California: the first three centuries

I’ve been reading about and visiting California quite a lot recently. And I love it. So it feels like something worth writing about. In Britain at least I think people have a reasonable sense of how the east coast of North America came into being. But the west coast is hazier.

This blog is going to tell the story of how Europeans discovered and eventually populated California. We’ll go as far as the settlement of San Francisco. But first, a word on what came before. Quoting Kevin Starr:

At the initial moment of European contact in 1492, something approaching one third of all Native Americans living within the present-day boundaries of the continental United States-which is to say, more than three hundred thousand people-are estimated to have been living within the present-day boundaries of California. This claim has been disputed by those who argue for a much larger Native American population for the continental United States, but no matter: the figures, however they compare to the rest of the continent, are still impressive. For centuries, hundreds of thousands of Native Americans had been making their homes, living their lives, in the place now called California.

Is this true? My sense is that it's an active area of debate amongst historians. Here is a map of the population distribution of pre-columbian North America from 1957(!). So take it with fistfuls of salt etc.

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