Erin H. Turner - It Happened in Northern California: Stories of Events and People That Shaped Golden State History

Erin H. Turner is a writer and editor living in Helena, Montana. She has a degree in history and gender and womens studies from Grinnell College in Iowa and has traveled extensively throughout the West.

The name California first appeared in a Romantic novel, published in Seville, Spain, in about 1510. The book , Las Sergas de Esplandin, by Garc Rodrguez Ordez de Montalvo described a fantastic, mythical island called California, and the Spanish adopted the name for the land to the north of their conquests in South America.

Between 1860 and 1960 the population of California nearly doubled every twenty years.

According to the official U.S. 2020 census, 39,538,223 people now live in California, which is the most populous state.

California comprises 158,693 square miles, spans ten degrees of latitude, and has 1,264 miles of coast. It is the third largest state, after Alaska and Texas.

California experiences about five thousand earthquakes every year, but most of them are so small that only seismologists know they occur.

The Sierra Nevada receives thirty to forty feet of snowfall in average years, and in peak years as much as sixty feet fall in the mountains.

There were between 150,000 and 300,000 Native Americans living in California when the Spanish first arrived. Thats four times the density of the population of any other aboriginal population in what is now the United States.

The Native Americans who were the first human inhabitants of California developed more than one hundred dialects in several different language families.

Californias state motto is Eureka! which means, I have found it!

At 14,496 feet, Mount Whitney is the tallest mountain in the contiguous forty-eight states.

Death Valley is the lowest point in the United States at an average 279.6 feet below sea level. The lowest point in Death Valley is Bad-water at 282 feet below sea level.

Californias capital is Sacramento.

Californias nickname is the Golden State, a reminder of the 1848 discovery of gold in the state. Other gold California icons are the golden poppy and Californias state fish, the golden trout.

Californias state bird is the California valley quail.

The state tree is the California Redwood.

California is first in the United States in total farm income. Crops raised in the state make up more than 10 percent of the total farm income of the United States.

From 1848 to 1857, California gold fields produced $370,000,000 or an average of $41,000,000 per year.

In the mid-1870s, California had about the same size population as the state of Connecticut, but the residents spent nearly six times as much as Connecticut did on public schools. Today, the state still spends more on education than any other state.

Californias professional sports teams have won multiple major championships in basketball, football, and baseball, but it wasnt until 2012 that a California team (the Los Angeles Kings) finally won hockeys Stanley Cup. The Kings won the championship a second time in 2014.

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