Quotes from Walton Bean

No other frontier has ever inspired so many of its people to write. The scenes of California, and the experiences of getting there an dliving there, were so often extraordinary and dramatic that they cried out for description.

Spanish encouraged racial intermarriage with the indigenous peoples of America. Anglo-Americans were usually intolerant of it. they were generally able to secure wives of English descent, whereas the Spanish American colonies were extremely unattractive to Spanish women.

During the one hundred years after the beginning of the gold rush, the output of California's gold totaled about $2 billion. All the gold produced in a century was worth less than the total value of one year's agricultural output of the state in the 1960s.

If there had been no gold discovery, Oregon would probably have been ready for admission as a state before California was. The first transcontinental railroad might have been built to Oregon. But if California's first transcontinental railroad had been built later, it might have been in the hands of a somewhat less rapacious group of men, and it might have obtained less of a stranglehold on the state's economy and politics.

It set a tone and created a state of min in which greed predominated and disorder and violence were all too frequent.

Henry Huntington shaped the system of transportation which, along with other forces, launched the entire region from Santa Monica to Redlands and from San Fernando to Santa Ana, on the road to becoming the great City of Southern California.

The value of the California crude oil produced in the decade of the 1920s was more than two and a half billion dollars. . . . the value of all the gold ever mined in the state — about two billion dollars.