California is both a state of mind and a physical place, its sensibility shaped by geography, conflict, and experience.
It was the Left Coast even before the Europeans arrived. This slender edge of the continent was the place human beings came after they likely wandered across the Bering Land Bridge and from which they pushed farther south, to warmer weather, richer hunting grounds, on their way, eventually, to the southern tip of South America.
Centuries later, the density and complexity of Indigenous tribes, cultures, and languages in the land west of the High Sierra had become a human continent unto itself.
Merely a few decades after Columbus, the Spaniards came, and then Portuguese ships, followed by Russian fur traders, English navigators, and then, much later, droves of northern Europeans traveling…
