An American in California

Many American pre-Gold Rush pioneers in California embraced aspects of the Spanish culture but modified it by Yankee enterprise. William Heath Davis was one of these. Son of a Yankee father and a Hawaiian mother, he lived on the island of Oahu until he was sixteen years old. At that time, in the year 1838, after two trips to California aboard his stepfather's trading vessels, he was apprenticed to his uncle Nathan Spear, a prosperous merchant in San Francisco. Later, Davis himself engaged in the mercantile trade. From a modest beginning he, with various partners, established what became San Francisco's largest trading emporium. He earned early prominence and a quick fortune. For a decade, Davis kept various vessels engaged at California's "leeward ports," and as far away as Hawaii, China, Peru, and Boston. Circumstances and errors in judgment combined to make his success shortlived.

Early in 1850 Davis became interested in a plan to found a new city on the ocean side of the old pueblo of San Diego. Davis was well acquainted with the area and knew the old town was handicapped by its distance from the water. It was an ambitious and expensive venture and although he built a considerable community and a $60,000 wharf, the town failed. Still, he is considered by some to be the father of San Diego. The costly speculations there, coupled with his losses in the great San Francisco fire of 1851, left him only the lands of the Estudillos, the illustrious family of which his wife was a member. Davis became a ranchero, managing the family estates in Alameda County. It was during this period that he founded San Leandro. Sensing also that one day the oak-covered slopes along the eastern shoreline of San Francisco Bay would support a large population, Davis tried to purchase these attractive sites. Had he been successful, he might also have become the founder of Oakland.

The research upon which this book is based covers many important aspects of the economy of California and Hawaii before 1850. This authoritative biography of a California pioneer also sheds light on special areas of interest, such as the New England-Canton trade, Russian activity along the Northwest Coast and Alaska, the Hawaiian sandalwood traffic, which Davis's father virtually controlled, the Pacific Coast hide and tallow commerce, the Gold Rush, and California's rancho society and later urbanization.

Davis's career as ship- and landowner, trader, civic official, town founder, and ranchero faithfully mirrors the role he and his contemporaries played in paving the way for California's transition from frontier province to modern state.