History of San Francisco 1



In 1579, Sir Francis Drake landed at Point Reyes, about 35 miles north of San Francisco, claiming it for Queen Elizabeth and then sailing south straight past the Golden Gate. Not long after, Spanish explorers renamed the Point Reyes bay (now known as Drakes Bay) La Bahia de San Francisco, but then proceeded to wreck their ship on Point Reyes and had to crawl south to the safety of Acapulco in a vessel lashed together from the wreckage. Amazingly they failed to notice the San Francisco Bay. Discovery by Europeans did not occur for close to another 200 years.
In 1775, Juan Manuel de Ayala became the first European to enter the Golden Gate. A tiny village known as Yerba Buena sprang up and was later renamed San Francisco. 1847, a momentous discovery was made in the Sierra Nevada mountains to the east: gold!. The news was soon out, and prospectors began to flood in; over 100,000 of them endured the long overland trek or the still dangerous sea voyage to San Francisco, and the city's population exploded from 500 to 25,000 almost overnight. In 1850, California became the 31st state in the union and by 1854 the booming Gold Rush town already had more than 500 saloons and 20 theatres to entertain the big-spending miners. In 1859,after the initial Gold Rush had faded, a second rush took place, this time for the even richer wealth of the silver Comstock Lode near Reno, Nevada. By the late 1870s , the boom years of the gold and silver rushes were drying up; nevertheless, the city grew steadily, and at the beginning of the new century the population was approaching 350,000.
A decade of rebuilding followed the 1906 earthquake (the Big One, estimated to have been at around 8.3 on the soon to be invented Richter Scale), and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition saw the city bigger and brighter than ever. There had been other major earthquakes in San Francisco in 1812 and 1865, but neither had caused the massive damage of 1906, damage that came mostly from the rampant fires fed by fractured gas mains.

 

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