Dreams of Gold.

Before the Spanish explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo identified the West Coast, and before Hernando Cortez set foot on lower California, the allure and adventure of California was imagined in a Spanish romance written by Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo. In The Adventures of Esplandian (1510) Montalvo wrote: "Know then, that on the right hand of the Indies, there is an island called California, very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise." Montalvo's California was peopled by Amazonian women warriors. Perhaps most telling of all, Montalvo imagined that "in the whole island, there was no metal but gold."

An Overnight Metropolis.

In 1840 Richard Henry Dana published his Two Years Before the Mast, a vivid recounting of his journey to California around Cape Horn and his life as a merchant sailor. Dana found California sparsely settled, and the Spaniards, in Dana's view...