The Daily Alta California
19th-century San Francisco newspaper
The Alta California or Daily Alta California (often miswritten Alta Californian or Daily Alta Californian) was a 19th-century San Francisco newspaper.
California Star
The Daily Alta California descended from the first newspaper published in Yerba Buena (as San Francisco was then called), Samuel Brannan's California Star, which debuted on January 9, 1847. Brannan, who had earlier assisted in publishing several Mormon newspapers in New York, had brought a small press with him when he immigrated to California aboard the ship Brooklyn in 1846, as the leader of a group of Mormon settlers, the "Brooklyn Saints".
With Dr. E. B. Jones as editor, the California Star was the city's only newspaper until an older publication, The Californian, moved to Yerba Buena, California from Monterey in mid-1847. The city was about to undergo rapid changes as the California gold rush got underway. The California Star appeared weekly until June 14, 1848, when it was forced to shut down because its entire staff had departed for the gold fields. Its rival newspaper had suspended publication for the same reason on May 29.
Merger and name change
Later that year, Sam Brannan sold his interest in the moribund California Star to Edward Cleveland Kemble, who also acquired The Californian. Kemble resumed publication of the combined papers under the name Star and Californian on November 18, 1848.
The public source identifies “The Daily Alta California” as 19th-century San Francisco newspaper. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Daily, Alta and California.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Daily Alta California” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.