[craigs]

Originally Posted by jd3189

San Francisco seems to be the odd one out since it’s pretty centrally located in California.

San Francisco is located well within California's borders because, for several decades, it basically was California. In the earliest decades, San Francisco was the undisputed center of industrial, commercial, legal, and cultural life in the young state. It completely eclipsed Monterey, the capital of Spanish and then Mexican Alta California from 1770 to 1845. Before the railroads, San Francisco was the primary port of entry into the West. Early California essentially grew outward from San Francisco concentrically--the University of California across the bay, Stanford in the farmland to the south, wine country to the north. It was a big city, with hundreds of thousands of residents, when lightly-populated southern California was still referred to as "the cow counties." No other state would have been allowed to carve out any of the heart of young California; borders were never going to be drawn close to San Francisco.

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Yeah, that's another good point. All of the U.S. cities that grew from a pre-Revolutionary War settlement were probably situated in a way to help defend against being attacked. Many of the oldest cities were probably settled around forts.

This is certainly true here. Mission Dolores and its attendant village was founded in 1776--but so, then, was the Presidio, a fortified military garrison for the Spanish king's soldiers to guard the entry to San Francisco Bay.

Originally Posted by dubu

California has no big rivers. so by that logic Oregon and California are combined. I mean the border really doesn't exist, except you an tell by looking at the way the cities look. the whole west cost is mixed up.

California has the 447 mile-long Sacramento River, on which its capital city is situated and for which it is named. When gold was found in the 119 mile-long American River just outside Sacramento in 1847, the ensuing rush, which birthed the modern state, saw thousands of people from all over the world sail into San Francisco Bay, through the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta, and upriver to the gold country. It was the primary "highway" for people and goods between the port of San Francisco and all points east. In turn, Sacramento--at the confluence of the two rivers--became the state capital, and cemented its bright future as the overland terminus of the Pony Express and, later, the first Transcontinental Railroad.

California also has the 366 mile-long San Joaquin River, which flows north through Fresno, Merced, Modesto, and Stockton, where it joins with the Sacramento River in the aforementioned delta.

Now, these rivers may not seem big when compared to the Columbia or the Missouri or whatever, but they are big enough to have made a huge impact on why, and how, early California was developed and populated.