Recent Trends in Population Distribution in California

S INCE the beginning of white settlement in California, in the Spanish-Mexican era, the population has tended to shift from region to region. The movement has been accentuated and helped by migration to California from other parts of the United States, from Europe, the Orient, and Mexico. The history of the peopling of California has thus been that of a continuous movement in number and space marked by new forces finding expression in new forms of population distribution. The original distribution of the native Indian population had first been disrupted by the process of missionization and SpanishAmerican colonization. In the period I835-I848 the tendency of the population to concentrate in the plains of central California and around the pueblo of Los Angeles was apparent. After the discovery of gold at Coloma (I848) the population center of California moved definitely to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and the lowlands between the "Mother Lode Country "I and the Pacific Ocean.2 In the decade i86o-i870 there began a gradual depopulation of the gold-mining regions and a movement toward the valleys. With the opening of railroads and the transition to more intensive types of farming the peopling of the valleys and lowlands began. The following decades were characterized by a "filling" of almost all the habitable parts of the state by its settlers and newcomers. The limits of settlement were widened by continuous deforestation and by irrigation of desert land: the most daring enterprise was the creation of the rich Imperial Valley in the northern part of the Sonoran desert. In the postwar period wave after wave of newcomers reached this last American frontier: Mexicans, Southern Negroes, Filipinos, Midwesterners, and, most recently, the "Dust Bowlers." The decade I930-I940 was characterized by striking demographic changes, most of them connected in some way with the migration from the Southwestern States (Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas) to the Pacific Coast. The changes are visible in almost every aspect of the composition and character of the population. This paper is limited to a brief notice of the most important trends in the distribution of the population, trends that are already clearly apparent and that