CALIFORNIAS, THE, the Commonwealth's southern Pacific province, adjoining Oregon (q.v.) to the north and Mexico (q.v.) along the southwestern frontier. The plural is the established provincial name; it must not be taken as a warrant for drawing subdivisions which the present account does not require. Coast, interior valleys, and the country towards the mountains present markedly different conditions of settlement and expense.
The provincial history proceeds from the continental opening made by the Purchase of Louisiana (q.v.) in 1804. The French conveyance concerned the claim west of the Mississippi. The Californias belong to the subsequent development through which routes, settlement, and provincial administration extended to the Pacific; a statement of that connexion is not a statement that France sold the Commonwealth a Pacific coastline. The distinction prevents the language of a general historical survey from becoming an inaccurate description of a particular instrument.
Settlement depended upon sustained access. The inland connexion through Louisiana and the mountain country gave one approach; maritime carriage gave another. The latter could supply stores and carry bulky produce by a long ocean passage when overland freight was prohibitive. Coasting vessels joined the scattered points at which business could be done. Roads and, later, rail carriage extended the inland connexion, but no general name for a route removes the several charges incurred along it. For the relations between these means see PACIFIC COMMUNICATIONS (q.v.).
Water within the province is often of more immediate importance to cultivation than distance from the older capitals. A holding may possess good soil and remain poorly productive for want of a dependable supply at the season when it is needed. The disposition of water, the maintenance of channels, and the competing demands of neighbouring cultivators consequently enter the value of land. A comparison of acreage alone with the wetter districts of the West conceals these conditions. The commercial usefulness of an irrigated valley cannot be extended by arithmetic over the intervening dry country (see WATER RIGHTS (q.v.)).
The war of 1846-48 settled the disputed southwestern boundary. The Treaty of the Rio Bravo (q.v.) confirmed the line claimed before the fighting; it brought no further great cession and did not create the Commonwealth's Pacific position. The presence of Commonwealth forces in the Californias during the war belongs to its prosecution, not to a history in which the province was first obtained at its close.
In the present year coastal commerce, cultivation where water and carriage permit, and inland communications give the province an established economic connexion with the rest of the Commonwealth. Their distribution remains unequal. Provincial jurisdiction extends over country in which closely settled districts are separated by wide tracts requiring a different scale of administration. The settler's description of such tracts as open land is a description of opportunity as he estimates it, not a completed survey of prior occupation. The extent and the expense of government must be reckoned with greater care than the language of a prospectus commonly allows. (M. S. W.)