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Gold made the instant city. On January 24, 1848, James Marshall found gold on the American River, and that May the merchant Sam Brannan — who had quietly bought every pick, shovel, and pan in town — walked the streets shouting the news with a vial of flakes in his fist. By the end of 1849 a village of fewer than a thousand held twenty-five thousand people; ships arrived faster than crews would stay, and the cove filled with an armada of abandoned hulls. San Francisco incorporated on April 15, 1850, the same year California became the thirty-first state, and the Argonauts of 1849 gave the city its founding character: improvised, polyglot, and certain the impossible was a scheduling problem — a city confident enough, a decade on, to humor Joshua Norton, the ruined merchant who proclaimed himself Emperor Norton I of the United States and was mourned by thousands when he died.
The peninsula was home long before the bridge or the gold. The Yelamu, a Ramaytush Ohlone people, lived on these seven miles by seven miles for thousands of years. The Spanish arrived in 1776: Fathers Francisco Palóu and Pedro Cambón celebrated the first mass at Mission San Francisco de Asís that June — five days before the Declaration of Independence was signed across the continent — and the Presidio followed in September. The mission era devastated the Yelamu, a loss the city’s story owes its first honesty to. The 1791 adobe chapel, Mission Dolores, still stands as the oldest intact building in San Francisco, and a Mexican-era village called Yerba Buena grew along the cove until 1847, when it took the name San Francisco.
Why People Visit San Francisco California
San Francisco offers the orange bridge in the fog, a moving landmark for a transit system, an island prison with a harbor view, Victorian rows and mission adobe, and hills that hand you a postcard at every crest. Visitors come for the Golden Gate, the cable cars, Alcatraz, the neighborhoods, the food, and the fog that is part of the architecture. On the Bay since 1776.