But just beyond the northern reaches of the Presidio of San Francisco, Russian workers felled redwood to build the impressive palisade walls and stout log structures of Ross-the administrative center of the first mercantile colony in California.

A chain of Franciscan missions and presidios, extending from San Diego to the greater San Francisco Bay, emerged as the cornerstone of the Spanish colonial enterprise in what became known as Alta California. With the coming of the Russians, the fertile coastal shores of central California were transformed into the borderlands of two distinctive colonial domains. By 1812, California was also the southernmost frontier of an extensive Russian mercantile enterprise centered in the North Pacific (see map 1). The roots of our modern ethnic diversity can be traced back to this colonial encounter among Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, Russians, Native Alaskans, and many other peoples.Īs the site of one of the last major colonial expansions of the Spanish Crown in the late 1700s, California became the northernmost province of a vast empire that stretched across much of southern North America, Central America, and South America. We tend to forget that this state was forged at the crossroads of the world, for it was here that the extensive colonial domains of Imperial Spain and Tsarist Russia first touched on the Pacific coast. An eerie silence pervades the memories of thousands of native peoples and Russian colonists who, like the Spanish, participated in the creation of the California frontiers. But the full diversity and significance of the state's colonial past has been lost in the hustle and bustle of our twenty-first-century world. We accentuate Spanish recollections that indelibly mark the contemporary landscape with Mission Revival buildings, reconstructed missions and presidios, place names, and even Taco Bell restaurants. Such is the case with the telling of California's colonial history.

Voices of the past become muted over time. Dimensions and Consequences of Colonial Encounters

Skull wars by david hurst thomas