Episode 107
What is the History of California?
On this day in 1850, the thirty-first state of the Union is admitted. So today, on its 175th birthday, I want to find out a little more about its history before statehood, the reasons why it became an important piece of land for the US, and how it grew to become not just one of the largest states, but one of the largest economies in the world, as I ask… what is the history of California?
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Special guest for this episode:
- Patricia Nelson Limerick, a Professor of History of the American West at University of Colorado Boulder, formerly President of the Organization of American Historians, American Studies Association, the Western History Association, and the Society of American Historians, and Vice President of the Teaching Division of the American Historical Association, and co-founded the Center of the American West. And in 2015 she was appointed, by nomination from President Obama, to the National Council on the Humanities.
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Highlights from this episode:
- California's admission as the 31st state in 1850 marked a significant turning point in American history.
- The diversity of California's native populations and their rich cultural practices shaped the land long before statehood.
- The Gold Rush of 1849 spurred a massive influx of settlers, fundamentally altering California's demographic landscape.
- California's environment is incredibly varied, offering everything from deserts to stunning coastlines that attracted settlers.
- The state's history is a complex tapestry of colonization, indigenous displacement, and the evolving narrative of American expansionism.
- California's legacy includes ongoing issues of racial inequality and the enduring presence of its indigenous and Hispanic populations.
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Additional Resources:
Dorothy Ramon Learning Center – We save & share Native American cultures
California Geography Essentials | Visit California
Who is Junipero Serra? | Serra
The Dominguez and Escalante Expedition - Dinosaur National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) | National Archives
Freedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction by Stacey L. Smith
The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790–1850 by Andrew C. Isenberg
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https://america-a-history.captivate.fm/episode/what-is-the-history-of-california-patricia-nelson-limerick
How Did Slavery Impact Cherokee Nation?
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Transcript
So Today, on its 175th birthday, I want to find out a little more about its history before statehood, the reasons why it became an important piece of land for the US and how it grew to become not just one of the largest states, but one of the largest economies in the world.
Speaker A:As I ask, what is the history of California?
Speaker A:Welcome to America, a history podcast.
Speaker A:I'm Liam Heffernan, and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places and the events that make the USA what it is today.
Speaker A:To discuss this, I am joined by a truly esteemed guest, a professor of history of the American west at University of Colorado Boulder.
Speaker A:And bear with me for this list.
Speaker A:It's long formally president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Studies association, the Western History association and the Society of American Historians, and vice president of the Teaching Division of the American Historical association and co founded the center of the American West.
Speaker A: And if that's not enough, in: Speaker A:So it is a genuine honor to welcome to the podcast Patricia Limerick.
Speaker B:Thank you.
Speaker B:Pleasure to be here.
Speaker A:It's great to have you on the show.
Speaker A:And there really wasn't anyone better, I think, to get on to talk about California.
Speaker A:So to kick off this conversation, we need to go back way before California became a state.
Speaker A:So if I was to go back 500 years, for example, what would I have seen on the land that is.
Speaker B:Now California 500 years ago?
Speaker B:Boy, you need to commit some time to your visit because you are going to see so many different forms of community and habitation and belief and joy and all sorts of things and some tough times as well.
Speaker B:So what a diverse population of folks in California 500 years ago.
Speaker B:And of course, because California's environment, well, how could I even use that as a singular word?
Speaker B:California's environments are so varied, so many different ways of being at home and engaging with every aspect of that home and homeland.
Speaker B:So you can start in the deserts, you could start along the Colorado river in the deserts where people were doing extraordinary floodplain farming.
Speaker B:And you could just keep moving along.
Speaker B:Lots of places where hunting and gathering, where expertly practiced acorns, really important in many areas, extremely nutritious food there.
Speaker B:And just a remarkable diversity, sometimes some conflict between the groups because people do that.
Speaker B:I don't know why they do that, but people are into that.
Speaker B:And so every once in a while, a bit of a Conflict over turf issues, but just an extraordinarily diverse thriving set of populations.
Speaker A:And I think for anyone that's maybe not as familiar with the geography of the U.S. there's an assumption that just California is just.
Speaker A:It's hot, it's just a hot state, but it's actually, it's quite a long state.
Speaker A:And actually from north to south you get a real diverse kind of climate and geography, don't you?
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:And we won't jump ahead from the era we're speaking of, but boy, state borders are weird and how they all came into being.
Speaker B:Those were not designed by any natural force or certainly if a deity designed those borders, that deity needs some rethinking here.
Speaker B:So yeah, so borders of state are ridiculous and maybe ours in the middle of things are the most ridiculous.
Speaker B:Colorado, other rectangles.
Speaker B:That's like what a rectangle on a complicated landscape.
Speaker B:So borders are very silly and really consequential.
Speaker B:I've never seen anything so ill thought out carries so much consequence over time.
Speaker B:I shouldn't really make that competitive.
Speaker B:There are plenty of those things.
Speaker B:But okay, so we have an amazing, very well populated with redwoods, forests in some areas, extraordinary coastline.
Speaker B:Absolutely stunning coastline.
Speaker B:Some of it made for people to sit on beach blankets in the future, but paddle around a little bit.
Speaker B:Some of them not the least bit like that.
Speaker B:Very difficult access and cliffs and so on.
Speaker B:So deserts, intense deserts, but deserts that if you are traveling east across the desert, you will come to a rise and then you will go over a pass and you will be in an amazing coastal area.
Speaker B:That is hard to think.
Speaker B:Weren't we just in the desert and now things are kind of green again here.
Speaker B:What happened here?
Speaker B:So diverse.
Speaker B:I think we could say that for the people coming from elsewhere, not the native people, people coming from elsewhere.
Speaker B:I would be pretty much cognitively not for a loop by this wildly juxtaposed set of different microenvironments and macro environments and so on.
Speaker B:So it'll take them a long time to figure out where they are those people.
Speaker B:And are they still figuring it out?
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And I mean it's, it's, it's quite mind boggling as someone who lives on a fairly small island to, to just kind of comprehend just the vastness of the U.S. you know, just looking at the country as a whole, it's, you know, and, and I've, I've been lucky enough to travel around the US a little bit and, and it feels like every state, and sometimes, you know, every county within states is just Its own culture and, and geography.
Speaker A:And it's just, it's, it's crazily diverse.
Speaker B:It is.
Speaker B:And I guess we have to be a little bit amazed that it actually does kind of hold together a good share of the time, not all the time.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:Yeah, so that is a pretty remarkable transition.
Speaker B:And yet it's so hard to comprehend and make long term settlement, which is why it is really important that we're starting with the people who did pull off long term settlement.
Speaker B:The people who were here, who had found the resources and learn to use them in ways that were foresighted.
Speaker B:I guess we would have to say that because that would be quite a contrast to the uses that came after that.
Speaker B:If there's anything less farsighted than gold mining, I don't know what that would be.
Speaker B:So it's such a contrast.
Speaker B:And then what is, of course, extremely important to say now is they're still here.
Speaker B: some oral histories from the: Speaker B:Just talking, talking, talking about their history and it.
Speaker B:And one of the people whose stories he found in that records was an ancestor of his.
Speaker B:So it's just, well, okay, I grew up in California, probably get that on record.
Speaker B:Banning California on the edge of the desert.
Speaker B:Just one of those places where you think, what happened here?
Speaker B:We were just in the desert.
Speaker B:Now we're coming into a coastal area.
Speaker B:But right there, right on the edge of that town is the Morongo reservation and the Cahuilla and Serrano people still very much there.
Speaker B:It's got one of the big casinos.
Speaker B:So it's a place that you notice as you're going by.
Speaker B:And it has some just extraordinary cultural achievements as well.
Speaker B:That reservation next to my hometown, Malkai Museum, M A L K I is I believe, recognized as the first museum on a California Indian reservation.
Speaker B:And so I grew up right next to a place where you think vanishing Indian.
Speaker B:Where did that nonsense come from?
Speaker B:That never happened.
Speaker B:These people are right, right there.
Speaker B:I knew the people who created that museum.
Speaker B:They built a press, the Mauci Museum Press.
Speaker B:There's a wonderful, wonderful collection of stories told by a Serrano woman, Dorothy Ramone.
Speaker B:Look up Dorothy Ramone R a M O N. Find her book where a linguistics professor got her to tell a whole bunch of stories.
Speaker B:You can see them in the original language, but you can also see the English.
Speaker B:There's a story called how the White Man Stole Our Water, for instance, which is a really Good story.
Speaker B:And I lived in the town where the white man had stolen the water for that.
Speaker B:So it's so connected.
Speaker B:And yet a lot of people live in California without really waking up to how continuous the presence of Native people was and is.
Speaker A:From the discussions I've had previously on the podcast, one thing that's really apparent to me is you can tell an awful lot about the, not just Native American people, but about the land itself by how they're living on the land and, and, and which communities are living where.
Speaker A:So I wonder if you could give a little bit of a backstory around, you know, why the land, I guess, was so precious to certain Native people.
Speaker B:Well, I'm, I'm going to make it do a little bridge building exercise here and say it didn't stop this notion that being in California is to be in a very intense and reorienting relationship to land.
Speaker B:So there are plenty of people, maybe too many people who have gone to California and said this was the home I was looking for.
Speaker B:I just didn't know that well.
Speaker B:Very different for the Native people who have generations and generations of stories and stories and stories of how to treat, how to hunt animals and to do it with respect and to say to the animal, I am so grateful to you at the time of that animal turning into a nutritional opportunity there.
Speaker B:So I don't know, it's every place, fishing, fishing, huge issue for many people along rivers or along the coast.
Speaker B:So it's just a place of abundance and nothing to take for granted in that.
Speaker B:And in fact, that's the, the great thing about the traditional Native view is we're not taking that for granted.
Speaker B:We are really.
Speaker B:This is where we are living and this is where we're going to live and this is where we're going to have our children and next generations live.
Speaker B:So it's hard for me to just to say which places should we speak of the areas again, the forested areas that the oaks and the acorns are very crucial and all kinds of ways of understanding how to harvest them and how to process them.
Speaker B:All sorts of understandings of deer and other forms of game and just generally of, yes, this is food that keeps us alive.
Speaker B:Yes, there's all that.
Speaker B:But it's also our connection to, well, to everything around us, to the creators, to the people who figure in the origin stories of all of these people.
Speaker B:There's always some people who are aware of where this abundance came from and the characters.
Speaker B:I'm struggling a little bit for the word, the deities.
Speaker B:I'm not sure, that's the right word.
Speaker B:But the spiritual beings and forces that brought that in.
Speaker B:So yes, it is definitely an economic relationship.
Speaker B:We have found ways to keep ourselves fed and alive.
Speaker B:We got that.
Speaker B:But it's also very much this is who human beings are in relationship to everything around them.
Speaker B:Everything living now, everything living in the past, everything living in the future.
Speaker B:So I sound a little bit like I'm romanticizing and oversimplifying, but I don't think I am.
Speaker B:I think that's the way in which we went back 500 years.
Speaker B:That's what I think we would have found a lot of very well oriented people who are thinking clearly about what they're going to do today and what they're going to do in the future and what the generations before them did.
Speaker A:Yeah, and I think it's incredibly humbling from the conversations I've had just on this podcast about Native American history in the respect that they had for the land and still have for the land, and, and just that completely different mindset that they have to, I guess, settlers, you know, or descendants of settlers.
Speaker A:And that kind of brings me on now to talking about that first point in which non native people arrived on the land.
Speaker A:But it wasn't actually the British that that first settled in California, was it?
Speaker B:The British are late comers and not the most clever of an enterprising of latecomers.
Speaker B:Well, interesting shift that is.
Speaker B:Once you make it, it just makes for a much more interesting story.
Speaker B:But all of that attention to the British colonies.
Speaker B:Well, okay, important, consequential, very consequential for native people in those areas, of course.
Speaker B:But meanwhile, we've got the Spanish in, we would now call Mexico Cortez coming in and taking over and setting up a base where people, more Spanish people come.
Speaker B:And then they start moving north and south as well, but north.
Speaker B:And they find minerals in various places.
Speaker B:And boy, the Spanish like minerals.
Speaker B:They like that a lot.
Speaker B:And then they also tried coastal expeditions.
Speaker B:And so there are Spanish explorers going up the California coast and landing and looking around.
Speaker B:Well, we won't keep dropping names here, but there's a bunch of them.
Speaker B:And so they are moving along there.
Speaker B:And then of course, the Spanish are totally into gold, but they are also into souls.
Speaker B:And the Christian imperative to find people who are not familiar with Christianity and bring them into that sometimes in ways that are very destructive and very injurious.
Speaker B:But there is that impulse that the Spanish will find gold.
Speaker B:They want to do that, but they also want to find souls and they want to send Missionaries and support, missionaries with troops.
Speaker B:So there we're getting really into the what's going to happen in California to the native people.
Speaker B:The California missions.
Speaker B:When I was a girl in Maine, we learned about Father Junipero Serra.
Speaker B:He was the main lead of the California mission system.
Speaker B:And he was very determined and very inattentive to the consequences of his actions that were unfortunate.
Speaker B: soon by this, Starting in the: Speaker B:And that turns out to be, boy, speaking of people who had a close tie to the land to take those people and with coercion, force them into missions and put them through the requirements of Christian belief also to use their labor in intensive farming.
Speaker B:It's hard to imagine a more destructive thing to do to people who were living as we just went through, with a very close tie to land, very aware of where their food came from and how it connected them to the powers of the.
Speaker B:Of the universe and so on.
Speaker B:Well, that doesn't fare well under the California mission system.
Speaker B:And some people have said in perfectly reasonable ways that it's hard to think of how you could more effectively spread disease than take a bunch of people and crowd them into mission buildings if you really were on the side of the germs.
Speaker B:And of course, people at the time do not know what germs are, so we can't be bringing that back into the past.
Speaker B:But what a way to weaken a population.
Speaker A:One thing that's always perplexed me a little bit about the idea of missions is there must be a long term colonization or settlement plan for that land, because otherwise what's the point in this case?
Speaker A:What do the Spanish Empire get out of just going there and trying to convert everyone?
Speaker B:Well, they certainly exert power.
Speaker B:And there is a plan which kind of comes into discussion of secularization that at a certain point the missions will have achieved the outcome that you would have a community of people who were originally different tribal affiliations, but now they had become more or less Spaniards, kind of a lower echelon in this social structure.
Speaker B:But they would be Spaniards and they would be Catholics.
Speaker B:Good heavens, they'd be Catholics.
Speaker B:And then the whole mission structure could get, well, just reduced in its everyday exercise of power.
Speaker B:Because you would have.
Speaker B:That would be the outcome is that you would have Catholics who farmed and who were subordinate to priests.
Speaker B:Again, most of the missions were supported by troops, by military troops there as well.
Speaker B:But at a certain point of secularization envisioned for a while and then sort of talked about in the 19th century, you would then be able to say, now we move on.
Speaker B:And we have these communities and surrounding the communities, interacting with the communities and taking advantage of the communities will be Spanish originating ranchers.
Speaker B:So there is a parallel, comparable, intertwined arrival of.
Speaker B:Not missionaries, Spanish citizens who are creating ranches.
Speaker B:And it's a good place for cattle.
Speaker B:A lot of good grazing opportunities there.
Speaker B:So there's.
Speaker B:With the missions, there's also a growing population.
Speaker B:Sometimes it's soldiers who have been there.
Speaker B:Soldiers and then leave the military and become ranchers.
Speaker B:All kinds of things happen there.
Speaker B: So by the early: Speaker B:There are also people who are raising cattle in land that actually has quite a remarkable amount of grazing opportunities.
Speaker B:So that's happening as well.
Speaker B:And the result of that is not the now we have thriving communities of people who were originally tribally affiliated but are now Spanish Catholics.
Speaker B:No, not that.
Speaker B:What we have more and more often is a subordinated labor group, working group of people who are forced into work on the ranchos and forced into work on the missions.
Speaker B:And that becomes the outcome is native people as a seized upon resource of labor.
Speaker A:To me, it seems like the crux of it is that this isn't really about religion, it's about compliance.
Speaker A:And once you enforce your cultural values on the people that you're trying to colonize, it becomes a lot easier to actually justify what you're doing and kind of enforce the sort of resistance that's needed to do it successfully.
Speaker B:Right, right.
Speaker B:Well, you wouldn't even need to justify what you're doing if you're so certain that that's what you have to do.
Speaker B:And Liam, I think that's the hardest part with colonizers everywhere is if we could only kind of X ray their minds and figure out what's going on there.
Speaker B:How could things that look so cruel and oppressive in hindsight, how did that just seem like, well, that's what we have to do.
Speaker B:That's what we're here to do.
Speaker B:So I think I have to go into the mode.
Speaker B:It's not a comfortable mode, but to say their minds were different people in different eras.
Speaker B:It's not just that they have a different set of beliefs and words, it's that that's what they have.
Speaker B:That's what their minds are shaped by.
Speaker B:And so I really, I don't.
Speaker B:I'm not trying to be.
Speaker B:I am not an apologist.
Speaker B:I'm not saying, well, we must feel a little empathy with the Spanish invaders.
Speaker B:I'm not saying that.
Speaker B:But I am saying that they would not say, how will we justify this?
Speaker B:They would be so certain that they were doing what they had to do.
Speaker B:We're called to do.
Speaker B:I'm going to use a terrible word here, but we're destined to do so we'll get back to that word destiny at some point here.
Speaker B:But it just seems like they didn't have really much of a sense of how their actions would look to others and certainly not how their actions would look to posterity.
Speaker B:So were they justifying?
Speaker B:Did they actually say, ha, labor, we're going to get some workers.
Speaker B:Oh, we're going to dress it up with some Catholic rituals, We're going to do that.
Speaker B:But really all we want is the workers.
Speaker B:I mean, I don't think there's anything remotely like that.
Speaker B:I mean, that's why I think it's very important for all of us today to re examine our assumptions every few minutes probably and just say, what is it that we are so taking for granted that people in the future are going to say they did that they thought that was right?
Speaker A:And it's interesting because we do always like to frame this idea of, I mean, you alluded to it sort of manifest destiny and sort of the American dream as a very American thing, but actually it feels like, you know, even the Spanish empire, I'm assuming the French empire and all of these big nations had this sense of entitlement that actually if land was there, it was up for grabs.
Speaker B:Yep, yep.
Speaker B:I guess we'll just find this bitterly ironic that the empires do get sometimes into the sport of accusing each other of being very bad.
Speaker B:That's a bit funny because for the British to conjure up the black legend of Spain, well, there's terrible, horrible brutal conduct by Spaniards and there's terrible brutal conduct by British people.
Speaker B:So I think we have to just find it bitterly ironic that the British colonizers came up with this whole thing that they were very eager to put forward of the black legend of Spain, that Spain was very brutal in its colonization.
Speaker B:And somehow or other it's like, look over there, look at them, don't look at us.
Speaker B:But just a strange, strange way in which people could look at another empire and say, well, this is a dreadful way to behave.
Speaker B:Without that moment of thinking, maybe we're not quite in the position to take that high ground.
Speaker A: hink, okay, we're at the late: Speaker A:You know, America is a nation so how do we get from the west coast being Spanish ruled to eventually being in American hands?
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B: inent, such and such going in: Speaker B: But: Speaker B: So Dominguez and Escalante in: Speaker B: But: Speaker B:And that whole notion, actually we should take just a moment on that, that the notion that California might be an island that persisted kind of in the pictures.
Speaker B:That's why the coastal explorations are important.
Speaker B:But that is there going to be a way to get from the interior to the coast that doesn't get fully resolved for a while?
Speaker B:So anyway, so that's the whole question of how much can a land connection lead to the populating of California by the outsiders?
Speaker B:And why is it so stuck on the coast for so long?
Speaker B:That's an important part of the story too.
Speaker B:Okay, so now gust nation forming on the far side of the continent.
Speaker B:We have things coming up within New Spain.
Speaker B:Some tensions mounting within New Spain.
Speaker B:Also, as New Spain is finding out, distant colonies are not the easiest thing to manage.
Speaker B:Really rather difficult if the center of power is in way south in Mexico.
Speaker B: And now by the late: Speaker B:So how do you get.
Speaker B:This is.
Speaker B:We'll have to always remind ourselves this before the Internet.
Speaker B:So how do you exchange information?
Speaker B:How do you carry authority to those distant places?
Speaker B:So it's getting to be kind of a headache to have colonies, which again, do I sound like I'm empathizing with brutal colonizers?
Speaker B:I'm not meaning to do that.
Speaker B:But what we have is growing tension sometimes in these borderlands.
Speaker B:So what is this New Spain and why are we part of the Spanish empire?
Speaker B:And how is that working for us?
Speaker B:So with that dynamic in the borderlands, there's restiveness.
Speaker B:And also within Central Mexico as well.
Speaker B:Well, still New Spain, but more and more discontent with being under Spanish rule.
Speaker B:Perfectly understandable.
Speaker B: So by: Speaker B: And so: Speaker B:Mexico exists.
Speaker B:New Spain certainly has Left a big legacy, but it's kind of over.
Speaker B: So that's the context,: Speaker B:What are they?
Speaker B:What is this new nation going to do with its distant colonies?
Speaker B:And there's a lot of pretty independent people in this.
Speaker B:There's some extremely unexpected, intense thinkers.
Speaker B:In Alto, California, there's a wonderful woman who's written a great, well, soon to be book about the serious thinkers that some California, originally Spanish, now in Mexico, people were thinking about how are we governing ourselves after the revolution?
Speaker B:How, how do we, where do we stand as citizens of this new country?
Speaker B:So, okay, so that's all going up in ways that I just wasn't aware of how much there is this Latin American tradition, North and South America, of people from the Spanish created areas thinking about how do we live together and how do we govern ourselves.
Speaker B:So that's going on.
Speaker B:Okay, then we've got this nation that is getting bigger and more, oh, I don't know what, more conscious of itself.
Speaker B:So the United States is growing and had some trouble with the problem of growth initially when the, when a British colonies first revolted, it sort of how far west do our colonies that are becoming states go?
Speaker B:So quite a struggle over what to do to separate, to put boundaries up and create a thing that we'll just call public domain of lands that will be in some way part of the United States.
Speaker B:But will be.
Speaker B:First there'll be territories, then they won't be territories, and they'll be states.
Speaker B:So the United States is going through quite a process of figuring out how to get bigger.
Speaker B:Totally important to say it is not a unanimous enthusiasm.
Speaker B:There are people worried in the first half of the 19th century about what will happen if the United States gets geographically too big.
Speaker B:Can you extend the experiment of a democratic republic over that space?
Speaker B:And then there are also obvious very big tensions over slavery in the south and the relationship to the north and so on.
Speaker B:So it's not like the American people are just of one mind and they're thinking, why don't we just take up more of the continent?
Speaker B:Let's just do that.
Speaker B:There's so many internal tensions in this nation that is trying to be a nation and not always quite certain how to do that.
Speaker B: So by the: Speaker B:And that's politically dynamic and major figures contest each other in Congress and elsewhere.
Speaker B:So since we do not have several days to pursue this, we'll just Go straight to the fact that James K. Polk was president and Polk was an expansionist.
Speaker B:And Polk was strategic and sneaky and clever.
Speaker B:Well, clever.
Speaker B:Not particularly clever, but sneaky.
Speaker B:And so he found ways to maneuver that would position him to say, we are now at war with Mexico.
Speaker B:The contested status of Texas was the key thing.
Speaker B:Was Texas after the Mexican Revolution, was Texas going to join the.
Speaker B:At some point, be next to United States?
Speaker B:Very open question.
Speaker B: It's still into the: Speaker B: is an independent Republican: Speaker B:But, well, is it going to be part of the United States?
Speaker B:All of that leads to a moment where if you are a sneaky politician, pretty good that you have American troops in disputed territory.
Speaker B:Mexico still claims it.
Speaker B:Independent Republic of Texas is a party in this.
Speaker B:But you can say American troops were attacked in a Mexican.
Speaker B:Well, that's not the way we would say it.
Speaker B:American troops were attacked and the United States has to respond as the critics say, American troops were attacked in a Mexican cornfield.
Speaker B:Is that an occasion?
Speaker B:What were American troops doing in that territory?
Speaker B:So, okay, so that's the context.
Speaker B:And the context is very consequential for our story because the United States and Mexico go to war.
Speaker B:And in that war, the United States actually invades the center of Mexico, which we often forget about the whole occupation of Mexico City.
Speaker B: nd of: Speaker B: ,: Speaker B:Why am I going for such detail on dates?
Speaker B: ,: Speaker B:So gold discovered in California, January 24, no instant transmission of knowledge.
Speaker B:Thousands miles away, people are signing a treaty Feb. 2, and it is transferring ownership of California to the United States.
Speaker B:Just as the stakes go soaring, the word is now starting to spread that California has an astounding, unbelievable, inestimable resource of mineral riches of gold.
Speaker B:So that is the context.
Speaker B:1848, acquisition.
Speaker B:1848, discovery of gold.
Speaker B:1849, major population rush.
Speaker B:James K. Polk announcing this as if he were four sighted and had thought that justified his actions.
Speaker B: But a rush of people in: Speaker B:So fast forward action there, just almost, we think, oh my, so many events occur so fast.
Speaker B:And it's hard to keep track of them.
Speaker B: Well, that's going on in: Speaker B:So, yeah, new state comes in.
Speaker B:This will have to dwell on this for a moment or two.
Speaker B:It comes in as a free state.
Speaker B:No slavery.
Speaker B:So that is the big struggle going on in Congress involving everyone with any interest in the fate of the United States.
Speaker B:What will happen to the expansion of slavery in the West?
Speaker B:California is officially entering the Union as a free state.
Speaker B:And all sorts of adjustments will have to come from that.
Speaker A:We are now fully in the period of the Civil War is brewing.
Speaker A:I don't think the US has ever been at a more divided point than it was during.
Speaker A: In the: Speaker A:And it does beg the question of exactly, I guess, legally, what is meant by a free state.
Speaker B:Yep.
Speaker B:Well, not much, it turns out, because, yes, it means a great deal in terms of the balance of power within the United States.
Speaker B:It means a lot.
Speaker B:Free state, slave state.
Speaker B:That means a lot.
Speaker B:What does it mean in California?
Speaker B:This is where young scholars are just so spectacular in what they bring to our attention.
Speaker B:So I did not know this through much of my career, but people writing in the last 20, 25 years have just turned that around.
Speaker B:Alrighty, so if we go back to what we know, what we've already talked about, that Indian people were coerced, often coerced into the position of workers and laborers.
Speaker B:So California in the Spanish and Mexican period has a very strong tradition forcing Indian people into basically bondage.
Speaker B:So when California becomes an American state, well, there's a lot of residents of California.
Speaker B:The more the elite sorts who have a total drive to keep Indian people subordinated and working.
Speaker B:So free state, pretty darn soon.
Speaker B:Various forms of legal action that legitimize the.
Speaker B:We won't say enslavement, but the holding and bondage indentured status of Indian people.
Speaker B:So people taking part in the Gold rush, white Americans coming to the Gold rush, some of them are from the south and some of them bring black slaves.
Speaker B:And there's manipulative kinds of people.
Speaker B:And so they figure out ways to not officially own a slave, but.
Speaker B:But to in actual practice keep a person in bondage in coerced labor.
Speaker B:So, Stacy Smith, anybody looking for a book on this?
Speaker B:Stacey Smith has written a very fine book on.
Speaker B:On how free.
Speaker B:Why are we using the word free for a state that came into the union called a free state, and very soon had institutionalized forms of forced labor in place?
Speaker A:And I think it's probably really important to Note here as well that actually even African Americans who were free in that they weren't officially owned by a slaveholder, they weren't equal.
Speaker A: anywhere in the US in the mid-: Speaker A:But let's be honest, they probably wouldn't have been, would they?
Speaker B:Well, there's no question that injustice and inequality moves westward.
Speaker B:Part of the westward movement, racial subordination is not going to stop at the Mississippi river or the hundredth meridian or anything like that.
Speaker B:So there is no question about the coerced state and the extremely vulnerable under the laws condition that not just African Americans, but really quite soon, Mexican Americans and Indian people are going to be subject to as well from the new set of colonizers, from the Americans on their rivals.
Speaker B:So I do want to take a moment though, to swerve and say, was this all just an unrolling process of Manifest Destiny?
Speaker B:Since I just kind of introduced that that inequity and injustice moved west just as well.
Speaker B:Was there national unity and agreement that whatever else happened to the United States, it was destined by God to extend from coast to coast?
Speaker B:Was that something that people, white American settlers, really thought and believed in and acted on that thought?
Speaker B:Well, coming back to these young scholars today who really do not have any deference to their predecessors and just ask all kinds of questions that we would never have asked.
Speaker B:So we now have a much better sense from several young scholars who are showing us that in fact, Manifest Destiny was a phrase rarely used in the 19th century.
Speaker B:What was certainly unmistakable was white settlers wanting land.
Speaker B:They wanted property, especially.
Speaker B:Anyone with any background in Europe found the notion that you could own land to be just an overwhelming promise and opportunity.
Speaker B:So they wanted land, but did they have this notion that the United States had a destiny determined by a deity?
Speaker B:So I'm going to name one more scholar.
Speaker B:Andrew Eisenberg has written a book, just came out called the Age of the Borderlands, just came out a few months ago, and he has the most excellent analysis that no, actually the phrase Manifest Destiny was not used much in the 19th century.
Speaker B:The drive to get land.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:And of course, California is going to be a major magnet for that with a mild climate, with areas like the Central Valley that are just extraordinary for farming.
Speaker B:So, okay, so that's going to be a big part of the drive to get to California, is the notion that land is going to be available and agriculture could prosper, not to mention all of the dreams and hopes of prospectors and miners coming to California.
Speaker B:But was this manifest destiny?
Speaker B:Did people say, it is our manifest destiny to be here in California taking over?
Speaker B:These younger scholars, I think, have made a very good case that we don't have any reason to believe that.
Speaker B:That what happened instead was after the Civil war.
Speaker B:Historians writing textbooks, histories of the United States had a problem.
Speaker B:How do you write a history of a nation that fell apart and how.
Speaker B:We can't really ever prove this definitively, but there's a really good reason to accept the arguments that people like Drew Eisenberg have put forward that what happened was that the people trying to write coherent histories of the United States were stymied by how they were supposed to say, well, actually, there wasn't a United States for a while, totally disunited.
Speaker B:So what to do?
Speaker B:Reach back into the 19th century, dig up that phrase manifest destiny, which some journalists did use.
Speaker B:Few people use dig that up and say, oh, that's what unifies the nation.
Speaker B:Manifest destiny runs continuously from the before the civil war, during the civil War, after the civil War.
Speaker B:That is the unifying quality of American history.
Speaker B: we'll dig that up out of the: Speaker B:That's what we're going to do, and we're going to now be able to write textbooks that hold together.
Speaker B:Yay.
Speaker B:So for reasons that we don't think we'll ever understand, this becomes an essential feature of American history.
Speaker B:Every American history survey course, high school, college, has a unit on manifest destiny.
Speaker B:Whoops.
Speaker B:So it's pretty exciting to say this is really not the best way to understand California, to see this as unrolling.
Speaker B:Better way to say astounding resources, mineral resources and agricultural resources, and milder climate.
Speaker B:Why does California grow so fast in a settler population?
Speaker B:Resources, climate, coastal ties, trade opportunities, so on.
Speaker A:I can completely accept that.
Speaker A:How the idea of manifest destiny can become the unifying notion in a country that was otherwise quite divided on many other things.
Speaker A:But what doesn't make quite total sense to me is the idea that America didn't immediately mark up all the land it owned and make states out of them.
Speaker A:You know, why was there any period where California wasn't a state?
Speaker B: rt of the United States until: Speaker B:But that's unusual.
Speaker B:I mean, your question is very solid.
Speaker B:Why did it take so long?
Speaker B:Well, the Northwest Ordinance at the early parts of the Republic creates a process.
Speaker B:The assumption is that the United States will get new territory, that Americans will go live there and then something has to happen to incorporate them into the nation, but not too fast.
Speaker B:So that's why the whole territorial sequence gets going.
Speaker B:So when there is a certain number of white settlers, then it can become a territory and then it will go through a period where it only has a territorial delegate, does not have any members of Congress except a non voting territorial delegate that will go for a while and then when there's more numbers, then it can apply for statehood and then become a part of the Union.
Speaker B: oking ahead at the end of the: Speaker B:Then the process didn't happen with California.
Speaker B:The sense of urgency, there's so much going on so fast, the nation is falling apart and tensions over that.
Speaker B:So California did not go through that process, but most of the other territories did.
Speaker B:And it's sort of a probationary.
Speaker B:Let's see if you pull this off of a significant amount of population.
Speaker B:It does get tangled up where Nevada gets in fairly fast after its mineral rushes as well.
Speaker B:But mostly it can be several decades of the territorial status and it is just sort of prove yourself to be sufficient in self governing different places.
Speaker B:Utah is confusing to the whole process because the dominance of a Mormon population and with the issue of polygamy and the notion of we're just going to let them into the Union, that does not work for quite a long time.
Speaker B:Same for Arizona and New Mexico.
Speaker B:They wait a long time because they have a, well, especially New Mexico, a dominant Hispanic population.
Speaker B:So a lot of people for racially thinking people in the nation's capital are saying, well that can't be a state, that's not appropriate.
Speaker B:We have to have more Anglo Americans there before we're going to do that.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:So there's lots of variation in it, but it's supposed to be a very kind of well oiled start as a territory, get more people and then apply for statehood.
Speaker B:But California brushed that through.
Speaker A:Yeah, it seems like it was a bit of a perfect storm really because, you know, the gold rush happening at the same time as all the other, you know, political wranglings between the US and Mexico seems quite coincidental.
Speaker A:But once that was known, there was obviously an urgency there to cash in on on, on that.
Speaker A:And then you had the additional pressure, I'm going to assume, from anti slavery politicians.
Speaker A:Probably there was a sense that California was going to be a free state and therefore to, to sort of weight things in the union's favor.
Speaker A:I imagine there was probably a push on one side to get them into statehood as well.
Speaker A:Right, okay.
Speaker A:So, you know, California is now a state.
Speaker A: It's: Speaker A:Potentially.
Speaker A:We, we should, we should skip past the, the Civil War years because that's potentially a whole conversation in itself.
Speaker A:But, you know, the Civil War happened.
Speaker A:What was the impact after California's statehood?
Speaker A:How did that actually change anything about the United States?
Speaker B:Great question.
Speaker B:I do want to back up for a moment though, and note what we have to note, which is that the state of California when it existed, was absolutely clear on its policies and the settlers, especially the miners on the ground, were absolutely clear and the conduct of the majority.
Speaker B:So settlers engaged in astoundingly dreadful punitive actions towards any Indians that were in their reach.
Speaker B:So it is a perfectly gold rush era, sometimes seen as kind of a colorful era of a folk movement and migration and so on.
Speaker B:Absolutely horrible era for sometimes informal parties of prospectors if they've had a livestock attacked or stolen or just going off into completely unjustified retaliation, sometimes finding the Indians who might have stolen the livestock, stolen, might have seized the livestock, and sometimes just attacking whoever they could find, then the state of California is also very clear in its policies that this is a merciless campaign to get Indian people eliminated.
Speaker B:So we don't always know when we should use the term genocide, but usually there's a sort of, it should have a purposeful, institutionalized, state based framework.
Speaker B:Although that doesn't really work when there's these informal posses and parties going out that certainly can be functionally genocide just as much.
Speaker B:But that era of just unfathomable brutality is part of the California heritage.
Speaker A:Obviously there was a lot of people out there that took the law onto themselves and murdered Native Americans because they felt they could.
Speaker A:But that's kind of the point, isn't it?
Speaker A:Like they had that kind of federal safety net where they were empowered and almost encouraged to be that brutal.
Speaker B:Absolutely right.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:I don't want to separate those two forms of evil because they're very intertwined with that, the state official sanctioning and the people who might have done it anyway.
Speaker B:Who knows?
Speaker B:It's not even worth asking as a question, but it's certainly, I would say you could call it coordinated and you could also call it Chaotic because coordination and chaos often, not often.
Speaker B:They have a way of working together and really bad causes.
Speaker B:So yeah, so absolutely the sense that they could.
Speaker B:There are other parts of the west where there was more of a hold some of the settler violence to accountability.
Speaker B:There are other parts, other places where that did happen.
Speaker B:And I don't want to obscure that.
Speaker B:The military just said, well, we just as soon have everyone taking up our work and eliminating the population.
Speaker B:On the contrary, there's many cases, not many significant cases where the military said elsewhere, stop that.
Speaker B:This is violence beyond justification and so on.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:Well, but not so much.
Speaker B:Not California.
Speaker B:California.
Speaker B:What you're speaking of here is exactly that.
Speaker B:No brakes being put on, maybe a few people of conscience expressing dismay and concern.
Speaker A:We've spoken before on the podcast about just the horrible treatment of Native Americans and this is definitely.
Speaker A:It's a nationwide thing.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:It's that.
Speaker A:And it goes back to what we were saying before about just that sense of entitlement, of that the land is there, it's theirs to be taken.
Speaker A:If you were a Caucasian man especially, you know, you, you were allowed to, to take lands from, from anyone else by force if necessary.
Speaker A:And it probably then goes without saying that the, the Native American population suffered as a result of, of statehood.
Speaker A:But what I think is really interesting is that today there's still a very strong Spanish demographic in California and actually there's a, there's a disproportionate number of Spanish speaking Americans in, in that.
Speaker A:In California.
Speaker A:So although it became American, it did you know, that, that, that that Spanish influence never really went away, did it?
Speaker B:No, no.
Speaker B:And that's, and the same thing here is that we just always need to be really clear about when or ever we should stop a story and say, well, that, that concludes that a campaign of ferocity to kill Indian people and a persistence and a continued presence of Indian people.
Speaker B: So if we stopped our story in: Speaker B:Well, every effort was made and it didn't work.
Speaker B:It worked horrifyingly in some instances, but still hanging out, still here, still very much a presence.
Speaker B:So that seems important to say.
Speaker B:And also, of course, Anglo Americans can be astoundingly brutal to Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants.
Speaker B:We know that we're seeing a little bit more resurgence of that lately.
Speaker B:And of course we have to say that the whole situation in California was very shaped by class.
Speaker B:So the rich, well, they're quite well off.
Speaker B: goodwill in the years before: Speaker B:Fair amount of Anglo men coming in as traders and aspiring ranchers who married into Hispanic families.
Speaker B:So there is an elite level where there's some degree of recognition of status and so on.
Speaker B:So what makes that whole story about the Hispanic presence or Mexican originating presence in California is that class does run through that whole story.
Speaker B:And yet class only goes so far because elite Mexicans can end up experiencing dismissal, prejudice, injustice as well.
Speaker B: om Mexico to California after: Speaker B:So that's different from that.
Speaker B:Can't.
Speaker B:We can't obscure the elite Californios who actually did have a phase of being seen as people to be reckoned with in some way.
Speaker B:But it doesn't offer lasting protection and position.
Speaker B:And at a certain point, coming from elite origins isn't really going to make a difference in terms of the prejudice.
Speaker B:What makes it so peculiar is a.
Speaker B:Let's just say something simple, shall we?
Speaker B:Well, no, we can't, because there's that hope wild movement, late 19th, early 20th century of romanticizing the Spanish past, of preserving Anglos, preserving the missions, romanticizing the missions as places of peace and beauty and harmony and kindly.
Speaker B:Oh Lord, hard to say it, but kindly missionary fathers and so on.
Speaker B:So, and then all sorts of uses of Spanish names in for festivals and for.
Speaker B:And then increasingly real estate developments and so on.
Speaker B:So that that Spanish conjured up heritage that Anglo Americans take up is really one of those.
Speaker B:Okay, let's just try to think clearly about this.
Speaker B:These Anglos come in, take over, subordinate the local populations, Indians and then eventually Hispano elites.
Speaker B:And then they start naming all their real estate developments with Spanish names.
Speaker B:What's that about?
Speaker B:It's just.
Speaker B:It is the strangest way.
Speaker B:Some scholars have written wonderfully about this, about how romanticizing the other is part of imperialism, not in a way that adjusts the power, but that basically it's.
Speaker B:You could say it's imperialist, saying, well, really, you know, people condemn us, but we're really kind of appreciative of some of the beautiful arts and crafts that the people we displaced practiced.
Speaker B:So it is, it's so tangled.
Speaker B:And there are moments where you just think, wouldn't it be nicer for the public if I could just tell a story that didn't have these strange twists and turns.
Speaker B:But there we are.
Speaker A:I think it's almost impossible to talk about American history without these kinds of threads running through it.
Speaker A:But we see that throughout, don't we?
Speaker A:Just almost reappropriation of cultures that have been displaced by the very people now holding out.
Speaker A:But everything that we've discussed today, I think I actually feel a little bit sorry for you, Patricia, because I've had to impose on you being able to tell us basically a whole history of California in an episode hour, when actually I think everything we've discussed.
Speaker A:We could probably talk for days on all of this, and there's so much more to unpack.
Speaker A:But I just want to quickly end on asking you, what sort of country would the United States of America be without California?
Speaker B:Well, okay, so that's a great question.
Speaker B:What would it be?
Speaker B:It would be.
Speaker B:I hadn't really thought through how to answer this question.
Speaker B:So here we go.
Speaker B:It would be an easier to control country, and it would be a country that would take less effort to smush into a coherent narrative.
Speaker B:It's still, I'm doing a real disservice to all the other places and parts and pieces of the United States, but anytime that you are going to write a oversimplified history of the country, California is just going to be endlessly in there giving you trouble.
Speaker B:So if we just said, well, slavery was practiced in the South American south, then you have to say, well, something pretty close to that was practiced in California and with a different set of populations.
Speaker B:So, no, that thing we just said, slavery was practiced in the American South.
Speaker B:Yes, it was.
Speaker B:But we've just gotten started on that, on that subject.
Speaker B:If we think of the whole question of rural and urban relationships, that too, we might have a simpler time of telling it, but the way in which so many people around the country are, especially the ones who think they're going to eat healthy food, are totally tied into their relationship to California, whether it's Imperial Valley or Central Valley.
Speaker B:A trip to the supermarket where everything produced in California were removed would make us all vegetarians would have a rough time of that.
Speaker B:So it's just everywhere.
Speaker B:In places where we wouldn't think to look, the California tie is in there.
Speaker B:The way in which labor systems that really got their first demonstrations and runs began in California and then got exported to other areas.
Speaker B:The subordinated role of Mexican American, Mexican workers, Mexican immigrant workers, has got off to quite a notable start in California.
Speaker B:And now it's.
Speaker B:It's everywhere in the country So I think there's a lot of any effort to make American history closer to a easy to summarize straight line narrative.
Speaker B:California will just kick that around.
Speaker B:That's just not going to work.
Speaker B:And sometimes it will be inspirational and sometimes it won't.
Speaker B:And that's extremely good practice for us all in these times, wherever we're living, whichever side of the pond of just saying, well, we cannot turn this into a simple story.
Speaker B:We cannot get good guys and bad guys.
Speaker B:We'd love to be able to tell these simple stories.
Speaker B:And we simply cannot say, California is an example that we should follow or California is an example that we should dread and avoid.
Speaker B:We have to say both of those things at once.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And I think actually that's a wonderful way of thinking about, you know, the United States of America as a whole.
Speaker A:You know, and certainly in the, in the two years plus now that I've been doing this podcast, I think you could, you could apply that to the whole country that there's just so much gray area that nothing's quite linear or as black and white as it, as it seems when you really get into the detail of US history.
Speaker A:And I think California is a really fascinating microcosm to study within the US that really shows all of that in its, I want to say, in all its glory, but I'm not sure glory's maybe the right word.
Speaker B:It's misery.
Speaker B:All of it's everything.
Speaker B:I mean, glory, the whole package.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:And, you know, it's been absolutely fascinating talking to you, Patricia, and I think there's so much more that we need to cover off the back of this episode.
Speaker A:And I can't thank you enough for joining me to get the conversation started at the very least for anyone listening to the podcast.
Speaker A:Of course, everything that Patricia has mentioned, all the books that we've referenced, we'll put in the show notes as well.
Speaker A:So if you want to do any further reading, just check out the show notes and all the links will be there.
Speaker A:Patricia, if anyone wants to connect with you directly, where can they do that?
Speaker B:Well, that's very simple, Patricia.
Speaker B:Limerickolorado Edu so that could not be clear.
Speaker B:Just remember my funny last name.
Speaker B:And I do write limericks.
Speaker B:That's how.
Speaker B:Whole other topic for another occasion, but Patricia Limerick@ Colorado Edu, as I mentioned.
Speaker A:To anyone listening, all the links will be in the show notes.
Speaker A:And if you really enjoy this podcast, do remember to leave us a rating and a review and give us a follow as well, because then all future episodes will just appear on your feed, and if you really love what we do, you can support the show and help us keep the lights on.
Speaker A:And we'll really appreciate that.
Speaker A:All the links are in the show notes, but thank you for listening to the podcast and goodbye.
