California

A state that skipped the territory stage

Most western states spent years as territories before Congress let them in. California never did. Gold was found in early 1848, the same year Mexico gave up the region after the Mexican-American War, and within two years so many people had arrived that Californians held their own constitutional convention at Monterey in 1849 and asked to join as a state. Congress admitted it directly, as a free state, in one of the five laws that make up the Compromise of 1850. That made California the 31st state, a number you can still count in the 31 stars on its Great Seal.

Where the name comes from

California was named before anyone in Europe had seen it. Most historians trace the word to Las sergas de Esplandián, a Spanish adventure novel by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo printed in the early 1500s. It describes an island called California, rich in gold and ruled by a warrior queen named Calafia. When Spanish explorers reached the Baja California peninsula in the 1530s and 1540s, they took it for an island and used the novel’s name. Where Montalvo got the word himself is still argued over.

Gold, Eureka and the Golden State

Gold runs through California’s official identity. The state motto is Eureka, Greek for “I have found it,” the cry tied to the gold strikes. It has been on the Great Seal since 1849, but the Legislature only made it the official motto in 1963. The nickname “the Golden State” is older than the law that adopted it: it was in print by the 1850s and became official in 1968. Native gold has also been the state mineral since 1965, and the state colors, set by law in 1951, are blue and gold.

A capital that took five years to settle

Sacramento is the capital, but it was not the first choice. Between 1849 and 1854 the Legislature met in San Jose, Vallejo, Sacramento, Vallejo again and Benicia, a run of moves that earned the government the name “the floating capital.” Sacramento won in 1854 by offering its county courthouse, and its residents later taxed themselves to buy land for a permanent capitol. Work on that building started in 1860 and finished in 1874. Sacramento is far from the biggest city: Los Angeles has about seven times as many people, and San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco and Fresno are all bigger too. The capital page tells the full story.

More official symbols than almost anywhere

California has made more than 40 things official, and the list keeps growing. The best known is still the Bear Flag, adopted in 1911. It shows a California grizzly, the state animal since 1953 and a bear that was hunted out of the state by the 1920s. The California poppy became the state flower in 1903 and the California quail the state bird in 1931. The coast redwood and the giant sequoia share the title of state tree: one is the tallest tree in the world and the other the largest by volume.

Some of the newer choices are less expected. California was the first state to name an official rock (serpentine, in 1965) and the first to name an official lichen (lace lichen, in 2015). It has four state nuts at once, a state fabric (denim), a state sport (surfing) and an official prehistoric artifact, a small stone bear more than 7,000 years old. The banana slug joined the list in 2024 and the giant garter snake, a Central Valley species that is endangered, in 2025. Every one of them, with the law that made it official, is on the California symbols page.

Size and people

California covers 163,695 square miles, behind only Alaska and Texas. It is home to about 39.4 million people according to the Census Bureau’s 2025 estimate, more than any other state and roughly one in nine Americans, though its population is slightly lower than at the 2020 census. It borders Oregon, Nevada and Arizona, shares an international border with Mexico, and faces the Pacific along its whole western edge.