Wilma Mankiller came to San Francisco in the 1956 relocation era and called the Alcatraz occupation her awakening; in 1985 she became the first woman Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation.
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 1848 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.
Why People Visit San Francisco California
- Walk or bike the Golden Gate Bridge, then see it from Fort Point below, Baker Beach, or the Marin headlands — International Orange against the fog.
- Ride a cable car over Nob Hill and Russian Hill — the 1873 system is the only moving National Historic Landmark in the country.
- Take the ferry to Alcatraz Island for the penitentiary years and the view back at the city.
- See the Painted Ladies from Alamo Square at golden hour, the Queen Anne row of the 1890s against the downtown skyline.
- Enter Chinatown through the Dragon Gate for dim sum and lantern-strung alleys — the oldest Chinatown in North America.
- Wander North Beach for espresso, the City Lights bookstore of the Beats, and the climb to Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill — listening for the wild parrots overhead.
- Visit the Mission District for Mission Dolores — the 1791 adobe that is the city’s oldest building — the murals, and a Mission-style burrito.
- Graze the Ferry Building marketplace, then watch the sea lions haul out along the Fisherman’s Wharf piers.
- Walk Lands End past the Sutro Baths ruins to Ocean Beach, or catch the whole grid from Twin Peaks.
- Drive — or better, walk — the crooked block of Lombard Street down Russian Hill.