History History

Over 20,000 years ago, North America and Asia were linked by a land bridge: Beringia, where the Bering Strait now lies. This enabled nomadic Siberian hunters to migrate: over the centuries, they spread out over the territory of present-day Alaska and adapted to this new environment. Several ethnic groups, distinct in their physical characteristics, language and way of life, descended from them and settled throughout the continent, including the United States. The result is a country with a very long history of settlement, led by the Great West. For it was in California, on Santa Rosa Island - off the coast of Santa Barbara - that the oldest bones in North America were found, those of "Arlington Springs Man", dating back some 13,000 years.

In 1530, Hernán Cortés reached Mexico City and then the coasts of the Pacific Ocean. The conquistador thinks that the coasts which face him are those of the island of California which he seeks. Successive expeditions showed that it was in fact a peninsula, the Baja California (low California), which joined the Alta California (high California, which is present-day California) to the north. The coast is inhospitable, the land is wild. Isolated by the Sierra Nevada mountains and the ocean, California was inhabited by numerous small Indian communities with varied dialects, living from gathering, hunting and fishing. In 1776, their total population was estimated at 300,000 people. Although they were welcoming, they had neither the gold nor the riches that the conquistadores sought.

California, which did not keep the promises of an El Dorado, remained practically out of the picture, even if, for a few centuries, it interested the great navigators, including Francis Drake, the pirate privateer of Queen Elizabeth of England, who stayed in 1579 on the coast of Marin County, north of San Francisco Bay. This area was still unknown to the explorers. The fog characteristic of the bay and the geography are such that the navigators systematically miss the entry in the bay by the mouth of the Golden Gate

From 1591 to 1769, the Jesuit and then Franciscan monks opened the way for Spanish colonization. The pattern was always the same: establishment of a mission, construction of a presidio (military fort), installation of a garrison. The first mission, that of San Diego de Alcala (on the site of present-day San Diego), was founded in 1769 by the Franciscan father Junipero Serra and San Francisco Bay was discovered the same year.

Between 1769 and 1823, the famous Camino Real was built, the royal road linking the 21 California missions built by the Franciscans on lands populated by Indians. The Indians were put to work, but their population was soon decimated by viruses and bacteria brought by the settlers, against which they had no immunity. The last mission, the most northerly, was built in Sonoma in 1823.

The establishment of a Spanish settler population became effective with the expedition of Juan Bautista de Anza, leading to the foundation of San Francisco. In September 1776, he founded the presidio, a military fort that can still be seen today. Mission San Francisco de Asis, better known as Mission Dolores, was founded a month later in October 1776. In 1773, as the Spanish crown had authorized the acquisition of land by Spanish individuals already living in the missions or presidios (forts protecting the missions), the soldiers were the first to make use of this offer: they created the first San Francisco ranchos by acquiring imported livestock. Society organized itself on this basis, remaining essentially agricultural and not very prosperous until the discovery of gold.

In 1821, Mexico declared its independence and California became Mexican. Its capital was Monterey. The Mexicans living in Southern California expelled the Spaniards and took over the region, which they named Alta California. While the Mexican government favors the destruction of several missions, the oppression of the Indians continues. This political change was not accompanied by any real social changes, and Californians maintained their way of life around the growing ranchos.

In 1833, 88,000 Indians were baptized by the Church and 31,000 continued to live under the care of missionaries. That same year, the Republic of Mexico, which controlled California at the time, ordered the immediate secularization of the missions and their transfer into the hands of the Indians. The Indians, because of the laws and because of their dependence on the system, did not see the missions return to them. Or rather, they will see them pass into the hands of astute large landowners. The missions will be plundered and abandoned in the original desert

Americans migrated to California in the 1840s. The Mexican government tolerated them, but refused to grant them property rights. In the Sonoma Valley, they formed the group of bears, the Bears. In May 1846, war was declared between Mexico and the United States. On June 14, 1846, 33 Americans, encouraged by the presence of U.S. troops commanded by Captain John C. Fremont, revolted against the Mexican government in Sonoma. On June 15, 1846, the Bears mutinied against the government of General Vallejo: it was the Bear Flag Revolt. The Mexicans were driven out and the Republic of California was proclaimed. The flag with the grizzly bear and the words "California Republic" was hoisted on the square in Sonoma. On July 7, 1846, the battle of Monterey was won by the American army: it was the end of the Mexican reign in California, which was incorporated into the United States in September 1850

On January 24, 1848, gold was discovered along the American River at Sutter's Mill, near Coloma and Sacramento, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. When word of the discovery reached Sam Brannan, the owner of the California Star newspaper in San Francisco, he set up a store with shovels and other paraphernalia to dig for the precious nuggets. He then hit the streets of San Francisco announcing the news: "Gold! Gold! Gold in the American River! In a few days, the gold rush turned into a frenzy. By the end of 1848, nearly 10,000 gold seekers were roaming California. It was the time of the boomtowns, now ghost towns. Between 1841 and 1869, nearly 300,000 people crossed the Rockies to reach the Californian El Dorado.

The first effect on San Francisco was devastating. The sailors of the bay deserted their boats, each one abandoning his work and his family to throw himself into the stream of gold seekers. Then, as rumors spread, Chinese, Europeans, Australians and South Americans disembarked in the bay. They were the forty-niners, those of 1849. Soon the city overflowed, suddenly growing from less than 1,000 inhabitants to about 25,000 in one year. A mushroom town, it was also a giant shantytown where men lived in tents and where chaos reigned. There is no gold in the direct vicinity of San Francisco, it must be sought further north-east, in Sacramento, which also owes its development to the precious ore. But in San Francisco there is the port, where men from all walks of life disembark en masse. The city welcomed the gold seekers who returned to spend their hard-earned money in the bars and hotels of the city. This was the beginning of the Barbary Coast. The city was then a giant gambling den, made up of opium houses, brothels and gambling dens

At the same time, money began to flow in. Particularly in today's Financial District, where investors financed the search for gold, which began to dry up in the 1860s. Railroad construction with cheap Chinese labor took over, with the inauguration of the transcontinental line in 1869, celebrated at the junction of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific companies at Promontory Summit in Utah, known today as the Golden Spike National Historic Site. The Big Four, the company's four main investors, make a fortune. They are Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker. The new line caused the town's population to explode.

Little by little, large industrial fortunes were established and sought to form a respectable society. Thanks to Andrew Hallidie's cable car launched in 1873, the hills around the Barbary Coast became accessible. The members of the new high society moved up to the heights of Nob Hill and Russian Hill and away from the "little people" of the plain. The literary salons developed and the writers flocked. Mark Twain arrived in 1860, the same year as Ambrose Bierce, reporter for theExaminer, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London. In the 1890s, San Francisco became the "Paris of the West": a city of refinement and elegance. It was the great period of Victorian wooden villas.

However, not everything is rosy for the Chinese community, which has been growing steadily since 1849. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, stripping them of their right to citizenship. Immigration from China came to a screeching halt, and the 1890s saw violence against the community, which was gradually organizing. This led to the creation of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, which sought to defend the rights of Americans of Chinese origin and offered programs to support the community. It wasn't until the Second World War and the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 that the exclusion laws were repealed.

At the beginning of the ^20th century, San Francisco was in its heyday. But on April 18, 1906, at around 5 a.m., a gigantic earthquake killed around a hundred people and ruptured the gas mains. A huge fire ravaged half the city for three days, including Downtown. San Francisco quickly became a gigantic construction site. The city was rebuilt using more effective anti-seismic techniques, and the Marina was created to host the 1915 World's Fair. This marked the rebirth of the city.

In the 1920s, California became the leading agricultural producer in the United States, the breadbasket of the American West. In the wake of the crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, the new poor from the East and Oklahoma, the Okies, flock to its agricultural plains. These are the Grapes of Wrath of which Steinbeck speaks.

With the abolition of Prohibition, California also became the leading producer of wine in the United States, thanks to the Napa, Sonoma and Russian River valleys.

California played an active role in the war against Japan with its arms and aeronautics industries. But the conflict also marked a difficult time for the Japanese community in Japantown. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the internment of all Japanese and Japanese Americans and their transfer to camps across the country. At the end of the war, the Japanese American Citizens League of San Francisco lobbied for recognition of the injustice done to these Japanese Americans. With the signing of the U.S.-Japan Peace Treaty in San Francisco in 1951, the government finally rehabilitated them.

The United Nations Charter is signed in San Francisco.

The war was followed by an incredible period of economic growth: the Trente Glorieuses. These three decades of growth affected all the developed countries involved in the conflict. But unlike the others, the United States did not have to cope with reconstruction, rationing or new institutions. Economic growth, boosted by the war effort, continued with the implementation of major projects: highways, irrigation... all sectors were in full swing. California prospered, bringing with it the rest of the United States, and indeed the Western world, and became the most powerful state in the Federation. The myth of surfing beaches, gleaming automobiles and villas with impeccable lawns spread: it was the era of the Beach Boys,Hotel California...

However, a whole section of young people felt overwhelmed and lost, no longer finding their bearings in the affluent society of post-war America. In the 1950s and 1960s, these young people gathered in San Francisco around the emblematic figure of Jack Kerouac and his novel On the Road, published in 1957, as well as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, all three supported by the great publisher and owner of City Lights Bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Allen Ginsberg describes the despair of his generation in his Howl. Considered obscene, the poem was banned by the American censors. But Ferlinghetti defied the law and published the poem. A historic lawsuit was launched against the publisher and the writer: the 1957 Howl Trial. Numerous demonstrations took place in San Francisco and the Bay Area to protest the censorship. The court agrees to withdraw the trial: an unprecedented victory.

The Beatniks' victory over censorship was a small revolution that turned young people upside down. In the early 1960s, students on the UC Berkeley campus demonstrated for greater freedoms, and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district went up in flames: it was Flower Power. Long hair, free love, rejection of institutions and the Vietnam War... It was in this same neighborhood that 1967 became known as the Summer of Love, with its share of LSD and marijuana, psychedelia and sexual and homosexual freedom. After 1967, a large number of hippies left San Francisco to establish communities that are still active today, such as Bolinas. Humboldt County, America's marijuana-producing capital, is still home to many hippies of the old and new generations.

The Summer of Love allowed for a great deal of sexual freedom, and gay men would soon organize to create their own activism. When Harvey Milk and his partner decided to leave the Haight in the early 1970s, they turned to Castro: an inexpensive neighborhood with lovely abandoned houses. In their wake, the gays built a little haven: word of mouth did its job and soon hundreds of them landed in Castro, where they bought up the abandoned properties and made the neighborhood profitable. In 1977, Harvey Milk was elected supervisor of the mayor's office: it was an incredible victory for the gays of San Francisco and elsewhere. Harvey Milk was the first openly gay elected official in California and one of the first in the United States. But in November 1978, a former colleague at City Hall, Dan White, assassinated him and Mayor Moscone

Gay activism continued its fight for equal rights, but soon had to face a new scourge: AIDS. It appeared at the beginning of the 1980s and hit San Francisco's gays first. In the space of a decade, the Castro lost almost a third of its population... The community therefore took the lead in alerting public opinion and the authorities and in advancing research

In the 1980s and 1990s, Silicon Valley attracted engineers, entrepreneurs and large IT companies. It was here that the Internet was born. Numerous start-ups emerged overnight in a new modern gold rush. San Jose smells like El Dorado, and fortunes are made fast. Dynamic young people found themselves at the head of considerable sums of money at barely 25 years of age. It was euphoria: the speculative machine was launched. But in 2000-2001, the bubble burst. Since then, activity has largely recovered, and yesterday's start-ups have become today's behemoths. Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google and Yahoo! are among the most impressive success stories. More recent examples include Uber, Airbnb, Instagram and Yelp.

The U.S. Supreme Court puts an end to five years of uncertainty and twists and turns on the issue of marriage for all by extending the definition of marriage to same-sex couples. The gay pride parade held on June 29 and 30 was a veritable explosion of joy for the homosexual community.

The years 2020 and 2021 were among the worst wildfires California has ever seen. In two short years, nearly 20% of the giant redwoods succumbed to the embers. The seven largest fires in the state's history have occurred since 2018, and the Oak Fire megafire of summer 2022 that licked the western flank of Yosemite National Park did not contradict this tragic trend.

New technology money is also driving up real estate prices, with the result that San Francisco and the Bay Area are undergoing gentrification. The poor and middle class are forced to move to more affordable areas. At the same time, the US opioid crisis hit San Francisco hard. The homeless are multiplying, often intoxicated with fentanyl, a highly potent opioid. The new Zombie drug, or tranq, which mixes fentanyl with a powerful anesthetic, causes limb putrefaction and cascading overdoses. In 2023, 800 overdoses were recorded, particularly in the Tenderloin and Civic Center districts.

From an economic point of view, Silicon Valley executives are fleeing downtown San Francisco, for fear of the wave of drug addicts living on the streets and because of exorbitant rent prices. With the Covid of 2020-2022, telecommuting is becoming widespread and emptying Downtown. Californian tech engineers, if they don't live in the Bay Area around Palo Alto, move to Colorado, Utah, Las Vegas, L.A., Portland.... In downtown San Francisco, nearly 30% of bars, restaurants, nightclubs and shops have closed. Since then, the economy has struggled to recover. In 2024, nearly 30% of offices were empty in downtown San Francisco, compared with 10% in 2019.

As San Francisco prepares new Prop E public safety measures to improve neighborhood safety, stronger laws and policing have contributed to a 32% drop in property crime and a 14% drop in violent crime in the first three months of 2024. Crime had exploded since 2020 and the Covid crisis, and has been falling slowly since 2023.