From gold rush to great depression

In 1848, California’s non–Native American population was around 7,000. But then gold was discovered in them thar hills — well, flakes at a sawmill along the American River, anyway. Faster than you can say “Eureka, California!” 300,000 men and women rushed into the state between 1849 and 1851, one of the largest mass migrations in U.S. history. Very few of them found any actual gold, foreshadowing similar migrations trying to hit it big in the movie industry. In 1850, California was admitted to the Union as the 31st state. The state constitution on which California applied for admission included several noteworthy features that set up California as the progressive (to some, flaky and overly liberal) place it remains. To protect the miners, slavery was prohibited. To attract women from the East Coast, legal recognition was given to the separate property of a married woman (California was the first state to offer such recognition).
Not-so-progressively, by 1870, almost 90 percent of the state’s Native American population had been wiped out, and the bulk of the rest were removed to inland reservations.

In 1875, when the Santa Fe Railroad reached Los Angeles, Southern California’s population of just 10,000 was divided equally between Los Angeles and San Diego. As San Francisco, around the tenth-largest city in the United States, suffered a serious setback in the form of the infamous 1906 earthquake and subsequent devastating fire (it rallied fast and strong enough to host the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition), Los Angeles got its own growth spurt, and identity, thanks to the nascent movie industry realizing that in places where it doesn’t snow, you can film outdoors year-round. The movies’ glamorous, idyllic portrayal of California boosted the region’s popularity and population, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when thousands of families (like the Joads in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath) packed up their belongings and headed west in search of a better life.