California

Spanish Franciscans built the first of California's twenty-one missions at San Diego de Alcalá in 1769, under Junípero Serra, and strung the rest north along El Camino Real over the following decades, the last raised at Sonoma in 1823. Los Angeles was founded in 1781 by forty-four settlers as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles; San Francisco began as the Spanish presidio and mission of Yerba Buena in 1776 and took its present name in 1847. Mexico ceded the territory to the United States in 1848 under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the same year James Marshall found gold at Sutter's Mill on the American River, and California entered the Union in 1850 without ever passing through territorial status. The Central Pacific Railroad, built east from Sacramento starting in 1863, met the Union Pacific at Promontory Summit in 1869. Hollywood's studios arrived in the 1910s, and Don Hoefler coined "Silicon Valley" in a 1971 trade-paper series on the semiconductor firms south of San Francisco Bay.