The population of California has grown more rapidly than the rest of the United States at a truly stunning rate. There were many events that contributed to the prominence of California and its amazing growth of population. The San Francisco Gold Rush in 1849 is arguably the most significant single event attributable to the growth of the Golden State,. Hundreds of thousands of people began to flock to what seemed to be easy pickings for the dedicated, the new territory of the US. The First Transcontinental Railroad was another contributing factor in the growth of the state, essentially making the journey to obtain the gold, and the Golden State Dream, that much more efficient. This technological phenomenon led to the development of communication infrastructure in the form of sprawling trans-national rail systems. After the turn of the century, the discovery and development of the oil industry provided a large source of California’s economic production and growth capabilities, only to be further fueled by WWII and the development of the defense industry within the State. The growth of California and its rise to prominence on the international stage are rooted in individual’s personal desires to gain financially, often euphemized with “in search of a better life.” This is especially true for the first wave of migrants to the state for economic reasons primarily, a group that would famously become known as the “49ers.”
The Gold Rush began in 1848 when James W. Marshall at Sutter’s Mill discovered gold. Samuel Brannan was the first publicist of the Gold Rush in San Francisco, famously credited with walking around with gold in a jar exclaiming, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” The discoveries of gold in Northern California in Sacramento were soon thereafter sensationalized throughout the nation leading to a massive migration of peoples into California, particularly to the area mainly in Northern California where much of the gold was known to be. In between 1849 and 1855, that first initial migration over six years saw approximately 300,000 people migrate into California. Essentially, the Gold Rush is responsible for the first major spike in population the state experienced since being apart of the United States, yet it was also one single wave in a series to come.
The Gold Rush’s historical significance on the long term was fundamentally rooted in the notion of the “California Dream,” a place of new beginnings where hard work and good luck were rewarded with boundless riches. The Historian HW Brands described the Gold Rush’s influence on the supposed ideal of the nation, “The old American Dream . . . was the dream of the Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard . . . of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year by year. The new dream was the dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck. [This] golden dream . . . became a prominent part of the American psyche only after [Sutter's Mill]." In essence, California’s get-rich-quick potential was so alluring that an entire nation felt the wind of its spirits underneath their wings, propelling them to fly away from their cages and into the free sky of the California Dream. In addition to the impact on such an intangible aspect of history, the Gold Rush had concrete results in terms of helping settlements in the surrounding area grow to sizable populations. No place in California was more effected by this era than San Francisco, whose population rose from 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 two years later, and by the year 1870 had exploded to 150,000. These settlements were a direct result of the Gold Rush; with the large influx of people to the state, along with them came both money, and a freakishly insatiable demand for goods and services.
The journey to California in search of the instant riches offered by the Gold Rush era initially was done two ways, by land or sea. Before a land route was produced that was easily accessible to the average person, the sea option was used. Sailors generally went one of two routes: down past the tip of South America and back up the West Coast to the port of San Francisco or through the Panama Canal. The California Trail allowed a future group of migrants the option of traveling westward by land, which soon became the preferred option for the large majority of the pioneers coming to the region. The California Trail holds a greater significance, however, as it would ultimately used as the route for the groundbreaking First Transcontinental Railroad.
The First Transcontinental Railroad (formerly known as the Pacific Railroad) was completed in 1869, stretching cross-country from Omaha to Sacramento and bringing California into the main fold of the United States. The road established a mechanized transportation system that would revolutionize the population and economy of the American West. As rail lines increased in proximity and in breadth, they opened up huge areas that would have otherwise gone uninhabited for a much longer time, primarily because the one of the principal commodities transported across transcontinental rail lines was people. The Railroad established an environment that made possible the creation of numerous towns and settlements, paved the way to abundant mineral deposits and fertile tracts of pastures and farmlands, and included the Western United States into the overall trade and consumption of American goods. In sum, it turned the lawless Wild West into an industrialized economic powerhouse.
In 1870 the two largest rail companies on the West Coast were Central Pacific and Southern Pacific. That year the two giants converged, granting Southern Pacific a near monopoly within the region of the Southwest. The Santa Fe Railroad Company entered into the Southern California rail scene, constructing the Surf Line along the coast from San Francisco to San Diego. This infusion of competition ignited a rate war with Southern Pacific. This rate war, compounded with the fact that these rail companies were interested in selling some of the land that was granted to them by the US government, led to the formation of many “boomtowns,” in which free rides were given to new settlements to eager investors looking to buy land at a good price. Major advertising campaigns by Southern Pacific, Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and other major carriers of the day helped transform Southern California into a major tourist attraction as well as generated intense interest in exploiting the area’s agricultural potential. One of the major reasons that folks migrated to California was its reputation as an agricultural powerhouse. Those who rode the trains west discovered when they arrived that if irrigated properly, California was extremely well suited to fruit cultivation and agriculture in general. This helped lead to the exodus of people from Midwestern states to Southern California and forever transformed the once sparsely populated landscape into a booming region of commerce.
The Twentieth Century would not be dominated by Gold and Railways, rather Black Gold and Highways. The oil industry in California experienced a serious boom, ultimately contributing to the California we all know and love today. Once discovered in Northern Los Angeles at New Haul, oil production quickly overtook mining and agriculture as the dominant aspect of the state’s economy. Annual output of barrels per year rose from 4.3 million in 1900 to 105 million in 1920, making California the largest oil producing state within the Union. Many of the largest and most powerful oil companies in the world began in Southern California. Unocal was the original Californian oil company who made the discovery at New Haul; Edward Doheny began an oil company with early site near La Brae Tar Pits that eventually turned into Arco Corporation. Ohio based Standard Oil Company eventually became Chevron, the company responsible for inception of offshore drilling, a trend shortly followed by competitors Texaco and Shell.
In 1896, offshore drilling emerged into infancy in the Summerland oil field in Santa Barbara County. The same field had at least 187 offshore oil wells drilled by the summer of 1902. The successes of these early drills caused an expansion of coastal drilling, extending from Santa Barbara County to Ventura County, Los Angeles County, as well as Orange County. This chapter in California history has yet to be concluded, as although there has indeed been much profit gained from these offshore wells, the Santa Barbara Oil Spill that occurred in 1969 is proof of the potential costs incurred by nearby coastal communities, as well as the general beach-loving public at large.
Intimately tied to the boom of oil related industries was Henry Ford’s fulfilled vow to create an automobile that every single American Family could afford. The realization of his dream is manifests itself in a simple symbol of achievement, the Ford Model T. Not only was Ford successful in designing a relatively efficient and costly vehicle that was accessible to the average American family, he also innovated the credit industry in his attempts to sell as many cars as possible. The eventual domination of the personal automobile as a means of everyday transportation in the US meant that the public rail systems built by Huntington in LA and OC, known as the Red Cars, would soon become obsolete thanks to the birth of the sprawling CA Highway system. The Highways would use the old Southern California rail tracks as blueprints, eventually leaving it a land of expansive roadways meant for personal auto use rather than public trains as a major source of transport.
This same period of the twentieth century saw the rise of the studio system. MGM, Universal, and Warner Bros all bought land in Hollywood, which in the early 20th century was just a small , sleepy subdivision on the outskirts of Los Angeles. By the 1930’s the show-biz population had extended its reach to television, hosting studios for major networks such as NBC and CBS. The first television introduced in 1948 essentially devastated the movie industry, and by 1960 90% of American homes possessed a television.
During the Great Depression, California was hit especially hard. The recent Dust Bowl migration patterns created the perfect economic storm; large surpluses of labor and flailing consumer demand. These two confluent forces created an economic environment in California that was ripe for reform by shifting domination away from the agricultural and mining sectors. This happened essentially as a response to the increasingly large demand for military expenditures which primarily included the manufacturing of airplanes and ships. The location on the western front of the war made the California Coastline strategically essential to the war effort, and th region consequently became a natural gathering place for American defense corporations. The Longhead Brothers made airplanes for WWI in Santa Barbara and eventually became defense giant Lockheed. Donald Douglas began building airplanes on Pico Blvd and eventually moved his operation to Santa Monica. His company would become the internationally recognized airplane manufacturing powerhouse Boeing. Henry Kaiser enters the ship building industry during WWII, successfully employing 300,000 people for his company alone. Kaiser’s legacy is ironically not for his killing machinery, but rather the health-care provider Kaiser Permanente. (The medical industry titan started as a program to ensure the health of his numerous workers, and is now the only surviving aspect of the California corporation.) During WWII, six out of ten contracts that came into California for military expenditures were for the purchase of aircrafts. The industry boomed within the region, creating a large support network of separate industries such as rubber, plastics, and electronics.
California owes its amazing growth to many factors. Starting with the Gold Rush in 1849, the new area was prime real estate for the Railroad industry. Those two forces together helped create the first wave westward, a California reflecting a seedling of its current self. Almost a century passes between the Gold Rush and the Great Depression, which was the second leading event (worsened by the Dust Bowl) to contribute to the population growth in the Golden State. WWII, as with most of the nation, helped bring California out of the Depression stronger than before. Oil, Highways, Airplanes, and Shipyards make up the bulk of the current Californian proverbial banana split. That makes Hollywood the cherry on top, selling the American Dream as if it were sno-cones on a Sunday.
The Gold Rush began in 1848 when James W. Marshall at Sutter’s Mill discovered gold. Samuel Brannan was the first publicist of the Gold Rush in San Francisco, famously credited with walking around with gold in a jar exclaiming, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” The discoveries of gold in Northern California in Sacramento were soon thereafter sensationalized throughout the nation leading to a massive migration of peoples into California, particularly to the area mainly in Northern California where much of the gold was known to be. In between 1849 and 1855, that first initial migration over six years saw approximately 300,000 people migrate into California. Essentially, the Gold Rush is responsible for the first major spike in population the state experienced since being apart of the United States, yet it was also one single wave in a series to come.
The Gold Rush’s historical significance on the long term was fundamentally rooted in the notion of the “California Dream,” a place of new beginnings where hard work and good luck were rewarded with boundless riches. The Historian HW Brands described the Gold Rush’s influence on the supposed ideal of the nation, “The old American Dream . . . was the dream of the Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard . . . of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year by year. The new dream was the dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck. [This] golden dream . . . became a prominent part of the American psyche only after [Sutter's Mill]." In essence, California’s get-rich-quick potential was so alluring that an entire nation felt the wind of its spirits underneath their wings, propelling them to fly away from their cages and into the free sky of the California Dream. In addition to the impact on such an intangible aspect of history, the Gold Rush had concrete results in terms of helping settlements in the surrounding area grow to sizable populations. No place in California was more effected by this era than San Francisco, whose population rose from 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 two years later, and by the year 1870 had exploded to 150,000. These settlements were a direct result of the Gold Rush; with the large influx of people to the state, along with them came both money, and a freakishly insatiable demand for goods and services.
The journey to California in search of the instant riches offered by the Gold Rush era initially was done two ways, by land or sea. Before a land route was produced that was easily accessible to the average person, the sea option was used. Sailors generally went one of two routes: down past the tip of South America and back up the West Coast to the port of San Francisco or through the Panama Canal. The California Trail allowed a future group of migrants the option of traveling westward by land, which soon became the preferred option for the large majority of the pioneers coming to the region. The California Trail holds a greater significance, however, as it would ultimately used as the route for the groundbreaking First Transcontinental Railroad.
The First Transcontinental Railroad (formerly known as the Pacific Railroad) was completed in 1869, stretching cross-country from Omaha to Sacramento and bringing California into the main fold of the United States. The road established a mechanized transportation system that would revolutionize the population and economy of the American West. As rail lines increased in proximity and in breadth, they opened up huge areas that would have otherwise gone uninhabited for a much longer time, primarily because the one of the principal commodities transported across transcontinental rail lines was people. The Railroad established an environment that made possible the creation of numerous towns and settlements, paved the way to abundant mineral deposits and fertile tracts of pastures and farmlands, and included the Western United States into the overall trade and consumption of American goods. In sum, it turned the lawless Wild West into an industrialized economic powerhouse.
In 1870 the two largest rail companies on the West Coast were Central Pacific and Southern Pacific. That year the two giants converged, granting Southern Pacific a near monopoly within the region of the Southwest. The Santa Fe Railroad Company entered into the Southern California rail scene, constructing the Surf Line along the coast from San Francisco to San Diego. This infusion of competition ignited a rate war with Southern Pacific. This rate war, compounded with the fact that these rail companies were interested in selling some of the land that was granted to them by the US government, led to the formation of many “boomtowns,” in which free rides were given to new settlements to eager investors looking to buy land at a good price. Major advertising campaigns by Southern Pacific, Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and other major carriers of the day helped transform Southern California into a major tourist attraction as well as generated intense interest in exploiting the area’s agricultural potential. One of the major reasons that folks migrated to California was its reputation as an agricultural powerhouse. Those who rode the trains west discovered when they arrived that if irrigated properly, California was extremely well suited to fruit cultivation and agriculture in general. This helped lead to the exodus of people from Midwestern states to Southern California and forever transformed the once sparsely populated landscape into a booming region of commerce.
The Twentieth Century would not be dominated by Gold and Railways, rather Black Gold and Highways. The oil industry in California experienced a serious boom, ultimately contributing to the California we all know and love today. Once discovered in Northern Los Angeles at New Haul, oil production quickly overtook mining and agriculture as the dominant aspect of the state’s economy. Annual output of barrels per year rose from 4.3 million in 1900 to 105 million in 1920, making California the largest oil producing state within the Union. Many of the largest and most powerful oil companies in the world began in Southern California. Unocal was the original Californian oil company who made the discovery at New Haul; Edward Doheny began an oil company with early site near La Brae Tar Pits that eventually turned into Arco Corporation. Ohio based Standard Oil Company eventually became Chevron, the company responsible for inception of offshore drilling, a trend shortly followed by competitors Texaco and Shell.
In 1896, offshore drilling emerged into infancy in the Summerland oil field in Santa Barbara County. The same field had at least 187 offshore oil wells drilled by the summer of 1902. The successes of these early drills caused an expansion of coastal drilling, extending from Santa Barbara County to Ventura County, Los Angeles County, as well as Orange County. This chapter in California history has yet to be concluded, as although there has indeed been much profit gained from these offshore wells, the Santa Barbara Oil Spill that occurred in 1969 is proof of the potential costs incurred by nearby coastal communities, as well as the general beach-loving public at large.
Intimately tied to the boom of oil related industries was Henry Ford’s fulfilled vow to create an automobile that every single American Family could afford. The realization of his dream is manifests itself in a simple symbol of achievement, the Ford Model T. Not only was Ford successful in designing a relatively efficient and costly vehicle that was accessible to the average American family, he also innovated the credit industry in his attempts to sell as many cars as possible. The eventual domination of the personal automobile as a means of everyday transportation in the US meant that the public rail systems built by Huntington in LA and OC, known as the Red Cars, would soon become obsolete thanks to the birth of the sprawling CA Highway system. The Highways would use the old Southern California rail tracks as blueprints, eventually leaving it a land of expansive roadways meant for personal auto use rather than public trains as a major source of transport.
This same period of the twentieth century saw the rise of the studio system. MGM, Universal, and Warner Bros all bought land in Hollywood, which in the early 20th century was just a small , sleepy subdivision on the outskirts of Los Angeles. By the 1930’s the show-biz population had extended its reach to television, hosting studios for major networks such as NBC and CBS. The first television introduced in 1948 essentially devastated the movie industry, and by 1960 90% of American homes possessed a television.
During the Great Depression, California was hit especially hard. The recent Dust Bowl migration patterns created the perfect economic storm; large surpluses of labor and flailing consumer demand. These two confluent forces created an economic environment in California that was ripe for reform by shifting domination away from the agricultural and mining sectors. This happened essentially as a response to the increasingly large demand for military expenditures which primarily included the manufacturing of airplanes and ships. The location on the western front of the war made the California Coastline strategically essential to the war effort, and th region consequently became a natural gathering place for American defense corporations. The Longhead Brothers made airplanes for WWI in Santa Barbara and eventually became defense giant Lockheed. Donald Douglas began building airplanes on Pico Blvd and eventually moved his operation to Santa Monica. His company would become the internationally recognized airplane manufacturing powerhouse Boeing. Henry Kaiser enters the ship building industry during WWII, successfully employing 300,000 people for his company alone. Kaiser’s legacy is ironically not for his killing machinery, but rather the health-care provider Kaiser Permanente. (The medical industry titan started as a program to ensure the health of his numerous workers, and is now the only surviving aspect of the California corporation.) During WWII, six out of ten contracts that came into California for military expenditures were for the purchase of aircrafts. The industry boomed within the region, creating a large support network of separate industries such as rubber, plastics, and electronics.
California owes its amazing growth to many factors. Starting with the Gold Rush in 1849, the new area was prime real estate for the Railroad industry. Those two forces together helped create the first wave westward, a California reflecting a seedling of its current self. Almost a century passes between the Gold Rush and the Great Depression, which was the second leading event (worsened by the Dust Bowl) to contribute to the population growth in the Golden State. WWII, as with most of the nation, helped bring California out of the Depression stronger than before. Oil, Highways, Airplanes, and Shipyards make up the bulk of the current Californian proverbial banana split. That makes Hollywood the cherry on top, selling the American Dream as if it were sno-cones on a Sunday.
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