The first treasure California began to surrender after the Gold Rush as the oldest: her land.
I was surprised at how cosmopolitan the Gold Rush was: prospectors were of all races, genders, and countries. I was equally surprised at how fast gold prospecting became big business.
I lived in San Pedro, California, which is, you know, on the west side of California, and it's where many, many Japanese lived.
Growing up in California, I obviously knew about our deep connections with the Japanese.
I went West and took part in the strike of the machinists - the Southern Pacific Railroad, the corporation that swung California by its golden tail, that controlled its legislature, its farmers, its preachers, its workers.
At the time the United States government acquired the territory of California from Mexico, slavery had been abolished there nearly twenty years
I'm really nostalgic for Malibu area because I've spent so much time there. People don't think of California as having a history.
I get heartbroken flying into L.A. It's just this feeling of unspecific loss. Can you imagine what the San Fernando Valley was when it was all wheat fields? Can you imagine what John Steinbeck saw?
Startups were thriving in Los Angeles when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were closer to the nursery than they were the garage.
God tipped the country and all the fruits and nuts rolled west.
As a fluke, my great-grandfather hit one of the largest oil reserves in California.
This is Reagan country. Yeah! And perhaps it was destiny that the man who went to California's Eureka College would become so woven within and interlinked to the Golden State.
But for the difference in habit of observation, why did Yankees, almost instantly, discover gold in California, which had been trodden upon and overlooked, by Indians and Mexican greasers, for centuries.
Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.
The Gold Rush and the Pony Express made Sacramento a substantial place in terms of enterprise.
Malibu history is interesting to me. My mom's family was one of the early families in California, so there's history going back to the 1840s or '50s. They came over in the Gold Rush, actually. I have all this guilt about raising my daughter in the East. Coco's very anti-California. It's her way of rebelling.
Avicenna California...Museum of my twisted youth, vault of my dearest and most disgusting memories.
L.A. prides itself on newness or being the last frontier or just not liking old things and tearing them down to build new things. But Malibu history is interesting to me. My mom's family was one of the early families in California, so there's history going back to the 1840s or '50s.
