MINING

CALIFORNIA AND WASHINGTON Ever since the famous gold discoveries of 1849 from of the North Central Valley the Pacific Coast of America has proved a vital centre of attraction, and its importance has steadily increased with the growing realisation of its great assets —its favoured climate as well as its agricultural and mineral wealth, and its commercial and industrial possibilities from the Colorado Plateau and the Rain Shadow. Seas deepened during the Jurassic period, and caves eroded. Within this belt of the Pacific Northwest, the inlet of the Puget Sound is of great importance, with Seattle and Tacoma containing something like three-quarters of a million people; but California is the most favoured area, and its population is growing at a more rapid rate than that in any other American State. Here are two great urbanised areas, one centred on San Francisco with over two million people and the other, still larger, based on Los Angeles and Long Beach with four million people. In this land of the Golden West, the Sierras, California has the larger number of N.A.M.A. members, at least two-thirds of them being found either in Los Angeles or San Francisco, both of which have strong branches of the N.A.M.A. The State of Washington ranks next, with the Puget Sound area containing most of the settlers.

English became spoken in the area now known as California on a wide scale beginning with a considerable influx of English-speaking European Americans during the California Gold Rush and after rapid growth from internal migration. Linguists who studied English as spoken in California before and in the period immediately after World War II tended to find few if any distinct patterns unique to the region. No matter the individual degree a speaker displays, the emergence of the California Vowel Shift (California English) and its spread among younger speakers point to a future form of California English which will have undoubtedly diverged significantly from other varieties.

Very few Manx people living on the Pacific coast seem to have come directly from the Island; they have reached there from some other part of the United States or from Canada. The same principle is true of other settlers in the area — apart, of course, from those of Oriental or Mexican origin — and this can be readily understood when the distance, and transport costs, from the east coast are kept in mind.

Pacific Northwest English is a dialect of the English language spoken in the Pacific Northwest. The dialect is very similar to General American with the cot-caught merger, and some features in common with Prairies and California English. The merger occurs in some accents of Scottish English and to some extent in Mid Ulster English but is best known as a phenomenon of many varieties of North American English. One possible etymology of the expression O.K. is that it stands for oll korrect. This suggests that the merger may have begun to take root in North America by the 1830s, when this explanation for the expression was first attested. It occurs in most forms of Canadian English, in the Boston, Massachusetts area (Boston accent) and northeastern New England, and in the eastern Ohio River valley. From the Great Plains westward, except San Francisco, the merger is usual. The merger does not generally occur in the southern United States, along the American side of the Great Lakes region, or in the Northeast Corridor extended metropolitan region from New York City to Baltimore.

Among Manx names that have been preserved from the pioneering days are those of William Henry Christian, of the Virginian Christians, who was one of the surveyors of Sacramento in 1850. The American people as a whole are probably the most mobile in the world so that internal migration is a perpetual feature, with a general direction westwards. Thus it is that the people of the west are very mixed in their origins; but signs of unity are certainly increasing, while there is also an imaginative and optimistic outlook on the future which helps to give the area a distinctive character. Now it is believed that there is a sufficiently strong and vigorous local organisations in San Francisco, backed by the Manx up and down the Pacific Coast, and particularly by those in Los Angeles and Vancouver, to ensure a successful Convention there! Peoples of Manx origin have been associated, even if only in a modest way, with many of the great movements that have been involved in the evolution of the vast country of America as we now know it, including the developunent of agriculture, mining, industry and trade in the great plains, the mountain states and on the Pacific Coast.

 

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