San Francisco
The first European settlement of what would come to be called San Francisco Bay came in 1776 when the Spanish constructed a fort and a mission in an effort to establish a claim to the area. In 1821, following the Mexican War of Independence, control of the Bay Area passed to Mexico. It would not remain in Mexican hands for long, though. In the mid-1930s American settlers began to arrive on the coast and establish homesteads, and at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War in 1848 San Francisco fell into American hands.
When the United States assumed control of San Francisco it was still a sleepy port town with perhaps 1,000 residents. All that would change all that within the course of a year. The discovery of gold in Coloma, California, in early 1848 touched off a frantic wave of migration to the west coast. Thousands of prospectors, hoping to strike it rich, flooded into San Francisco in 1849 during this gold rush, increasing its population twenty-five times over. The next year California was formally granted statehood.
It seemed as if nothing could halt the rapid expansion of San Francisco. As the population grew the city built its iconic streetcar network, which would shuttle inhabitants up and down the steep grades of the city’s streets. The U.S. Navy established its preeminent west-coast base in the city, drawing further traffic to the city, and set up a military prison on Alcatraz Island. San Francisco also served as the terminus for the newly constructed Transcontinental Railroad. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was the eighth-largest city in the United States, with some 300,000 residents.
What the inhabitants of this sparkling new metropolis did not realize was that they had built their city on one of the most active fault lines in the world. They would learn the hard truth on April 18, 1906, when a monumental earthquake struck the city. The quake itself toppled modern structures across the city, but the greatest threat came after the ground became still. Broken gas lines across the city fed fires that cut through the city, while rubble from fallen building obstructed firefighters. By the time it was over three-quarters of the city was ash or ruin.