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A gold rush, a wave of Chinese immigration, and an herb shop: the story of Fiddletown
When news of the gold discovery in California circled the world in 1848, no population beyond U.S. shores answered the call in greater numbers than the Chinese. By 1860, migrants from China made up nearly a third of the state’s roughly 83,000 miners. After arduous journeys across the Pacific, often in flight from hunger or…
Read MoreThe Merry Tramps of Oakland: California’s original glampers
More than a century and a quarter before the word glamping earned an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2016, a boisterous group of women were camping in style in the wildlands of California. Beginning in the 1880s, as John Muir was captivating the nation with his writings on the “inventions of God,” the…
Read MoreGeorge Freeth, the man who brought surfing to Venice
In the early 1900s, few Californians could swim, let alone surf. So when a Hawaiian named George Freeth performed surfing demonstrations at Venice Beach in 1907, spectators were mesmerized by the man who could dance on the waves. Born in 1883 in Waikiki to a Native Hawaiian mother and English father, Freeth fell under the…
Read More22 photos of midcentury San Francisco in vivid color
Charles Cushman, a voracious traveler from small-town Indiana, was an early adopter of color photography. Never without his Contax IIA viewfinder camera, he shot seemingly everything that caught his eye — people, landscapes, city streets — while taking meticulous notes on each photograph. Over a period from 1938 to 1969 he amassed more than 14,500 Kodachrome color…
Read MoreSix days and 665 miles: Louis Remme’s amazing bank run in 1855
When fears spread about the solvency of Silicon Valley Bank on March 9, depositors withdrew $42 billion in a single day. Scholars marveled at the swiftness of the bank run, which was turbocharged by mobile phones and social media. Not long ago, bank runs unfolded only after days or weeks of reports disseminated via television and radio.…
Read MoreHow ‘something glistening in the grass’ created the city of Yreka
Many California towns can trace their origins to the discovery of some precious mineral. In Yreka, the moment was captured in a photograph. The daguerreotype above shows the mule-train packer Abraham Thompson, left, and two partners in March 1851, shortly after he spotted something glistening in the grass where his mules were eating just south of…
Read More‘A grand woman fallen on difficult times’: the Redman Hirahara Farmstead
For years, a deteriorating Queen Anne Victorian along Highway 1 in Watsonville has been a source of curiosity among passing motorists. It’s known as the Redman Hirahara Farmstead, a national landmark, and the region’s ethnic and agricultural history is embedded in its crumbling walls. Built for a wealthy farmer in 1897, the home eventually passed into…
Read MoreThe Church of One Tree, and the tale of California’s clear-cutting
There’s a church in Santa Rosa constructed entirely from the lumber of a single redwood that once stood 275 feet tall and 18 feet in diameter. The redwood used for The Church of One Tree, built in 1874, lived in a densely forested area along the Russian River known as Stumptown for all of the stumps…
Read MoreA lousy extinction: How Colpocephalum californici lived among (and on) the California condors
When conservationists captured all remaining California condors in a bid to save the dwindling species in the 1980s, they deloused the birds. The intervention was ultimately a success, lifting their population from just 27 wild birds to hundreds through captive breeding. But it also killed off all members of a species of louse that lived exclusively on…
Read MoreCalifornia’s Central Valley was once a watery landscape of lakes and marshes. Then we sucked it dry.
Fly above California’s Central Valley and a vast earth-toned checkerboard spreads out below. The fertile plain — as big as Tennessee and bathed in sunlight 300 days a year — yields a third of the produce grown in the United States. In his book “Coast of Dreams,” the historian Kevin Starr described the birth of the irrigated…
Read MoreIn California, the wildflowers used to be everywhere
For most Californians, an outing to see the spring wildflowers involves driving an hour or two to preserves in the valleys, deserts, or foothills. But the flowers used to be everywhere. In 1847, the soldier Joseph Revere provided one of the earliest descriptions of the vast bloom within the Los Angeles basin: “In the plain itself,” he…
Read MoreHow Kate Sessions made her mark on San Diego
☝️ If you spot a large tree in San Diego’s Balboa Park, there’s a good chance it was planted by this woman. The pioneer botanist Kate Sessions finalized a deal with San Diego on this week in 1892 to lease a plot of city parkland for a nursery. In exchange, she agreed to plant 100…
Read MoreHow Jackie Robinson fought racism in the Army
Jackie Robinson, who emerged from a small house on Pepper Street in Pasadena to become an American icon, was born this week in 1919. Before he broke baseball’s color barrier, Robinson was an Army second lieutenant at Camp Hood in Texas. As recounted in “Jackie Robinson: A Biography,” on the evening of July 6, 1944,…
Read MoreThe white crosses of the Mojave Desert
About 50 simple white crosses line a dusty road leading to a military post in the Mojave Desert. They’re not for soldiers killed in combat, but motorists who died in crashes along the 31-mile Fort Irwin Road linking the Barstow area and Fort Irwin National Training Center. The accidents have been blamed on the design of the…
Read MoreSteve Jobs’ sly sense of humor
L.N. Varon, a resident of Imperial Beach, was a collector of autographs, soliciting them routinely in letters to famous people. In 1983, he got an answer from Steve Jobs, who was known to be a reluctant autograph giver. His letter is pictured below, typed on stationery branded with the Apple computer letterhead and containing both the…
Read MoreHow a California tribe became one of the Coachella Valley’s most powerful forces
Search for “Agua Caliente tribal reservation” in Google Maps, and you’ll see a bizarre checkerboard design draped across Southern California’s Coachella Valley, pictured below. It’s not an error. The borders of the Agua Caliente reservation emerged as a byproduct of America’s westward expansion in the 19th century and the technological innovation that facilitated it: the railroad.…
Read MorePirates, gamblers, and L. Ron Hubbard: the history of the Islas Coronados
Peer out to sea from the southernmost stretch of California coast, and you can catch a glimpse of four rocky isles. Many San Diegans are unaware of Mexico’s Islas Coronados, but their history and natural beauty are captivating. The rugged islands have attracted Mexican pirates, Russian otter hunters, Japanese fishermen, and American rumrunners. In 1933,…
Read MoreThe bumpy tale of Plank Road
In the early 1900s, the best way to cross the desert from San Diego to Arizona was by horse. Then a local businessman named Ed Fletcher had an idea: He proposed laying wooden planks across 7 miles of soft sand, a sort of beach boardwalk without the ocean. Joseph Lippincott, a prominent civil engineer, was quoted…
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