until July 1. The expedition lost no time in putting plans into action. Mision San Diego de Alcala was dedicated on July 16, two days after Portola led sixty-four members of the expedition away to the north to find the Bay of Monterey. Through country described by Portola as “rocks, brushwood and rugged mountains” trekked the newcomers—Spanish officers in brilliant uniforms, monks in gray-brown cowls, leather-clad soldiers, and Indians on foot. On October 2, upon reaching Monterey, they failed to recognize it and pushed on. In Father Crespi's words: “The expedition strove to reach the Punta de los Reyes, but some immense arms of the sea which penetrate into the mainland in an extraordinary fashion would have made it necessary to take a long, circuitous detour.” Those arms of the sea first seen by Sergeant Ortega and his band of scouts were the reaches of San Francisco Bay. Curiously inept at foraging for food, the company would have starved except for their pack animals. They ate twelve in as many days. At last, on January 24, 1770, they returned to San Diego, “smelling frightfully of mules.” At San Diego, there was so much suffering from illness and hunger that Portola decided to abandon the expedition and return to Baja California if help did not arrive from Galvez by March 20. But at dusk on March 19, a sail was sighted on the horizon, and less than a month later they were on their way back to Monterey. MISSION AUTHORITY ESTABLISHED This time they recognized the Bay; on June 3, 1770, the sites of the mission and the presidio were dedicated. Serra felt they were dedicating themselves to the task of civilizing the natives and winning them for God. To Portola, the planting of royal standards and crosses in the name of King Carlos III of Spain signified the assertion of more missions being established, and near some of them, presidios and pueblos. The last mission, San Francisco Solano, was founded north of San Francisco Bay on July 4, 1823. The missions formed a chain of civilized outposts along the coast, spaced a day's journey apart. Each had its herd of cattle, and its field and vegetable gardens tended by Indian neophytes. The Indians, taught by the padres to build irrigation systems, also became weavers, masons, carpenters, and blacksmiths. Thus the missions could be nearly self- sustaining, though they did receive clothing, furniture, implements, and tools from New Spain in exchange for their surplus of meal, wine, oil, hemp, hides, and tallow. The work of the padres, measured by the number of Indians reclaimed from their free life in the wilderness and put to tilling fields, was for a time successful. But even in 1786, at a time when the future of the missions was most promising, a discerning French scientist, Jean Francois Galaup de la Perouse, visited California and wrote that he was not impressed with what the padres were accomplishing. He doubted whether the mission system would ever develop self-reliance in the aborigines. The presidios, with their small military staffs, were established to protect the missions from hostile natives and possible invaders. Their military equipment was meager and antiquated, but fortunately the soldiers had little use for it. They occupied themselves with explorations, bear hunts, capturing runaway neophytes, carrying the mail, and providing their own food supply. Like the padres, the soldiers were supposed to receive regular wages from New Spain. But more often than not, the money failed to come, and they were forced to become more self-reliant than most subjects of the paternal Spanish government. Gradually, small towns began to grow. Some of them, like San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Monterey, spread around the edges of the presidios, and were at first under military rule. Others sprang up near the missions; among these were Sonoma, San Juan Bautista, San Juan Capistrano, and San Luis Obispo. Los Angeles and San Jose began as independent towns, with civic governments. San Francisco, although an adjunct to the Presidio, was definitely planned by the Spanish authorities as a civic enterprise. Its first settlers were 240 immigrants brought from Sonoma and Tubac, Mexico, by Juan Bautista de Anza. Leaving Tubac in October 1775, he led them over the present Arizona desert and the snows of the high Sierra, and arrived with his company almost intact. Only one person, a woman, died on the way, and eight children were born. (The Spanish Government had supplied every anticipated need.) On March 28, 1776, Anza located a presidio along the Golden Gate. The settlers, after first stopping in Monterey, arrived on June 27. Although Portola had hoped to establish the authority of Spain in California, his successors could not even repel the small company of Russian fur traders who landed in 1812 and boldly built a stockade, Fort Ross, in the Spanish province. The Spaniards made polite protests, but the intruders stayed as long as was convenient to them. Because of their military weakness, the presidio commanders were also forced to receive, respectfully, the visits of British, French, South American, and Yanqui ships—all of which were technically forbidden to enter California harbors. The captains of these vessels carried home eloquent reports of life in California, and it was inevitable that one or another covetous nation would snap the weakening Spanish rule. After Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, California settlers got their first taste of self-government, and their dissatisfaction with the patriarchal mission authority crystallized. The Indians were virtual slaves. Although they could not be sold, they could be pursued if they left the mission grounds; they were often brought back, whipped, locked up, and when penitent, allowed to go to work again. Though unhappy enough to plan two or three revolts—the worst occurring in 1824—the Indians were not very articulate about their plight. PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT The “young Californians”, a party of progressive Castilians, took up the Indians' cause. Their efforts, added to the republican sentiment in Mexico, resulted in a decree issued by the Mexican Congress in 1833 to remove the missions from Franciscan management. California's Mexican Governor, Jose Figueroa, made a careful plan for the secularization of the missions, but died before it could be carried out. The impatient Californios made the change unwisely, and with too much haste. One-half of the mission land and livestock was to have been given to the Indian neophytes who had developed it and to whom it had belonged before the coming of the Spaniards. Since they had never been taught self-discipline, they were to be forbidden to sell or mortgage their holdings. But when the missions were finally dismembered, colonists helped themselves to mission lands and cattle. The Indians received little cash for what they were able to sell, and what little they had was quickly squandered. COLONIZATION EFFORTS A few years after Portola's earnest little company struggled up from Baja California, the new province received a new kind of Spanish immigrant. Travelers returning to New Spain had been told that mission herds were thriving on the virgin pastures of Alta California. Castilian colonists trying to raise cattle on pastures in the stonier soil of Mexican ranchos were tempted to move on up the coast. The viceroy encouraged them with generous land grants. Although mission authorities opposed such colonizing by individuals, in 1786 Lieutenant Colonel Fages, Governor of Alta California, was empowered to make private grants for outfitting each ranchero with a storehouse and at least 2,000 head of cattle. By 1824, colonists were also guaranteed security of person and property, and freedom from taxes for five years. The ranch houses, built of sun-dried adobe brick, were plain but comfortable. Fields, worked by Indian labor, surrounded the houses, and beyond these were the vast pasture lands for the family's herds. The rancheros and their wives worked from dawn to sunset as industriously as the people who labored for them. The individual ranchos had to be self- sustaining, for the arrival of a supply ship was always uncertain. All visitors praised their hospitality. “If I must be cast in sickness or destitution on the care of the stranger,” wrote Walter Colton, “let it be in California; but let it be before American avarice has hardened the heart and made a God of gold.” It was the younger sons of these families who led progressive factions when the Californios were forced into politics. As long as Spain's American colonies remained loyal, even California, the remotest of them, looked to Madrid for guidance and assistance. The Californios took no part in the struggle to sever Spanish dominance in the New World. But when they learned, early in 1822, that an independent government had been set up in Mexico City, they suddenly became conscious of their republican rights. On April 9, 1822, Governor Pablo Vicente de Sola and ten delegates—eight presidio comandantes and military officers, and two priests—met at Monterey and recognized California “from this time ... as a dependent alone of ... the Empire of Mexico and independent of the dominion of Spain.” On November 9, 1822, California set up her own legislative body, the Diputacion, composed of six vocales, or representatives, one from each presidio and pueblo district. During this first brief period of independence, the province acted decisively. It declared the Indians free citizens, opened ports to trade, levied import and export duties, taxed crops and cattle, and established a military force, militia, and judiciary. In March 1825, California formally became a Territory of the Republic of Mexico. Under this Republic, its government consisted of a governor appointed by the national government; a secretary; a territorial legislature; a superior court; a prefect and a sub-prefect (sheriffs); district judges; alcaldes (minor judges); justices of the peace; and ayuntamientos, or town councils. The Territory of California could send one diputado to represent it in the Mexican Congress, but it had no vote. In November 1825, Luis Antonio Arguello's provisional governorship (1822-25) was ended by the arrival of a Mexican governor, Jose Maria de Echeandia. Echeandia's troubles began at once. The soldiers struck and marched against some of his Mexican troops when he was not immediately able to pay their wages. But as generally happened in the local rebellions of this period, no blood was spilled. Although Echeandia rescinded some of the measures put into effect during Arguello's term, on the whole he was liberal and just. But in March 1830, it was decided he would be replaced by a dictatorial governor, Manuel Victoria. Victoria took office in February 1831. Victoria opposed secularization of the missions, ordered the death penalty for small misdemeanors, and refused to convoke the Diputacion or to give the Californios more voice in their affairs, although ordered to do so by prominent diputados. The Californios, led by Pio Pico, Juan Bandini, and Jose Carrillo, seized the presidio at San Diego and advanced towards Los Angeles. On December 5, 1831, they clashed with government troops near Cahuenga Pass. The fight was not severe, for there was only one fatality, but Victoria was convinced he could not subdue the independent spirit of these provincials, and he returned to Mexico. Into the rancheros' lives of gentlemanly leisure there came a new sense of political responsibility. Although they had no heritage of democratic ideals, as a class the caballeros began to acquire a natural desire to take their government into their own hands. This they did in 1836, revolting against Mexico to proclaim the “Free and Sovereign State of Alta California.” But the Republic of Mexico made concessions which brought California back into the Union. During this transitional period, 1830 to 1846, a number of “battles” were fought which usually settled the current controversy. But the Californios had such an aversion to shedding blood that opposing forces were generally careful not to shoot if the enemy was within range of their guns. Most decisions were won by oratory and pronunciamentos. Some of the Californios' controversies were with the Mexicans, some with each other. When they had an unpopular Mexican governor to oust, they united fervently. But between these times, they indulged in just as violent local disputes. Jealous from the beginning were Los Angeles and Monterey, because each wanted to be the capital. The balance of power between customhouse and legislature was never settled. One of the most bitter of many individual rivalries involved two of California's respected citizens—Juan Bautista Alvarado, a spellbinding young leader who became civil governor at 27, and his uncle, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Alvarado's co-ruler as military chief. Their disagreement resulted in a strong attempt for Mexican authority in the person of General Manuel Micheltorena, who arrived with an army of convict soldiers in August 1842. Micheltorena, the last of the Mexican governors, stayed in the province for three years, until he was driven out by the Californios under Castro and Alvarado in March 1845, 15 months before the Americans took command at Monterey. ONSET OF AMERICAN INFLUENCE The tide of American pioneer families which flooded California in the 1840s was preceded a generation earlier by a smaller migration of skippers, traders, and trappers who came on brief commercial missions. True to their reputation for driving a good bargain, they secured wives, estates, and finally control of the province and its gracious people. The visitors were welcomed by the Californios, but not by their rulers in Mexico City or Madrid. Even before 1800, the Spanish Court had instructed the colonists that no foreigners were to land at California's ports or cross its borders. Since the court had neglected, however, to send regular supply ships to the colonists, the Californios seldom turned away the Yanqui skippers when they arrived with shiploads of such essentials as skillets, needles, cotton cloth, and plows. The captain of an American vessel wrote in 1817: “We served to clothe the naked soldiers of the king, when for lack of raiment they could not attend mass, and when the most reverend fathers had neither vestments nor vessels fit for the church, nor implements wherewith to till the soil.” The first United States ship, the Otter of Boston, docked at Monterey in 1796. In 1799, the Eliza stopped at San Francisco, and in 1800, the Betsy landed at San Diego. In addition to the regular traders, storm-battered whalers bound home from the North Pacific stopped at California harbors for repairs and supplies, paying for them with household goods brought from New England. Gradually, in spite of Spain's embargo, California hides and tallow began to find their way to Atlantic coast markets. While Yankee skippers were breaking into the California ports, Yankee trappers climbed the barrier of the Sierra and descended the canyons into the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. They explored many parts of California never reached by the Spaniards and took away a fortune in furs. On the whole, since they offered the Spaniards little and threatened much, they were not received as well as were the sea-faring traders. But one trapper, James Ohio Pattie, assured himself a welcome by bringing small-pox vaccine. Before foreigners settled among the Californios, there had been little commercial enterprise in the province. The newcomers immediately started to organize a business life. One ambitious firm, McCullough & Hartnell—called “Macala and Arnell” by the soft- spoken Spaniards—contracted to dispose of the entire mission's output of hides for a yearly shipload of supplies. While the foreigners aided California financially in this period, they held it back politically; in most cases, they supported the despotic Mexican governors against the rebellious Californios, because they feared that revolution would endanger their commercial interests. Influence of the Americans rose steadily after the arrival of the first United States immigrant train, the Bidwell-Bartleson company, in 1841. Americans had not yet declared any intention of raising the United States flag over the presidios, pueblos, and ranchos, but that purpose was stirring in their minds, as the Californios must have realized on October 19, 1842. That day, two American vessels sailed into Monterey Bay; their commander, Commodore Thomas Catesby Jones, ordered the port to surrender to the United States. Stationed at Peru, the Commodore had heard a rumor that the United States and Mexico were at war, and hurried north to annex California. When he learned that no war had been declared, he retired from Monterey on October 20 with elaborate apologies ... leaving the Californios something to think about. EARLY CONFLICTS FOR TERRITORY Quieter but more significant was the arrival of U.S. topographical engineer, Captain John C. Fremont. Later honored as “The Pathfinder,” Fremont came to California in 1844 on a scientific expedition. The next year he came again, this time visiting Monterey for several weeks as the guest of the United States Consul, Thomas O. Larkin. Jose Castro, the prefect, met Fremont and entertained him. But in January 1846, Castro learned that Fremont, en route to Monterey, had left two detachments of soldiers behind in the back country. Upon Fremont's assurance that his party was interested only in scientific data, Castro gave them permission to spend the winter in California, with the express provision that they remain away from the coast settlements. Fremont left Monterey to rejoin his soldiers. Six weeks later, the prefect learned that Fremont's band were camped at his back door, in the Salinas Valley, and demanded that they leave California at once. Fremont, acting perhaps under secret orders from Washington (the whole question of Fremont's official instructions remains a controversy), fortified a little hill, Gabilan (Hawk's Peak), and raised the American flag. His force was so small that it seems fantastic to regard this gesture as the first maneuver in the annexation of a great territory—but so it was. It came to nothing. When General Jose Castro made some not very effective military advances, Fremont withdrew up the Sacramento Valley. After spending a week at the fort of Johann August Sutter, a Swiss immigrant who welcomed overland caravans at his colony in New Helvetia on the Sacramento River, Fremont retreated northward toward Oregon. The retreat was made without haste, however. On the shores of Klamath Lake, Fremont was overtaken by two men from Sutter's Fort, with the message that Lieutenant A. N. Gillespie was following his trail with dispatches for him from the United States Government. Fremont and his company broke camp and retraced their steps. When he had read Gillespie's dispatches, he knew, as he wrote later, “that at last the time had come when England must not get a foothold; that we must be first. I was to act, discreetly but positively.” Soon afterwards, all American ranchers north of San Francisco Bay were informed by an anonymous paper that a band of Californians were on their way north to destroy the crops, cattle, and houses of the Americans. What followed remains largely conjecture, since Fremont withheld most of the story. Probably the Americans, when they reported to Fremont for aid, were advised to provoke the Californians into an act of overt hostility. At any rate, they struck first when a small band, headed by Ezekiel Merritt, captured 250 horses being driven southward by a group of vaqueros to Castro's camp in the Santa Clara Valley. As dawn broke on June 14, 1846, in the pueblo of Sonoma on the northern frontier, a little band of Yankees surrounded the house of the commandante of the presidio, General Mariano G. Vallejo, and seized him and the other officers. The presidio, ungarrisoned, was taken without a shot. The rebels, led by farmer William B. Ide, hauled down the Mexican flag and raised a new one of their own. The flag was homespun, fashioned with a strip of red flannel, and decorated in brown paint with a star, the figure of a grizzly bear, and the words “California Republic.” Although war had begun between the United States and Mexico on May 13, neither the rebels nor Fremont knew it. Despite the provocation of the Americans, the Californios remained strangely reluctant to make reprisals, even when the force at Sonoma grew to 130 and Fremont marched to join them at the head of 72 mounted riflemen. Although the intentions of the Americans must have been thoroughly revealed to the Californios by July 1, their two ranking officials, Governor Pio Pico in Los Angeles and General lose Castro in Monterey, were so absorbed in a private dispute that they made no preparations to defend the province. While they were arguing with each other in Los Angeles, Commodore John D. Sloat sailed into Monterey Bay. On July 7, he raised the American flag on the custom-house, and claimed California for the United States. Two days later, the flag was flying over San Francisco and Sonoma. In alarm, Castro and Pico combined at last to resist the invasion. Mustering a hundred men, they were ready when the American forces—350 strong—landed in San Pedro under Commodore Robert F. Stockton, who arrived in Monterey on July 15 to succeed Commodore Sloat. But before a shot was fired, both Castro and Pico fled to Mexico. On August 13, Stockton entered Los Angeles. Leaving Capt. Archibald Gillespie in charge, he returned northward. Little more than a month later, September 23, the Californios attacked the small garrison. John Brown (California's Paul Revere) carried an appeal for help to San Francisco on horseback, covering more than 500 miles in less than five days. By the time Captain MeNine reached Los Angeles with reinforcements on the Savannah, Los Angeles had been recaptured. On October 6, the Californios met and defeated Mervine and his sailors in a battle at the Domingues Rancho, and drove them back to their ship in San Pedro Bay. At Santa Barbara and at San Diego, the American flags so recently raised were hauled down again. Meanwhile the Californios, skirmishing with Americans led by Fremont and Thomas 0. Larkin in the Salinas Valley, seemed to be getting the better of it until late in the fall, when assistance arrived for the Americans. An expeditionary force, sent overland from Santa Fe by the War Department under command of Colonel Stephen W. Kearny, arrived December 5. They engaged with General Pico's forces the following day in an indecisive skirmish. Kearny's men, combined with Stockton's and resident Americans, now made an army of 600, equal to the Californios' forces. The two “armies” met in the Battle of San Gabriel and La Mesa on January 8 and 9 in 1847. AMERICAN FLAG IS RAISED So decisive were American victories that the Californios surrendered. On January 10, General Kearny and Commander Stockton once more raised the American flag over Los Angeles. On January 13, hostilities finally ended with the signing of articles of capitulation by General Andres Pico and Fremont at a ranch house near Cahuenga Pass. The incident was like the patching up of a quarrel by old friends, for the Americans required of the Californios only that they give up their artillery and pledge to obey the laws of the United States. On February 2, 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, California was formally relinquished by Mexico. California's adopted sons had one more job to do. Although the United States now owned California, Congress made no satisfactory provision for its civil government. Congressional slavery and anti-slavery factions could not come to an agreement on these questions. After a confused period in which military law, Spanish law, and American law were simultaneously administered in California, Brigadier-General Bennet Riley, U.S. military governor, took official action on June 3, 1849, and issued a proclamation “recommending the formation of a State constitution, or a plan for a Territorial government.” When the convention met in Colton Hall, Monterey, on September 1, 48 delegates were admitted to seats. On October 10, they adopted a constitution, which was ratified by the people on November 13, 1849. It remained in force until 1879. On the day of ratification (as provided by the constitution), the people elected a governor, a lieutenant governor, 16 State senators, and 36 assemblymen. On December 15, 1849, the State legislature convened. On the 20th, it inaugurated Peter H. Burnett as governor and John McDougal as lieutenant governor. The same day, the legislature elected two United States senators, John C. Fremont and William M. Gwin. And by December 22, most State officials and supreme court judges were elected. On December 20, 1849, Military Governor General Riley issued a remarkable proclamation: 'A new executive having been elected and installed into office in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution of the State, the undersigned hereby resigns his powers as Governor of California.' The proclamation constituted a recognition by the highest United States agent in California that California had declared itself to be a State, although legally, of course, it had no right to do so without Federal permission. This action precipitated an eight-month argument in Congress, prolonged by pro-slavery Congressmen who fought to prevent the admission of a new, non-slavery state. Finally, on September 9, 1850, California was admitted to the Union as a free State. FLOOD TIDE OF IMMIGRATION Hundreds of reports which described California as “a perfect paradise, a perpetual spring” started eastern families building prairie schooners several years before it became an American territory. The first pioneer train, organized largely by John Bidwell, left from Independence, Missouri on May 19, 1841, and reached the San Joaquin Valley November 4. The first to travel in wagons, the Chiles-Walker Party, came in 1843. By 1846, thousands, including the tragic Donner party, almost half of whom died of exposure and starvation en route, were on the westward trails. That year, immigrants also started to come around the Horn; one group of 200 Mormons arrived at San Francisco on the ship Brooklin on July 31. One member of the overland trains was a young New Jersey wagon builder, James Wilson Marshall. He went to work for Sutter, building a saw mill on the south fork of the American River near the site of Coloma. While inspecting the tail race there one morning in January 1848, he picked out of the water a piece of shining metal half the size of a pea. At first, he thought it was iron pyrites. But when he pounded it between stones and found it soft, he knew that what he held in his hand was gold. Alone in the upland forest, Marshall “sat down and began to think right hard,” as he wrote in his diary. It is doubtful he guessed his discovery would start the greatest mass movement of people since the Crusades. Less than six months later, Walter Colton, alcalde of Monterey, wrote: “The blacksmith dropped his hammer, the carpenter his plane, the mason his trowel, the farmer his sickle, the baker his loaf, and the tapster his bottle. All were off for the mines, some on horses, some on carts, and some on crutches, and one went in a litter.” By June 1848, scarcely a male remained in Monterey, San Francisco, San Jose, or Santa Cruz. Soldiers deserted, and so did the detachments sent to capture them. Hundreds of ships lay at anchor in San Francisco Bay, their crews gone to the foothills. Fields of wheat went unharvested, homes and shops were abandoned, newspapers suspended publication, and city officials closed their desks. The gold fever spread almost as quickly throughout the nation and the world. Westbound wagon trains passed between Missouri and Fort Laramie in an unbroken stream for two months. By March 1849, 17,000 had embarked for California from eastern ports. Within its first 10 years as one of the United States, California became generously populated—not only with Americans, but with the adventurous of all nations. Between 1847 and 1850, population of California increased from 15,000 to 92,497. A decade later, the Federal Census enumerated 379,994 persons in the State. Substantial pioneer families were among the Argonauts who danced and played games on the crowded little ships while gales, scurvy, and starvation threatened. Others trudged courageously over trails so bordered with the wreckage of previous parties that one immigrant, James Abbey, counted 362 abandoned wagons, and the bleaching bones of 350 horses, 280 oxen, and 120 mules in a 15-mile area. “Oh! Californy! That's the land for me! I'm bound for Sacramento with the washbowl on my knee.” In boisterous shanty-towns of gold rush days—Git-up-and-git, Bogus Thunder, Angel's Camp, You Bet, Shinbone Creek, Red Dog, Lazy Man's Canyon—the average return was up to $50 a day, though many made much more. From one panful of dirt, $1,500 was washed, and a trench 100 feet long yielded its two owners $17,000 in 7 days. Sometimes gold was picked out of the rock “as fast as one can pick kernels out of a lot of well-cracked shell barks.” Fully as much was made by those who served the miners. Many a tent-store took in $1,000 a day. Owners of river steamers and stage coaches, conveyers of water, innkeepers, and entertainers gathered copious wealth. They supplied the elementary needs; amenities were nonexistent. One of the “best hotels,” described by Hinton R. Helper, was a canvas structure floored with dirt and consisting of an undivided room where guests ate, drank, and slept in tiered bunks. “When we creep into one of these nests it is optional with us whether we unboot or uncoat ourselves; but it would be looked upon as an act of ill- breeding to go to bed with one's hat on.” The colorful ruffians of the times have been so immortalized as to create the impression that the camps were lawless. As a matter of fact, the mining camps, in distinction to the cities, stand as one of the world's best examples of men's spontaneous ability to govern themselves. With no formal legal setup, the miners, extremely diverse in background and nationality, established a society with a high degree of justice and democracy, particularly in the early years. Later, when “loose fish” and “bad whites” came to California in increasing numbers, crime became more difficult to control, both in the camps and in the feeder-town, San Francisco. Gold seekers, disembarked after a nine-month trip around the Horn or down from the camps with bags of gold, sought the lustiest entertainment imagination could provide. And they found it. Visitors gambled around roulette tables; residents gambled in real estate, nails, cork, calico, rice, or whatever commodities could be cornered; all gambled with their lives, for it is said that during the years from 1849 to 1856, more than a thousand murders were committed in San Francisco, with but a single execution. Of city government, there was practically none. An alarmed official addressed his fellow citizens in 1849: “We are without a dollar in the public treasury ... You have neither an office for your magistrate, nor any other public edifice. You are without a single police officer or watchman, and have not the means of confining a prisoner for an hour.” EARLY POLITICAL SYSTEM To remedy the situation, the citizens formed the vigilance committees of 1851 and 1856. The former drove out the “Hounds,” a gang that attacked various racial minorities, and the latter dispersed more “reputable” crooks in league with bankers and politicians. Both groups sprang from a widespread desire for democratic control, representing the community as a whole. Less clearly characterized by a sense of responsibility for its actions was the spontaneous government that arose in Los Angeles, where the voluntary citizens' committees broke up the bandit organization of Salomon Pico, Juan Flores, and Pancho Daniel. In 1854, the Great Bonanza suddenly slackened. Fortunes large and small collapsed. Disillusioned miners drifted up and down the State. Added to their numbers were the wagon trains and boatloads of immigrants arriving to homestead on Uncle Sam's new, fertile acres. They came not realizing that most of this vast land had been apportioned long before to the Californios, who had been guaranteed their property rights at the end of the Mexican War. The Americans simply moved onto the ranchos and dared the owners to put them off. What to do with these squatters became the question of the hour. Unfortunately, the boundaries of the ranchos had never been fixed exactly. “Professional squatters” were hired by land-grabbing corporations. Unscrupulous legislators defended the squatters in order to court their votes. When at last riots and bloodshed forced the Federal Government to take action, a survey of the State was ordered and a land commission was formed to adjust disputes. In the end, many Spanish families were reduced to comparative poverty. They were remarkably patient. One of them, General Vallejo, wrote, “The inhabitants of California have no reason to complain of the change of government, for if the rich have lost thousands of horses and cattle, the poor have been bettered in condition.” California's admission into the Union had not satisfied all Californians. In 1850, Walter Colton predicted that an independent nation would spring up on the Pacific unless Congress built a railroad to the Coast, for without it, California would easily have become self-sufficient. The cry for independence was soon taken up by southern sympathizers supporting pro- slavery Senator William S. Gwin, who overran southern California, especially San Bernardino County. The Democratic Party, which controlled the State legislature in every session but one from 1851 to 1860, was torn by the struggle between the Gwin faction and the anti-slavery faction headed by David C. Broderick, elected to the Senate in 1857. When Broderick was slain in a duel by Gwin's henchman, David S. Terry in September 1859, his successor in the Senate, Milton S. Latham, joined Gwin in the demand for a republic on the Pacific. He declared in 1860 that if civil war should break out, California would declare its independence. In 1860, pro-slavery Democrats gained overwhelming strength in both houses of the Legislature, but in the year following the split, Abraham Lincoln carried the State—by less than a thousand votes. In the nick of time, a plot to seize Federal strongholds in California and raise Confederate forces was frustrated. When news of the fall of Fort Sumter came on May 17, California pledged its loyalty to the Union, and in the next session of the Legislature, Republicans controlled the assembly. Gold from California's mines began traveling eastward to help win the war for the North. WESTWARD MOVEMENT When the first transcontinental railroad was completed in May 1869, new multitudes of pioneers traveled westward. Although two decades had now passed since the first Argonauts set out across the plains, California had still not absorbed its surplus population and strife. Wages were low and unemployment widespread, capital was scarce and interest rates prohibitive, land titles were uncertain, freight rates exorbitant, and water rights were held by monopolies. The labor movement became restless, anti-Chinese agitation grew rampant, and the people were in an uproar against a government corrupted by railroad control. Following collapse of a wild frenzy of speculation in wildcat mining and oil company stocks in the 1860s came an even wilder boom in Nevada silver mining stocks, set off by exploitation of the Comstock Lode's Bonanza mines in 1872. The California Stock Exchange Board was organized that year, and it became the scene of such violent excitement that the flush days of forty-nine paled in comparison. Throughout the State, people invested every cent they could borrow, beg, or steal in stocks. A few made millions. Most lost all they had. On August 27, 1875, the Bank of California crashed, and California was shaken to its foundations. The hard times following the bank panic bore down on people in town and country alike. Farmers of the interior valleys were already oppressed by inequitable mortgage and taxation laws, the railroad's high freight rates, monopoly of land and water rights by the railroad and land companies, and the ravages of a severe drought in 1876. They took with ill grace the added burdens of an economic depression. In the cities, wages fell and breadlines grew as thousands were thrown out of work; hungry men walking the streets began to resent the Bonanza kings' ostentatious display of their newly-found wealth. ETHNIC CONFLICTS GROW Meanwhile, the long-smoldering hostility against the Chinese, who had been thronging in since 1848 as miners, truck gardeners, laundrymen, fishermen, and workers on the railroad, began to break out in flames. It was incited by politicians, among them Governor Henry Haight, who said in December 1869: “The Chinese are a stream of filth and prostitution pouring in from Asia, whose servile competition tends to cheapen and degrade labor.” Working men, under artful urging, began to blame the Chinese for all their wrongs, and anti-Chinese feeling spread through the State. In 1871, a lawless gang looted and pillaged Los Angeles' Chinatown and lynched 19 Chinese. The labor movement took up the cry: “The Chinese must go!” On July 23-24, 1877, several thousand rioters burned and sacked Chinese laundries in San Francisco, and set fire to the Pacific Mail Steamship docks where Chinese immigrants landed. Elsewhere were sporadic outbreaks of violence. Despairing of redress for their difficulties from the railroad-controlled State government, city and farm workers, and some small businessmen and small landholders, organized the Workingmen's Party of California, promptly nicknamed the Sandlot Party for its Sunday afternoon meetings on San Francisco's vacant sand lots. Harangued by the Irish spellbinder, Dennis Kearney, the party vowed “to wrest the government from the hands of the rich and place it in those of the people, where it properly belongs; to rid the country of cheap Chinese labor as soon as possible; to destroy the great money power of the rich ... to destroy land monopoly in our state by a system of taxation that will make great wealth impossible in the future.” CIVIL GOVERNMENT ESTABLISHED For a solution to their problems, the people looked to the Legislature. The authors of California's first constitution, framed in the idealistic days of the Gold Rush, had given the legislators sweeping powers—to levy taxes, make appropriations, grant franchises, and give away public lands—of which the legislators of the seventies took full advantage. By 1878, the Workingmen's Party had grown so strong that it forced the Legislature to adopt an act calling a constitutional convention. Of the 152 members of the convention who came together on September 28, 1878, 51 were members of the Workingmen's Party, and 78 were nonpartisan; they included mechanics, miners, farmers, and even a cook, as well as lawyers, doctors, journalists, and teachers. The constitution which they adopted was ratified by the voters May 7, 1879. It was termed reactionary by some, radical by others. It remodeled the judiciary department, improved prison regulations, prohibited convict labor, and passed a law instituting an eight- hour working day. In general, it differed little from the organic law common in most states of the Union. But when compared with the constitution of 1849, it marked a distinct advance toward popular control. The power of the Legislature was everywhere curtailed. “Lobbying” was made a felony. Provisions to tax and control common carriers and corporations, and to regulate public utilities and services were inserted. A two-thirds vote in both Houses and ratification by the people were required to pass a constitutional amendment. Suffrage was extended to “every male citizen,” 21 years or more old who had lived in California for a year, “provided no native of China,” and no idiot, lunatic, convicted criminal, or illiterate “shall ever exercise the privileges of an elector.” The Legislature was to consist of 40 senators and 80 assemblymen, meeting biennially. The governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, controller, treasurer, attorney general, and surveyor general were to be elected by the people for four-year terms. A two-thirds vote of each house could overcome the Governor's veto. Judicial powers were confined to a supreme court (a chief justice and six associate justices), three district courts of appeal, a superior court for each county, and also minor courts (as amended Nov. 8, 1904). The Workingmen's Party was driven out of existence in 1880 by a fusion of Democrats and Republicans—but not before its anti-Chinese agitation had led to a vote by the people of the State (154,638 to 883) against further immigration from China. On March 20, 1879, the national Congress passed an exclusion bill, killed by the veto of President Rutherford B. Hayes. Two years later, a treaty with China giving the United States the power to “regulate, limit, or suspend” Chinese immigration was ratified by the Senate. Although the State's population increased 54 percent during the 1870s, its professional boosters—fast becoming a familiar type—discovered soon after 1880 that promotion would bring still more new settlers. For the first time, California went afield to bid for immigrants with advertisements, books, magazine and newspaper articles describing the extraordinary climate and resources of “the Coast.” Typical was this from B. F. Taylor's Between the Gates: “Whoever asks where Los Angeles is, to him I shall say: across a desert without wearying, beyond a mountain without climbing ... where the flowers catch fire with beauty ... where the pomegranates wear calyx crowns, chestnuts of Italy are dropping; where Sicilian lemons are ripening; where the almond trees are shining ... in the midst of a garden of thirty-six square miles—there is Los Angeles.” Inducements were so convincing that by 1884 the Southern Pacific was doing a rushing passenger business at fares of $125 from the Midwest to Los Angeles. When the Santa Fe was completed the following year, the two roads entered on a rate war that reduced fares to $5 and even, at one time, to $1. Multitudes climbed on trains and started West, their savings in their pockets, bound (they thought) for a sort of South Sea paradise. LAND SALES BOOM A real estate boom began, legitimate enough in that it initiated a sudden influx of buyers. But the shrewd encouragement of swindlers led most citizens to believe that the 1885 boom was only the prelude to another that was to “outclass the present activity as thunder to the crack of a hickory-nut.” Prices of Los Angeles lots rose from $500 to $5,000 within a year. Truck gardens and outlying vineyards worth $350 an acre were squared off into lots and sold for $10,000 an acre. Networks of sidewalks ran mile after mile out into the sagebrush. Elaborate hotels were built on desert tracts—and were never occupied except on their opening day. The newcomers, many of them unsophisticated farmers and small tradespeople from the Midwest, grew hysterical when the boom got really under way. The wealthier among them paid $20,000 to $50,000 for waterfront lots on a lonely stretch of shore, Redondo-by-the- Sea, because engineers had declared that a submarine oil well off Redondo kept the water smooth and made an ideal harbor. Smaller savings were invested in Widneyville-by-the- Desert, a wasteland covered with spiny and tortuous Joshua trees. Since the grotesque trees failed to give the site a homelike atmosphere, the promoters stuck oranges on the spines—and sold a citrus grove! In Widneyville, as in other boom towns, prospective buyers were carried in tallyhoes and stages, accompanied by bands, to be greeted on the grounds by the smoothest of high- pressure salesmen and plied with free chicken dinners and all the liquor they could drink. “Millionaires of a day,” to quote Theodore C. Van Dyke, “went about sunning their teeth with checkbooks in their outside pockets.” By 1887, many of those millionaires became suicides as syndicates collapsed, banks closed, individuals and business firms went bankrupt. The bands, tallyhoes, and oratory disappeared from the sunny scene. Once more, the bubble had burst. The hard times of the early 1890s lay ahead. Breadlines once more lengthened. Unemployed men mustered to join Coxey's Army in a hunger march on Washington, and the cities put their jobless thousands to work on public works projects. The influx of new settlers dwindled. TWENTIETH CENTURY But the tide of immigration once more rose, and new multitudes flocked in, swelling the population by six percent in the decade from 1900 to 1910. 'A new century—a new order' became the slogan. The new century began with prosperity, and was marked by rising wages and industrial expansion, development of petroleum and hydroelectric industries, and intensive fruit growing on a big scale. But the newcomers, mostly people from the Midwest who brought with them a tradition of active participation in community affairs, found much in California to challenge: corruption in municipal politics, machine control of government by corporations, industrial strife, and anti-Oriental agitation. Once more, the outcry against the “yellow peril” broke out. The Japanese, imported in increasing numbers by large agriculturists to take the place of Chinese as farm workers, had begun to settle as farmers and tradesmen, managing their small holdings so thriftily that soon they were displacing white workers and farmers. Although they numbered only 14,243 in 1906—and for many years had been excluded, along with other Orientals, from the privilege of naturalization—military and patriotic groups, merchants' association, and labor organizations combined to raise the cry: “California shall not become the Caucasian graveyard.” In 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education passed an order segregating 93 Japanese pupils in city schools into an Oriental public school. When Japan protested that the action was a violation of her treaty with the United States, the Federal government persuaded the board to rescind its order. The result of the diplomatic controversy was the “Gentlemen's Agreement” of 1907, by which the United States agreed to admit Japanese children below the age of 16 to the regular public schools, while Japan contracted to prevent the emigration of laborers to the United States. But anti-Japanese feeling persisted and grew in California. Another evil that challenged the attention of California's civic-minded newcomers in the early years of the century was corruption in city politics. The prosecution of San Francisco's “City Hall graft ring” led the way in a series of exposures of municipal scandals that introduced the muckraking era in California. From 1906 to 1908, the entire State followed with eager interest the prosecutions of such public figures as political boss Abraham Ruef, Mayor Eugene Schmitz, and Patrick Calhoun, United Railroads head, which were pushed by Fremont Older, Rudolph Spreckels, and James D. Phelan; attorneys Francis J. Heney and Hiram Johnson; and detective William Burns. In Los Angeles, the reform movement was taken up in 1909 when the editor of the Herald, T. R. Gibbon, accused Mayor A. C. Harper and his associates of enriching themselves by forcing owners of vice dens to buy stock in fictitious sugar companies by promising police protection. The municipal clean-up campaign, soon joined by the editors of the Evening Express and various citizens' committees, succeeded in defeating Harper in the next election. In State politics, the battle against control by corporation lobbyists, fought so ardently in the 1870s, was still to be won. As early as 1905-1906, resolutions demanding government ownership of railroads were passed at Bakersfield and Fresno, aimed against the Southern Pacific. The demand for public ownership was linked with demands for other reforms. The Independence League, a group of liberal Democrats meeting in Oakland in September 1906, came out for equal suffrage, the eight-hour working day, and State arbitration of industrial disputes, as well as public ownership. At the same time, a demand for direct primary legislation to reform election laws arose from charges of fraud at State party conventions. When a new economic depression shook the whole financial and business structure of the State in 1907, the reform movement gathered sudden strength. The outcome was a political revolt which took form in a coalition of liberal Republicans, organized in Oakland in August 1907 as the Lincoln-Roosevelt League. It proposed to give the people of the State a direct voice in government by freeing the Republican Party from domination by “Vested Interests.” Its platform included such planks as the direct primary, popular election of senators, and institution of the initiative, referendum, and recall. It promised to elect “a free honest, and capable legislature, truly representative of the common interests of the people of California.” Leading newspapers throughout the State swung to the support of the Lincoln- Roosevelt League, and enough votes were rallied in 1908 to elect a Legislature that passed a direct primary law; the law was soon ratified by the people. When the league gained control of the Republican Party in 1910 by electing its candidates to nearly every State and Congressional office, the State was shaken by a political upheaval. The Lincoln-Roosevelt League's candidate for governor, Hiram Johnson, took office in 1911. The new Legislature, which convened at the same time, fulfilled its platform promises by approving a long series of legislative reforms. Twenty-two amendments to the Constitution of 1879 were adopted and ratified by the people, and included provisions for women's suffrage, a new railroad commission, the initiative, referendum, and recall, and workingmen's compensation for industrial accidents. Theodore Roosevelt called its enactments “the most comprehensive programme of constructive legislation ever passed at a single session of an American legislature.” When the Roosevelt Republicans bolted the Republican National Convention of 1912, they nominated Hiram Johnson as Theodore Roosevelt's running mate on the progressive “Bull Moose” ticket, and carried the State in the national elections. A concession to anti-Japanese agitation was the 1911 Legislature's alien land law. It was supplemented in 1913 by the Webb Act, which forbid aliens ineligible for citizenship to own agricultural land in the State; the Webb act was passed by the Legislature over President Woodrow Wilson's protests. The Japanese evaded its operation by forming land corporations, or by transferring ownership to their American-born children, but the ensuing hue and cry forced enactment in 1920 of the Asiatic Land Law, forbidding such evasions. Despite Japan's protests, the United States Supreme Court in 1923 upheld the constitutionality of the Webb Act. And in 1924, Congress revised the immigration law to exclude Japanese. The reform wave continued into the early years of World War I. In December 1913, the Republican State Central Committee, announcing that it saw no hope of progress within the Republican Party, recommended establishment of the Progressive Party. The new party, formally launched on December 6 of that year, attracted a mass of prior Republican voters. In the elections of November 1914, when Hiram Johnson was returned to office, the Progressives won more decisively than in any previous election. But in 1916, the year in which Johnson was elected to the Senate, the bitter feud between Republicans and Progressives gave California to Woodrow Wilson by the narrow—and history- making—margin of 3,773 votes. THE WAR YEARS California embarked on the feverish expansionist period of the World War I boom years. Wages, manufacturing output, jobs, and industrial plants soared dizzily. Between 1910 and 1920, the assessed value of real and personal property doubled. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, celebrated the following year by the Panama-California Exposition at San Diego and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition at San Francisco, seemed to promise unlimited growth of California's maritime trade. The reform movement was soon forgotten. In southern California, the unexpected plea of guilty by J. B. and J. J. McNamara, on trial in 1911 for the dynamiting of the Times building, crushed the labor movement and turned the tide of a municipal election against the Socialist candidate. When the bombing of San Francisco's Preparedness Day parade on July 22, 1916 was followed by the swift arrest of labor organizers Thomas Mooney and Warren K. Billings, voices raised in protest were drowned out by the clamor of war-era patriots. The period of repression continued into early post-war years, when the newly passed criminal syndicalism law was invoked against members of the I. W. W. and other nonconformists. The westward moving hordes in the early days of settlement were nothing compared to the new influx of settlers welcomed to California in the 1920s. Prosperity, unrestrained, reached to giddy heights. High pressure efforts of boosters and promoters were devoted to making prosperity and California synonymous in the public mind. Its harbors, oil wells and factories, movie studios, orange groves and irrigation projects, and booming real estate subdivisions all helped to renew its association in people's thoughts with the El Dorado of the Argonauts. Cities around San Francisco Bay advanced to become maritime and manufacturing centers; the new metropolis of the south, Los Angeles, surrounded by fast expanding suburbs, became a manufacturing, oil-refining, fruit shipping, and movie-making center. By 1930, the population of California had grown to 5,677,251—an increase of 65 percent in 10 years, greater than in any other state in the Union during the same period. The increase gave it sixth place among the states in population. And again the bubble burst. The newcomers who had thronged in by the hundreds of thousands—wage earners and farmers, small investors and businessmen, elderly, retired people—found themselves in the same situation as those who came before them. Suddenly they were jobless, their savings exhausted, their businesses bankrupt, farms foreclosed, or investments wiped out. As they had done in the early l900s, and earlier 1870s, the people turned to politics. Of the State-wide political movements that began to follow close upon one another throughout the 1930s, the first was the EPIC movement, which rallied around the “End Poverty in California.” The EPIC plan was presented by Upton Sinclair when he consented in August 1933 to run for the gubernatorial nomination on the Democratic ticket. Sinclair's plan called for the establishment of self-sustaining State land colonies and the opening of idle factories, to be operated on “production for use” principles for the benefit of the unemployed and to be financed by State-issued scrip. The plan called also for repeal of the State sales tax, exemption of small homes and ranches from taxation, and the levy of graduated taxes on incomes, inheritances, corporations, and unused lands and buildings. Another plank in the EPIC platform was pensions for the aged, the physically incapacitated, and widows with dependent children. After the hottest election campaign hitherto waged in the State, Sinclair was defeated for the governorship by a narrow margin, although EPIC candidates were elected to city and Congressional offices. The people turned to other movements which seemed to promise a way out, some of which, like the EPIC movement, spread into other states. A short-lived one that swept southern California was the Utopian Society, which employed semi-dramatic rites to educate its members in social and economic affairs. The Townsend Plan, devised by elderly Long Beach physician, Dr. Francis E. Townsend, enlisted the support of large numbers of the State's more elderly citizens; its proposal promoted business recovery by paying $200 per month to each person over 60 years of age. In 1938, another project for economic recovery, the so-called “Thirty Dollars Every Thursday” or “Ham-and-Eggs” plan, rose to prominence, promising to pay aged persons $30 weekly in State warrants, financed by a 2 cent tax on all sales. On the highways leading into California in the late 1930s, scattered among long lines of streamlined automobiles was an influx of more antiquated vehicles. Like the covered wagons of earlier days, they carried all their owners' worldly goods, the elemental necessities that had changed but little in 80 years: pots, pans, bedding, basins, washtubs. These latter-day prairie schooners, like their predecessors, stopped for the night at wayside camps, where the informality of hardships loosened tongues. Once again, campfires burned along western trails—but the stories told around them resembled not at all the stories of earlier pioneers. “The dust was drifted high as the window sills.” “The cattle died a'lookin' at you.” “W'uldn't a blade of grass grow anywhere in the valley.” Over the spirit of the starving migrants, the desolation they had seen lay heavy, until they remembered that they were going to California. That horizon was a bright one, for they were sure that in a State which supplied nearly half the nation's fresh fruit and a third of its truck crops, there would be a place for them among the pickers. What only few of them learned was that earlier immigrants—Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos—had swarmed so thickly over the fertile acres that wages never rose above the standard accepted by coolie and peon labor. Or that they would have to make their homes in districts like the one where, in 1934, the National Labor Relations Board found “filth, squalor, an entire absence of sanitation, and a crowding of human beings into totally inadequate tents or crude structures built of boards, weeds, and anything that was found at hand to give a pitiful semblance of a home at its worst.” For these workers, the workmen's compensation law failed to operate, the State's minimum wage law for women and minors was ignored, medical aid was denied unless death was imminent, and labor contractors took an exorbitant percentage of wages—wages which averaged, in 1935, but $289 per family, including the income of all its members. Such were the conditions that awaited 97,642 Dust Bowl migrants in 1936, and 104,976 in the following year. In 1938, they were arriving at the rate of 10,000 a month. Their coming served to bring to people's consciousness the long unsolved problem of how to feed, clothe, and shelter the hundreds of thousands of homeless farm workers who followed the crops over the State. By 1943, a new “gold rush” had hit the West Coast—nearly one hundred years after the first. War efforts brought a new onslaught, infinitely more massive, that was to continue with no end in sight. Thousands of factory workers and servicemen who had tasted the glories of California during the early war years longed again for the sunshine, scenery, and casual lifestyles they had come to enjoy. EFFECTS OF WORLD WAR II Direction in the new era was begun in 1942. Governor Earl Warren, in 1938, won a triple nomination for attorney general—Republican, Progressive, and Democratic. He was reelected in 1946, after having won both Republican and Democratic primaries, and in 1950 (after running in 1948 as Thomas Dewey's vice-presidential candidate), he was elected to an unprecedented third term. In 1945, he was overseer of the time of organization of the United Nations in San Francisco, and its attendant high hopes. But it was also the period of a Russian threat, posed by the explosion of an atom bomb in 1949, and the Korean “police action” starting in 1950. Huge defense contracts fed the prosperity in the research facilities and factories, but problems were growing in the inner cities and in agricultural areas. Democrats picked up the State leadership after Warren went to Washington in 1953 as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Their candidate was the attorney general Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, who promised the moderate policies of his early predecessor. A major challenge, faced first by Warren and inherited by Brown, was water allocation for the State. Huge areas of land had been sold in the lush farming regions of the north to the flood of migrants and for highway development. Farmers thereafter sought the hot, dry lands such as those in the San Joaquin Valley, but those lands required irrigation. A long period of controversy and a great variety of proposals finally resulted in bond issues that would provide financing for such projects as the Oroville Dam. Growth and prosperity continued. In 1962, for example, the fourteen counties of Southern California received a net inflow of 256,000 immigrants (plus an increase of native- born of 411,000). Consumption of water in Los Angeles rose from 134 gallons per person in 1930 to more than 170 gallons in 1960. The prosperity was dampened somewhat in 1966 when procurement cutbacks shook the aerospace and defense industries. At the same time, smog and waste proliferated, and crime rose at an alarming rate. Ethnic minorities were not sharing in the prosperity and were seething with frustration. Also by the late 1950s, a huge program of coordinated freeway construction was underway—almost as staggering in its effects as water relocation efforts had been. There was a series of revolts to this construction by a variety of groups opposing construction for aesthetic as well as social and environmental reasons. The intensification of the smog problem led finally to anti-smog devices on automobiles, offering some control. Efforts in the major cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco for building rapid transit systems to alleviate auto traffic were stifled by the “Highway Lobby” (oil companies, banks, cement manufacturers, steel fabricators, etc.) It is doubtful if much progress could have been made in this area, because drivers simply did not want their mobility restricted, and therefore would not have chosen to support mass transit over road construction.