California

A Mexican province taken by conquest that became the most populous and richest state, and did it in a single generation. Spanish missions established from 1769 devastated the indigenous population, which had been among the densest and most linguistically varied in North America - perhaps a hundred languages - through disease and forced labour. Mexican independence secularised the missions and distributed the land as ranchos. American settlers declared a short-lived Bear Flag Republic in June 1846, the United States seized the province in the war that followed, and gold was found at Sutter's Mill in January 1848, nine days before the treaty transferring the territory was signed. Three hundred thousand people arrived within a few years, the state was admitted in 1850 without ever being a territory, and state-sanctioned campaigns against Native Californians in the following two decades were described by a later governor as genocide. Chinese labour built the western half of the transcontinental railroad and was then excluded by federal law in 1882. Irrigation turned the Central Valley into the country's most productive farmland. Hollywood, aerospace and then Silicon Valley followed. California would be among the world's largest economies as a country. Water allocation remains its central political problem. Sacramento is the capital and Los Angeles the largest city. The state holds both the highest and lowest points in the contiguous country, at Whitney and Death Valley. Its coastal redwoods are the tallest trees on earth. Nearly forty million people live there. The San Andreas fault runs most of its length.

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