Bakersfield

Bakersfield was established in 1863 in the western shadow of the Sierra Nevada at the intersection of two of the country’s defining events: the California Gold Rush and the Civil War. Bakersfield’s first generation of pioneers—gold-seekers, Southern sympathizers, and European immigrants—tamed the region’s confluence of swamps and built a frontier town. Over the next century, the town at the southern tip of California’s San Joaquin Valley produced a noteworthy array of heroes, poets, leaders...