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OPPOSITE: CAITLIN MIRRA (2) » 1910: HOLLYWOOD IS BORN D.W. GRIFFITH filmed In Old California in Hollywood in 1910, and the Nestor Motion Picture Company opened a film studio in an old tavern on Sunset and Gower in 1911, starting Hollywood's movie business. Cecil B. DeMille and others followed soon after and really put Hollywood on the map, where it's glowed ever since. moldered, their pioneering vineyards and olive groves were eventually overgrown and forgotten. Not until the 20th century were the missions restored and revived. Many flourish today as redoubts of history and contemporary worship, handsome, evocative reminders of the first major European presence. Alta California grew slowly in its isolation. That changed on January 24, 1848, with the discovery of gold on the American River. The California Gold Rush, beginning in earnest in 1849, gave fortune-seekers a second—some said a last—chance to make good. Half-amillion newcomers—many from Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa— globalized California in a hurry. The Mexican descendants of Spanish settlers— the Californios, with their sprawling ranchos and lives attuned to the slow turning of the seasons—were swept aside, left to start over. Many 49ers stayed on and found another kind of gold: richly productive new lives in a place where beginning afresh—personally, financially, even spiritually—was already a common rite of passage. In 1850, pried loose by the U.S. victory in the Mexican War and accelerated by the Gold Rush, California became the 31st state of the United States. New Californians brought the new Golden State into being, plowing its fields, founding its great universities, building its cities. California's lustrous reputation was tarnished on the morning of April 18, 1906, when a massive earthquake rocked Northern California and leveled much of San Francisco; what the rolling, rumbling ground didn't knock down, the ensuing firestorm burned down. Some 3,000 people died. Now, it was San Francisco's turn to start over. San Francisco dramatized its recovery, and celebrated the new Panama Canal linking the Atlantic and the Pacific, with the splendidly showy PanamaPacific International Exposition of 1915. Just two years after that optimistic JIMI HENDRIX poster from 1968 Winterland concert, above; Gold Rush souvenir circa 1849, and Yosemite daredevils at Glacier Point circa 1916, right; the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, poster below, was staged to show that San Francisco had recovered from the 1906 earthquake. 2 0 1 3 t r av e l gu i d e to c a lif o rnia 1 1