California

In January 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall found flakes of gold in the tailrace of a sawmill he was building for John Sutter on the American River. Within 2 years, California went from a remote Mexican province to a state of the Union. Tens of thousands of gold seekers came in 1849 alone, by wagon across the continent, by ship around South America, or across the Isthmus of Panama. San Francisco grew from a village into a city almost overnight.

The Gold Rush happened just as photography was arriving, and some of the earliest pictures of California are daguerreotypes of miners at work with pans and sluices. Before the Americans, California had been Spanish and then Mexican, and the chain of 21 Franciscan missions founded along the coast starting in 1769 left adobe churches that photographers returned to again and again. Many were in ruins by the late 1800s and were restored later.

Yosemite was photographed early and well. Carleton Watkins hauled a huge camera into the valley in the 1860s, and his pictures helped persuade Congress to protect it. Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant in 1864, the first time the federal government set land aside for public enjoyment.

On April 18, 1906, an earthquake struck San Francisco, and the fires that followed burned for days. Much of the city was destroyed, and photographers documented every block of ruins. The city rebuilt quickly, and in 1915 it hosted the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to show it had recovered. In Southern California, the story was oranges, oil and, from the 1910s, the movies. Hollywood became the center of American filmmaking in part because of its steady sunshine.

In pictures of Los Angeles and the south, notice how much open land there is. Orange groves, bean fields and empty hills ran right up to towns that are now covered by the city. Before 1913, when the Los Angeles Aqueduct began bringing water from the Owens Valley, the region could not support anything like the population it holds today.