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Our view of California History

California's history of its people is perhaps as much as 12,000 years old. dating to the end of the Tioga glaciation when Yosemite was still being carved out by glaciers.  In 1770, even as the Spanish empire was fading, Monterey was established to discourage colonization by other powers and to convert the Natives to agrarian, tax-paying Spaniards.  Revolutions against Spain that swept the New World in the 1800's brought California under Mexican rule. 

Originally, the Americans came by the dozens trading for cowhides and tallow,  the materials of the Industrial Revolution.  Finding gold, they came by the hundreds of thousands and the story of Monterey was almost over.

We tell the colorful and fascinating history of the Native Americans and of all the Europeans who followed them.  California's riches in land and agricultural products--not just the gold--were the attraction for the Spanish, the Mexicans, and later the Americans, and Monterey was California's capital until statehood in 1850.  It is in Monterey that much of our history begins.

Join us for a sightseeing tour of Monterey that will intrigue you, with stories of the people and the places that were so attractive to other nations that immigrants left everything behind and risked war, drowning, hostile natives, thirst, starvation and the unknown, just to come here.