For three hundred years California drifted in a backwash of time. Spain had discovered the region in 1542 but had done little about it until the latter part of the eighteenth century, when fears of Russian interest in the province inspired her to settle a handful of missionary priests, half-educated soldiers, and thoroughly uneducated civilians in a few pinprick outposts scattered along the coast from San Diego Bay to San Francisco Bay. After Mexico won her independence from Spain in 1821, the Mexicans had done little better by California.

By the 1840’s this program of neglect (not particularly benign) had nurtured a civilization that may have had no parallel in its own or any other time. Largely confined to a narrow strip of coastal valleys and plains, it was a massive pastoral society whose land was checkerboarded by kingdoms of grass; a society dominated by fewer than ten thousand people of Spanish, Mexican-Indian, and Negro mixtures who ostensibly ruled over fifteen thousand missionized Indians and, spread over California’s 158,693 square miles, at least ninety thousand other Indians who had not embraced the glory of the Cross; a society whose internal government was a loose collection of family alliances crippled by almost constant (and generally bloodless) political squabbling.

Full Story >>