When European ships began tracing the west coast of North America, the varied terrain and climate between Mexico and Alaska was home to many different societies. Within what is now California, indigenous peoples took advantage of the seasonal variety of food and climate in the three main geographic zones of coast, central valley, and the Sierra on the eastern side of the central valley. These peoples and their rich environment attracted Spanish missionaries in the late eighteenth century, who sought to convert them to Christianity, and to the rôle of labourers in the stock-raising and agriculture that constituted the economic basis of the missions. These missions notwithstanding, at the beginning of the nineteenth century California was still a remote and mysterious place for most Europeans and Americans, accessible only via the long ocean voyage around Cape Horn.

By 1850, however, California, a new state of the USA, was a destination for thousands of immigrants from elsewhere in the USA, from Europe, and from Asia, travelling by land and sea. Twenty years later, railways collapsed the six-month ocean or overland journey into a matter of a few days, and the telegraph and mechanized printing presses rapidly conveyed news of what travellers saw. Travel writing about California reflects the west coast’s rapid transformation from a remote non-place to a focal point of a powerful mythology, a development stemming from two centuries of European colonising experience in North America, newly stimulated by the rapid development of mass transportation and communications. The earliest published accounts of California are products of strategic and scientific explorations in the late 1700s, which were imitated by official overland expeditions between 1790 and 1840. But thereafter, we enter an era chronicled in a multitude of narratives of journeys around Cape Horn or across the continent, by trappers, farmers, would-be gold miners, journalists, and writers in search of a subject.