Who ruled San Francisco?

San Francisco occupies the tip of a hilly peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, beside the Golden Gate, the narrow strait that is the bay's only outlet to the sea. The bay is one of the finest natural harbours on the Pacific coast of the Americas, yet Europeans missed its entrance, often hidden by fog, for more than two centuries. The city's history is one of sudden transformations: a small Spanish outpost became a boom town almost overnight in the Gold Rush, was destroyed by earthquake and fire in 1906, and later became a centre of finance, social change and technology.

For thousands of years the peninsula was home to Ohlone-speaking peoples; the Yelamu group lived in several small villages on the land of the future city, gathering acorns and shellfish and fishing in the bay. In November 1769 a land expedition from the Spanish Empire under Gaspar de Portolá became the first Europeans known to have seen the bay. To guard the coast of New Spain against Russian and British interest, an expedition led by Juan Bautista de Anza chose sites for a fort and a mission, and in 1776 settlers founded the Presidio of San Francisco and the Mission San Francisco de Asís, known as Mission Dolores. The mission drew in Ohlone converts, but disease and the mission regime devastated them.

After Mexico won independence in 1821, the mission lands were secularised, and in 1835 a small trading settlement called Yerba Buena was laid out by the cove on the eastern shore. During the Mexican-American War, in July 1846, US Navy sailors raised the American flag in its plaza, and in January 1847 the town was renamed San Francisco.

The discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in January 1848 changed everything. Between early 1848 and the end of 1849 the population grew from about 1,000 to about 25,000, as fortune seekers arrived from the eastern United States, Latin America, Europe, Australia and China. Ships were abandoned in the harbour as crews ran off to the goldfields, and some were used as buildings or landfill. Fires, vigilance committees and rough politics marked the early years, but silver from Nevada and the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1869 made San Francisco the financial capital of the American West. Chinese immigrants built a large Chinatown despite harsh discrimination, including the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

At dawn on 18 April 1906 a powerful earthquake struck, and the fires that followed burned for days and destroyed most of the city. Around 3,000 people died, though the official count at the time was far lower, and more than half the population was left homeless. The city rebuilt quickly and celebrated its recovery with the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915.

Two great bridges followed within a year of each other: the Bay Bridge in 1936 and the Golden Gate in 1937. During World War II the bay's shipyards and military bases brought hundreds of thousands of workers to the region, and in 1945 delegates met in San Francisco to draw up the United Nations Charter. From the Beat writers of the 1950s to the "Summer of Love" in 1967, the city became a centre of counterculture, and it was a focus of the gay rights movement; Supervisor Harvey Milk was assassinated in City Hall in 1978. The Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 caused heavy damage. Since the 1990s the nearby technology industry of Silicon Valley has driven booms in wealth and housing costs. San Francisco today has about 800,000 inhabitants and is the cultural and financial centre of a Bay Area of more than seven million people.