California is both a state of mind and a physical place, its sensibility shaped by geography, conflict, and experience.
It was the Left Coast even before the Europeans arrived. This slender edge of the continent was the place human beings came after they likely wandered across the Bering Land Bridge and from which they pushed farther south, to warmer weather, richer hunting grounds, on their way, eventually, to the southern tip of South America.
Centuries later, the density and complexity of Indigenous tribes, cultures, and languages in the land west of the High Sierra had become a human continent unto itself.
Merely a few decades after Columbus, the Spaniards came, and then Portuguese ships, followed by Russian fur traders, English navigators, and then, much later, droves of northern Europeans traveling from what we call “back East.” There was Lewis and Clark, although they reached the Pacific Ocean by way of the Columbia River, in present-day Oregon. In the 1820s, Jedediah Smith wandered into San Gabriel from the Mojave Desert. After him came the great land grab of the 1840s, which was hyper-accelerated by the gold rush of the early ’50s—the Silicon Valley boom of its day.
To each era, California offered yet another dream of wealth, an escape from the confines
