The Great State of California

California

California, just like the rest of the states of this country is unique. The large populated country known as California has history, an economy and other things that make California the special country that it is today.

California’s history is unique. For example, California’s name came from a knightly romance book that was published in 1510. It was about a queen named Califia who ruled over an island paradise with black Amazons and a lot of pearls and gold near the Indies. Men were only allowed there once a year. Little did the queen know that Cortez’s men thought that they found the island because they found pearls. Later on, Francisco de Uolla found that the country was actually a peninsula. Based on research, the first settlers to arrive in California after the Native Americans were the Spanish and later the Mexicans. Russia had little places that were colonized for fur and whaling purposes. The Spanish went to California to turn the Indians into Christians. The Spanish hoped to make the Indians become Spaniards becoming loyal to Spain. Spain was being informed that Russia and English were coming onto the land that was already claimed be Spain. With the English, the fight for California started almost 500 years ago with Queen Elizabeth I. Queen Elizabeth sent Sir Francis Drake to harass and raid the Spanish. But they soon came to realize the value of California and realized that they did not want Spain to claim more land in the new world because that was upsetting the balance of power between the super powers of that time. But little did they know that after Lady Jane Grey ruled for a brief nine days, Mary I., who was the daughter of Henry and his first wife, came to rule. She had ties to both Spain and Catholi...

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...es the Yosemite Falls and the sequoia trees. One of the state’s problems is the appetite for water. The once fertile Owens valley is now dry and its waters tapped by Los Angeles. In the Imperial Valley, the eradication of water is controlled by the All-American Canal which gets its water from the Colorado River. In Central Valley the poor distribution is the water problem that is an imbalance lessened by the vast Central Valley project. California had cutbacks in federally funded water in the 1970sand 80s which led to California cities buying water from areas that had a surplus of water. But California failed to make a long-term to plan and the federal government stopped the funding of water to the state in 2003. But with all this being said and done, California remains to be a unique state with a lot of entertainment, history, agriculture and a productive economy.