Where The Heck IS California, Anyway?

When Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels in 1726, California was such a mysterious place that, when he wanted to send his hero Gulliver to the most remote place he could think of, he sent him to a country "somewhere northwest of California."

For 200 years Europeans thought California was an island inhabited by warrior women!

Even though many of the emigrants had moved west before, for example from Ohio to Illinois, the trip to California was much longer and scarier than any had even dreamed of before.

In 1849, California was still 2200 miles away from the United States.

This 1650 map shows California as an island—a misconception that lasted over 200 years.

It was said to be inhabited by beautiful women; and that gold and precious stones were just lying on the ground waiting to be picked up by anyone who wanted them - a myth that was to be repeated during the gold rush.

This map was drawn in 1820, 14 years after the Lewis and Clark expedition traveled from Saint Louis to the Pacific Ocean via the Columbia River. Note the geographic detail in the region now known as Oregon and Washington, and compare that to the region now known as California, Nevada and Arizona.

This map is especially interesting because it shows the mythical Buenaventura River that was thought to flow west from the area of present day Salt Lake to the San Francisco Bay. The belief in this river was so strong that in 1841, when the first party of California Emigrants (the Bartelson-Bidwell Party) headed west into the then unknown, they took carpentry tools so that they could build boats to sail down the Buenaventura!

For years the origin of the name California was a mystery. Then, in 1862, scholars discovered a "novel" written by Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo: The Exploits of the Very Powerful Cavalier Esplandian, Son of the Excellent King Amadis of Gaul, written in 1521.:

"Know that to the right hand of the Indies was an island called California, very near to the region of the Terrestrial Paradise, which was populated by black women, without there being any men among them, that almost like the Amazons was their style of living. These were of vigorous bodies and strong and ardent hearts and of great strength; the island itself the strongest in steep rocks and great boulders that is found in the world; their arms were all of gold, and also the harnesses of the wild beasts on which, after having tamed them, they rode; that in all the island there was no other metal whatsoever. They dwelt in caves very well hewn; they had many ships in which they went out to other parts to make their forays, and the men they seized they took with them, giving them their deaths, as you will further hear. And some times when they had peace with their adversaries, they intermixed with all security one with another, and there were carnal unions from which many of them came out pregnant, and if they gave birth to a female they kept her, and if they gave birth to a male, then he was killed...

"On this island, called California, there are many griffons... and in the time that they had young, these women would... take them to their caves, and there raise them. And... they fattened them on those men and the boys that they had borne...

"Any male that entered the island was killed and eaten by them...

"There ruled on that island of California, a queen great of body, very beautiful for her race, at a flourishing age, desirous in her thoughts of achieving great things, valiant in strength, cunning in her brave heart, more than any other who had ruled that kingdom before her...Queen Calafia."

Twelve years after the appearance of this novel, in 1533, the tip of Baja California was discovered by the Spanish.

Despite the myths and misunderstandings, the west was slowly opened.

In November of 1828, Peter Skeen Ogden came down from the north and discovered the Humboldt River, the last major river in America to be discovered. This was to become the highway across Nevada.

In 1833-34 Joseph Walker led a party of 70 mountain men and trappers from northern Utah , across the Great Salt Flats to the Humboldt, down the Humboldt to the Sierras, across the mountains and on to Santa Barbara, where he wintered. Returning by basically the same route in 1834, he and his men laid out what was to be the Emigrant Trail to California.

In 1841 the Bartleson-Bidwell Party, 32 men and one woman (pregnant and with a child in her arms) broke off from a larger wagon train headed for Oregon, and became the first group of true emigrants to cross Nevada and go to California. To speed their progress, they abandoned their wagons near present day Wendover and walked the rest of the way.

In 1844, the Murphy-Townsend-Stevens wagon train became the first to take their wagons all the way over the Sierra Nevada and into California.

And the road to California was now open.

On January 24, 1848, James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill on California’s American River. By June, San Francisco was virtually empty, its businesses shut down for lack of employees, and everyone was on the American River looking for gold.

While rumors of gold abounded on the east coast, the reality was not confirmed until President James K. Polk, in his State of the Union address in December 1848, said,

"The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief, were they not corroborated by authentic reports of officers in the public service."

After that, the rush was on.

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