Darren A. Raspa. Bloody Bay

For generations, the Wild West was an exciting historical narrative in books, movies, and television, featuring tantalizing stories of good guys fighting bad guys, earnest homesteaders trying to make it against towering odds, gold rush towns where fortunes were made (or not), and sheriffs poised for a showdown with a villain. In reality, the westward migration resulted in hundreds of thousands of people who moved across the continent in search of a better life, but the stories were hardly glamorous. The journeys were grueling, the destinations challenging—one needed a lot of grit to make a fortune. The circumstances may have been tough, as the thousands of diaries of frontier settlers show, but the rewards could be great. Westward migration most often resulted in farming, with bountiful produce, flowing milk, and tons of cattle. But this agricultural land of plenty was only part of the story: there were a significant number of cities, modest in size, that came into being in the post-1850 western expansion. One of the most important new towns was San Francisco, with its fortuitous geographical location on a bay and the Pacific Ocean. Hilly and near two major earthquake centers, the little outpost was part of Spain until 1821, when it became part of Mexico. As the National Trust Guide/San Francisco explains, Yerba Buena was attractive to the American newcomers, and following the Mexican-American War in July 1846 was renamed San Francisco during the US takeover in 1848. By 1850, California was given statehood, a recognition of its economic and geographical importance; San Francisco was the US’s the first major port on the West Coast.

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