Before the silicon chip, before Dionne Warwick, and well before the Spanish gave it a name, the Santa Clara Valley was home to scattered settlements of Ohlone Indians. The Ohlone (“The People”) were hunter-gatherers who had lived around San Francisco Bay since the end of the last Ice Age. The southern end of the Bay, where bustling San Jose now stands, provided the Ohlones with a particularly felicitous mix of mild climate, redwood forests, acornfilled oak groves, and creeks and bay wetlands abounding with fish and wildlife.

On November 6, 1769, Gaspar de Portola walked into the Ohlone’s peaceful world by mistake. Portola was looking for Monterey Bay, discovered (in 1602), and subsequently described with wild inaccuracy, by Sebastian Vizcaino. It would take Portola two expeditions to find it. On this first mission, he became the first European to lay eyes on San Francisco Bay, and on the Ohlone. (Portola set up camp to the north under a tall redwood, a place he called el palo alto. The tree, and its namesake city, are both thriving today.)

In 1775, Juan Batista de Anza arrived in the area with a number of Spaniards intent on settling the territory of Alta California, and civilizing the Ohlone. In two years, a mission was built on a site close to the Guadalupe River, dubbed Mission Santa Clara de Asis (after Saint Claire of Assisi). The area around the settlement came to be known as Santa Clara Valley. (Today, San Jose is the seat of Santa Clara County.) To maintain the mission, an agricultural outpost was founded nearby on November 29, 1777: El Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe, so called after St. Joseph, the patron saint of the territory. Because this was the first civilian lay presence in Alta California, San Jose can claim the title of the oldest city in the state. Spanish settlers planted vineyards and orchards and developed cattle ranches. The Ohlone learned agriculture, were absorbed into the burgeoning Spanish community, and ceased to exist as a distinct culture.

The year 1821 marked the Mexican Revolution and a change in the administration of Alta California. A period of tension between Mexico and the United States followed, as the American frontier pushed ever westward, culminating in 1846 with the Mexican- American War. The Santa Clara Valley saw the only action between United States and Mexicans (or, more precisely Californios) in Northern California, in fact, at the Battle of Santa Clara.

The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 had a profound effect on San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley. While not a vein of the “mother lode” that ran far south, the Valley’s western foothills were rich in cinnabar, an ore containing mercury and sulfur, both valuable minerals important for the refinement of gold and silver. The Valley’s agricultural, industrial and mercantile resources, which fed and clothed miners up at the diggings, also played an important role in bringing prosperity to San Jose. In 1850, two years after the conclusion of the Mexican-American War, California won statehood; thanks in large part to the determined lobbying efforts of two local real estate promoters, and San Jose became the state’s first capital. In its year in San Jose (a hard, rainy winter would drive the capital to Benecia, Vallejo, and finally Sacramento); the hard-living State Assembly was known as “the Legislature of a Thousand Drinks”.

As the gold rush ran its course and gave way to the silver bonanza of the Comstock Lode, miners came by the thousands to settle in the pleasant climate and fertile land of Santa Clara Valley. As the state grew, so did the Valley’s agricultural bounty of wheat, pears, apricots, cherries, plums, and finally, and most significantly, prunes. It was the prune industry that came to dominate Santa Clara Valley. San Jose’s agricultural heritage has been largely plowed under by the demands of housing and the technology industry, but individual trees and small stands can be seen here and there within city limits. The bulk of California’s fruit growing takes place to the east, in the San Joaquin Valley.

Santa Clara Valley continued to prosper quietly throughout the rest of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with the occasional disturbances of the 1906 San Andreas earthquake and the Great Depression. In 1891, railroad baron Leland Stanford’s largesse made possible the opening of Stanford University in Palo Alto (the town actually sprang up in the shadow of the university, and was subsequently named for Portola’s redwood).

Stanford quickly became a leading center of education and research, particularly in the development of new technologies. In 1909, Stanford engineering graduate Cyril Elwell, funded with $500 of seed capital from the university’s president, began work in wireless technology that would result in the founding of the Federal Telegraph Company in Palo Alto. Also in 1909, Stanford researcher Charles Herrold broadcast the world’s first commercial radio broadcasts from atop San Jose’s Garden City Bank building. Stanford graduates William Hewlett and David Packard started a small audio-oscillator business in their garage in the 1930s and are popularly credited with fathering what we now know as Silicon Valley. In truth, the South Bay’s high-tech industry was the legacy of a number of brilliant engineers and technologists associated with the university and Palo Alto business community.

After the World War II, tens of thousands of veterans made San Jose their home, displacing agriculture and changing the nature of the city, a change that would become even more dramatic with the wartime technology that followed. The exigencies of war had sparked the accelerated development of vacuum tube, radio, and radar technology, and led to the founding of the Stanford Research Institute. In far off Pennsylvania, the birth of the world’s first electronic computer, ENIAC, led to IBM building a $53 million disk drive plant in San Jose. Lockheed, GTE, General Electric, a more mature Hewlett-Packard and Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory (whose founder, William Shockley, had invented the transistor) soon followed. The area was by the late 1950s the center of the nation’s technology industry.

Disaffected Shockley employees founded Fairchild Semiconductor, which developed the first practical integrated circuit, or silicon chip as it came to be known. In 1968, refugees of struggling Fairchild went on to form the Intel Corporation, which, in 1971, came out with the microprocessor. In quick succession, video games (starting with Atari’s Pong), PostScript printing technology, Cupertino’s Apple Computer, the IBM PC, and Sun Microsystems helped to made up Silicon Valley as we know it today.

Having annexed numerous surrounding communities after the war, San Jose’s population, helped by the returning GIs, quickly tripled in size. (City Manager A. P. Dutch Hamann directed the annexation campaign, helped by a ruthless staff derided as “the Panzer Division”.) The expenditure of valuable municipal resources in the city’s rapid expansion had a profound and negative effect on the city’s center. By the late ’50s, it started a not-so-gradual decline into urban blight, which was reversed only in the mid-1980s under the stewardship of Mayor Thomas McEnery. An extensive and expensive redevelopment of downtown San Jose saw the construction of several new museums, the San Jose Arena (home of the San Jose Sharks hockey team), first-class hotels, and the San Jose McEnry Convention Center, along with a light rail mass transit system linking downtown San Jose with surrounding suburbs and Silicon Valley cities.

Today the most recognizable and certainly the largest of Silicon Valley’s prosperous communities, San Jose declared itself “the Capital of Silicon Valley” in the late 1980s. It had become the 11thlargest city in the country (with a recently estimated population of 867,675, 120,000 more than San Francisco, its more glamorous northern neighbor). Along with its size and its stature as a job magnet, however, has come a slew of new problems, like urban sprawl, congestion and social services distribution more often associated with Los Angeles.

The Silicon Valley’s fortunes rise and fall with the high tech industry and the economic downturn in the early 2000s his the area hard. Now it’s building back up as high tech gears back into full swing and the Silicon Valley grows to become one of California and the countries premiere economic and cultural centers.