Swiss immigrant John Augustus Sutter arrived in the Sacramento Valley in 1839, when California was still a province of Mexico. As a foreigner, he was not eligible for the land grant he needed to fulfill his vision of empire. The requirements to secure a grant were that the applicant must be a Mexican citizen and a member of the Catholic Church, occupy the desired property for a specified time, and erect minimal improvements. An additional caveat on Sutter’s New Helvetia (New

President Abraham Lincoln decreed Thanksgiving as a national holiday in September 1863. Prior to that, the observance was sporadically celebrated, mainly in New England, as a day of feasting and merriment after the autumnal harvests. California was not yet a state when military governor General Bennett Riley proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving in November 1849, during the turbulence of the Gold Rush. It is unlikely that very many gold miners sat down to a groaning table, even if

California was admitted to the Union as the 31st state on September 9, 1850. That year 27 original counties were created, with Mariposa and San Diego Counties the largest in acreage. Mariposa County, with an area of about 30,000 square miles, covered 1/5 of the state. Later it was subdivided into Tulare, Mono, Merced, Madera, Fresno, Kings, and Kern Counties. The original San Diego County included the areas that now comprise San Diego, Imperial, Riverside, San Bernardino, and

The pioneers who trekked west in covered wagons in the 1840s knew they had to take enough food to last six months. Trading posts between the Missouri River and the Pacific Coast were few, and the emigrants crossed through territories where the availability of game and wild berries was uncertain. Recommended supplies per adult typically included 200 pounds of flour, 10 pounds of rice, 30 pounds of pilot bread (dehydrated meal wafers), 25 pounds of sugar, 75 pounds of bacon, 1/

As legend tells us, All Hallows Eve is the night when spirits of the dead haunt the homes and neighborhoods they knew when they were alive, and need to be appeased lest they do some harm. As they have done since the Middle Ages in Europe, children in costume roam door to door saying “Trick or Treat,” asking for candy. The “trick” is an idle threat to perform mischief if the homeowner fails to deliver the treat. The custom of Trick-or-Treating possibly evolved from a centuries

Shortly after the close of the American Revolution, Boston whalers began navigating in California waters, hunting the prized sea otter. Merchant ships from several nations prowled the Pacific Coast, but American merchant ships—named “Bostons” by the native citizenry—quickly dominated the trade. At the time, Spanish-owned California was a bucolic place, sparsely populated with Franciscan missions and families who lived on government land grants called ranchos. After Mexico gai

Are tall tales accepted as fact just because the story is published in a memoir—and therefore, “must be” true? Consider the smallpox scenario included in The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie of Kentucky, published in 1831, and until quite recently accepted by historians as genuine. Pattie, a fur trapper, claimed he had won his freedom from a dank, Mexican California jail cell in San Diego when he agreed to use a supply of smallpox vaccine he had brought from New Mexico

Have you ever wondered how the westward-emigrating pioneers of the 1840s and 50s managed to get their covered wagons over the cliffs and precipices they encountered as they passed through mountain ranges? They emptied their wagons and lowered them, one by one, with ropes. Still hard to visualize, isn’t it—perhaps because our brains are too attuned to the freeway-everywhere-automotive-comfort-world we live in. Next time you travel Interstate 80, look down into the forested cha

During the three hundred-plus years Spain claimed ownership of California by right of conquest, Spain’s official religion took a part in setting the state’s first southern boundary. Imperial Spain’s Nueva Espana (New Spain) was far-flung: it included the Caribbean, Mexico, and parts of what are now the southwestern United States. To consolidate its colonial territories, spread the Christian doctrine and introduce European livestock and crops, mission outposts were established

Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821—in general (though the specifics were different) for much the same political and economic reasons our Thirteen Colonies declared their independence from England in 1776. The new Republic of Mexico acquired Spain’s former conquests extending from coastal California to the eastern border of Texas. In the twenty-five years that Mexico owned California, Mexico City sequentially installed seventeen governors in their inherited prov

When Franciscan friars Father Crespi and Father Junipero Serra came to colonize California in 1769, they looked upon this undertaking as a “sacred expedition” to bring native heathens into the Church. In truth, the effort was prompted by rumors of Russian ships nosing about the Pacific Coast—a potential threat to Spain’s unoccupied New World holdings. The priests were accompanied by California’s first governor Don Gaspar de Portola, and escorted by soldiers to protect the mis

A mere 300 years ago, while colonies on America’s Eastern Seaboard were developing, California’s vast stretches of geographically diverse, unspoiled terrain still slumbered in the sun, husbanded by native peoples in scattered villages. They lived off the land’s abundance, as they had done for 10,000 years or more, unaware that their homeland suddenly “belonged” to an outsider in 1520 when Spain claimed ownership by right of conquest of Mexico, and by extension the North Ameri