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Supported by education (California State University Monterey Bay is making deft use of the former Fort Ord), tourism and agriculture, and supplemented by the inevitable Internet startups, today's Monterey is secure in its place away from the frenzied New Economy culture to the north. A look into the past will surely shed some light on this pleasant present, and perhaps offer some clues about the future.
Human habitation of the Monterey Peninsula dates back some 3500 years. The Ohlones to the north and the Chumash to the south led a peaceful, subsistence-based existence, enjoying the area's temperate climate and abundant resources. Spain laid claim to the entire California coast in 1542, but it was explorer Sebastian Vizcaino who discovered Monterey Bay sixty years later. Having had the area named after him, the Viceroy of Mexico, Gaspar de Zuniga y Acevedo, was enthusiastic about its further exploration. He was replaced, however, in 1603. Vizcaino was subsequently fired, and the King's orders for him to return to Monterey with colonists, were quietly shelved. It wasn't for another 168 years that Gaspar de Portola, the Spanish governor of Baja California, established the first mission (under the direction of Father Junipero Serra) and presidio in Monterey. (So rosily inaccurate were Vizcaino's descriptions of the Bay's features, that it took Portola two expeditions to finally locate it.) Portola established the mission (under the direction of Father Junipero Serra) and presidio (still standing) in Monterey. In 1775, Monterey was made the Capital of Alta California, and remained so through Spanish, Mexican, and independent California until American statehood took effect in 1850. Spanish settlement and mission life doomed Ohlone and Chumas culture.
Huge land grants, or ranchos, were sold to Spanish settlers, or Californios. When Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, the vast holdings of the Catholic Church were broken up and sold off at generous rates as further ranchos. Many of the ranchos, particularly those along the Central Coast, survive today as ranches, farms, state and federal parkland, and the occasional golf course. The period of Mexican rule of California was short-lived, however. The steady stream of American immigration from the east became an unruly torrent once the Mexican Revolution broke the Spanish monopoly on California trade. John C. Fremont's Bear Flag Revolt of 1846 ushered in the 21-day history of the Bear Republic. During the ensuing period, in which California was a territory of neither Mexico nor the United States, the California Constitutional Convention met in the office of Monterey alcalde (mayor) Walter Colton.
With the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in 1848 (and statehood two years later), the torrent of immigration to California turned into a flood. While Spanish visions of gold in the Monterey area never materialized, the demands of the 'Forty-Niners' to the north sparked a robust timber and fishing industry, which continued to thrive long after the gold rush petered out. The lawlessness which characterized life in early San Francisco was prevalent, albeit to a lesser degree, in Monterey. In one three-year period during the 1850s, there were 60 murders without anything approaching a conviction, in large part because most of the murders were committed at the behest of the county sheriff, William Roach.
When Nevada's Comstock silver boom fuelled ever-greater expansion in the San Francisco economy, Monterey's seemingly inexhaustible resources stood ready. Crops, grain transport, fishing, and whaling made Monterey a bustling port. The area's attractions remained largely agricultural, however, but for coastal resorts and retreats that sprung up here and there along the Central Coast. (And which continue to be one of the area's great attractions, from St. Clare's Retreat House to the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. The most extreme example of Central Coast resort-building is, of course, Fred Swanton's Brighton-style casino up the road in Santa Cruz, where the famous roller coaster now does its thing.)
It was the Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s that brought a new wave of immigration to the Monterey Peninsula. 'Okies' from the drought-stricken South and Midwest came by the tens of thousands to pick lettuce and other crops and to work in the sardine canneries. Their travails are part of the picture of pre-war Monterey glimpsed in Cannery Row, The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Tortilla Flat, and other John Steinbeck classics. The industrial boom of World War II brought military bases like Monterey's Fort Ord to California, and the aeronautics industry cranked out bombers and fighters by the hangarful from area factories.
Steinbeck was hardly the only cultural figure attracted by the beauty, silence, and seclusion of the Central Coast. A century before, Richard Henry Dana and Robert Lewis Stevenson (who patterned the coastline of Treasure Island after those of Carmel Bay and Point Lobos) had settled there. Jack London, Isadora Duncan, Henry Miller, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Jack Kerouac all lived in the area at various times. Something in the fog air of the coast has had an attraction for spiritualists and self-development movements, as well: Theosophical Society founder Madame Blavatsky was followed, in later years, by the Esalen Institute, the Tassajara Zen Center, hippies, New Ageists, and many others.
Tourism grew to play an increasingly important role in the area's economy. The Monterey Jazz Festival, Concourse Classic Car Weekend, and the Bing Crosby Pro-Amateur golf tournament at Pebble Beach (now the AT& T National Golf Tournament) helped put Monterey on the map as a travel destination.
Wary of coastal development and the threat posed by offshore drilling, Monterey put itself at the vanguard of environmental activism. Much of Monterey's coastline has been put in the care of the state to keep it protected. Its beaches remain famously pristine. Monterey Bay Aquarium, with its iconic sea otters, has done much to heighten awareness of the fragility of the marine environment off the Central Coast: the most recent additional to the federal wildlife sanctuary system is the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
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