A World Transformed gathers together the writings of early European explorers, missionaries, sea captains and other visitors, from the first Spaniards to glimpse San Francisco Bay in 1769 to the eve of the gold rush. In 15 literate and accessible accounts by Father Juan Crespi, George Vancouver, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Edwin Bryant and others, the transformation of San Francisco (and by extension, all of California) unfolds before us. A land of bountiful and open meadows, oak woodlands, plentiful game, and countless distinct groups of native people becomes dominated by a Spanish mission and presidio. A Mexican town grows up and eventually becomes a small city inhabited largely by Bostonians and other Anglo merchants, engaged in trade with the Clipper ships of the East Coast. Modern California emerges, not suddenly but perhaps inevitably. Writer-historian Paddison brings together 11 eyewitness accounts of California from the mid-1700s up to the gold rush days of the 1840s. Though not strictly politically correct (one contributor refers to local Native Americans as "well-behaved good heathens"), there's a wealth of fascinating information here, including observations on all of the strange flora and fauna and detailed descriptions of native customs, daily life, and reactions to white visitors. The first accounts are from Spanish missionaries and explorers. Later, though, it's the British and Americans documenting life in California, a shift that signaled Spain's increasingly tenuous grip on this faraway territory. Interestingly, as the accounts progress, it's clear the merchant class is beginning to dominate California culturally and politically, especially in the San Francisco Bay area. Paddison's introductions to the various entries expertly flesh out the ever changing social and political contexts. Brian McCombie A useful collection of European and American accounts of California as it looked before 1848. Joining Heyday Books' strong list in revisionist-tending Californiana, freelance historian/journalist Paddisons collection draws on published reports that in many cases are available in English only in scholarly journals. He observes that the earliest European explorers, Spanish soldiers and missionaries, were initially unimpressed with what they saw: Early descriptions of California, he writes, were favorable but unenthusiastic, and Spain was unready and unwilling to invest the ships, supplies, and people necessary to settle such a far-flung land already inhabited by possibly warlike Indians. After neglecting their discovery for two centuries, Spain eventually turned to California in 1765 to establish a buffer against the encroaching French and British. Paddison opens his anthology with an account by Juan Cresp, a missionary on the Portol expedition, who surveyed the area around Monterey Bay and described it as a grand place this for a very large plenteous mission, with great amounts of good soil and trees . . . and great numbers of heathens, the finest and best-mannered that have been met in the whole journey. The Spanish kept California to themselves only for a short time; soon thereafter the English seafarer George Vancouver arrived in San Francisco Bay, not long after a French navigator named Jean Francois de La Prouse published a widely read journal that exalted the region, saying, no country is more abundant in fish and game of every description. Soon after, as Paddison's selections make clear, came Russians and Germans and, eventually, Americans, all seeking to make California their own. Paddisons anthology, accompanied by intelligent essays on aspects of the Golden States past, offers a trove of information to students of California history and general readers with an interest in the area. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. In 1769 the first Spanish explorers into California encountered a strange and wondrous land: trees "exceedingly high and straight" (redwoods); animals "long-eared like mules" (elk); and numerous native peoples speaking a multitude of languages. By 1846, however, California was already a world transformed. Attending a dinner party in San Francisco, Edwin Bryant remarked: "It was very difficult for me to realize that I was many thousand miles from home, in a strange and foreign country. All the faces about me were Americanand every American who is now here considers himself as treading upon his own soil." California changed dramatically in the years between the founding of the first mission in 1769 and the 1848 gold rush. These eleven eyewitness accounts vividly describe the first European land expedition into an unknown territory; the spread of the missions; the rule of Spain and then Mexico; the rise and fall of California's Russian colony; the emergence of rancho culture; the semi-feudal empires of Vallejo and Sutter; and the arrival of Anglo-Americans as ship-deserters, settlers, traders, and ultimately--perhaps inevitably--the masters of Cal