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Yerba Buena, California
Yerba Buena was the original name of the settlement that later became San Francisco. Located near the northeastern end of the San Francisco Peninsula, between the Presidio of San Francisco and the Mission San Francisco de Asís, it was originally intended as a trading post for ships visiting San Francisco Bay. The settlement was arranged in the Spanish style around a plaza that remains as the present day Portsmouth Square. Name The name of the town was taken from the yerba buena (''Clinopodium douglasii'') plant, a native herb of the West Coast of North America and abundant in the region surrounding San Francisco Bay. Franciscan missionary Pedro Font, accompanying the Juan Bautista de Anza expedition of 1775–76, applied the Spanish name to the common native herb he found abundant in the landscape. The plant's common name, yerba buena, the same in English and Spanish, is an alternate form of the Spanish ''hierba buena'' (meaning "good herb"). The earliest report of the use of ...
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San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Governments to include the nine counties that border the aforementioned estuaries: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, Sonoma, and San Francisco. Other definitions may be either smaller or larger, and may include neighboring counties that do not border the bay such as Santa Cruz and San Benito (more often included in the Central Coast regions); or San Joaquin, Merced, and Stanislaus (more often included in the Central Valley). The core cities of the Bay Area are San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland. Home to approximately 7.76 million people, Northern California's nine-county Bay Area contains many cities, towns, airports, and associated regional, state, and national parks, connected by a comp ...
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Fort Vancouver
Fort Vancouver was a 19th century fur trading post that was the headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company's Columbia Department, located in the Pacific Northwest. Named for Captain George Vancouver, the fort was located on the northern bank of the Columbia River in present-day Vancouver, Washington. The fort was a major center of the regional fur trading. Every year trade goods and supplies from London arrived either via ships sailing to the Pacific Ocean or overland from Hudson Bay via the York Factory Express. Supplies and trade goods were exchanged with a plethora of Indigenous cultures for fur pelts. Furs from Fort Vancouver were often shipped to the Chinese port of Guangzhou where they were traded for Chinese manufactured goods for sale in the United Kingdom. At its pinnacle, Fort Vancouver watched over 34 outposts, 24 ports, six ships, and 600 employees. Today, a full-scale replica of the fort, with internal buildings, has been constructed and is open to the public as Fort Van ...
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Hudson's Bay Company
The Hudson's Bay Company (HBC; french: Compagnie de la Baie d'Hudson) is a Canadian retail business group. A fur trading business for much of its existence, HBC now owns and operates retail stores in Canada. The company's namesake business division is Hudson's Bay, commonly referred to as The Bay ( in French). After incorporation by English royal charter in 1670, the company functioned as the ''de facto'' government in parts of North America for nearly 200 years until the HBC sold the land it owned (the entire Hudson Bay drainage basin, known as Rupert's Land) to Canada in 1869 as part of the Deed of Surrender, authorized by the Rupert's Land Act 1868. At its peak, the company controlled the fur trade throughout much of the English- and later British-controlled North America. By the mid-19th century, the company evolved into a mercantile business selling a wide variety of products from furs to fine homeware in a small number of sales shops (as opposed to trading posts) acros ...
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Francisco De Haro
Francisco de Haro (1792 – November 28, 1849) was a Californio politician, soldier, and ranchero, who served as the 1st and 5th Alcalde of San Francisco (initially known as Yerba Buena). He notably commissioned the first land survey of San Francisco to Jean Jacques Vioget in 1839. Biography De Haro was born in Compostela, Nayarit, in colonial Mexico. He came to the Presidio of San Francisco as a soldier in 1819. De Haro became the first ''Alcalde'' (mayor) of the pueblo of Yerba Buena in 1834. He was instrumental in planning the street grid of the town along with Englishman William A. Richardson in 1835. In 1837, de Haro bought the Rancho Laguna de la Merced, which included Lake Merced and portions of northern San Mateo County, from the grantee José Antonio Galindo. And in strange turn of events, in 1838, Alcalde de Haro issued an arrest warrant for Jose Antonio Galindo for the murder of José Doroteo Peralta (1810–1838). De Haro served again as the fifth Alcalde fr ...
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Alcalde
Alcalde (; ) is the traditional Spanish municipal magistrate, who had both judicial and administrative functions. An ''alcalde'' was, in the absence of a corregidor, the presiding officer of the Castilian '' cabildo'' (the municipal council) and judge of first instance of a town. ''Alcaldes'' were elected annually, without the right to reelection for two or three years, by the ''regidores'' (council members) of the municipal council. The office of the ''alcalde'' was signified by a staff of office, which they were to take with them when doing their business. A woman who holds the office is termed an ''Alcaldesa''. In New Spain (Mexico), ''alcaldes mayores'' were chief administrators in colonial-era administrative territories termed ''alcaldías mayores''; in colonial-era Peru the units were called ''corregimientos''. ''Alcalde'' was also a title given to Indian officials inside the Spanish missions, who performed a large variety of duties for the Franciscan missionaries. M ...
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William A
William is a male given name of Germanic origin.Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, , p. 276. It became very popular in the English language after the Norman conquest of England in 1066,All Things William"Meaning & Origin of the Name"/ref> and remained so throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern era. It is sometimes abbreviated "Wm." Shortened familiar versions in English include Will, Wills, Willy, Willie, Bill, and Billy. A common Irish form is Liam. Scottish diminutives include Wull, Willie or Wullie (as in Oor Wullie or the play ''Douglas''). Female forms are Willa, Willemina, Wilma and Wilhelmina. Etymology William is related to the given name ''Wilhelm'' (cf. Proto-Germanic ᚹᛁᛚᛃᚨᚺᛖᛚᛗᚨᛉ, ''*Wiljahelmaz'' > German ''Wilhelm'' and Old Norse ᚢᛁᛚᛋᛅᚼᛅᛚᛘᛅᛋ, ''Vilhjálmr''). By regular sound changes, the native, inherited English form of the name shoul ...
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Mexico
Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and to the east by the Gulf of Mexico. Mexico covers ,Mexico
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making it the world's 13th-largest country by are ...
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Mexican Independence
The Mexican War of Independence ( es, Guerra de Independencia de México, links=no, 16 September 1810 – 27 September 1821) was an armed conflict and political process resulting in Mexico's independence from Spain. It was not a single, coherent event, but local and regional struggles that occurred within the same period, and can be considered a revolutionary civil war. Independence was not an inevitable outcome, but events in Spain directly impacted the outbreak of the armed insurgency in 1810 and its course until 1821. Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Spain in 1808 touched off a crisis of legitimacy of crown rule, since he had placed his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne after forcing the abdication of the Spanish monarch Charles IV. In Spain and many of its overseas possessions, the local response was to set up juntas ruling in the name of the Bourbon monarchy. Delegates in Spain and overseas territories met in Cádiz, Spain, still under Spanish control, as the Cor ...
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Alta California
Alta California ('Upper California'), also known as ('New California') among other names, was a province of New Spain, formally established in 1804. Along with the Baja California peninsula, it had previously comprised the province of , but was split off into a separate province in 1804 (named ). Following the Mexican War of Independence, it became a territory of Mexico in April 1822 and was renamed in 1824. The territory included all of the modern U.S. states of California, Nevada, and Utah, and parts of Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. In the 1836 Siete Leyes government reorganization, the two Californias were once again combined (as a single ). That change was undone in 1846, but rendered moot by the U.S. military occupation of California in the Mexican-American War. Neither Spain nor Mexico ever colonized the area beyond the southern and central coastal areas of present-day California and small areas of present-day Arizona, so they exerted no effective cont ...
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Las Californias
The Californias (Spanish: ''Las Californias''), occasionally known as The Three Californias or Two Californias, are a region of North America spanning the United States and Mexico, consisting of the U.S. state of California and the Mexican states of Baja California and Baja California Sur. Historically, the term ''Californias'' was used to define the vast northwestern region of Spanish America, as the ''Province of the Californias'' ( es, Provincia de las Californias), and later as a collective term for Alta California and the Baja California Peninsula. Originally a single, vast entity within the Spanish Empire, as the Californias became defined in their geographical limits, their administration was split various times into Baja California (''Lower California'') and Alta California (''Upper California''), especially during the Mexican control of the region, following the Mexican War of Independence. As a part of the Mexican–American War (1846–48), the American Conquest of ...
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