A promised land?

At the western edge of America, where the continent falls into the Pacific as it follows the sun, the coast has always seemed an image of Eden, a garden of earthly delights. “There is an island called California, on the right hand of the Indies, very near the Earthly Paradise,” wrote a 16th century Spanish fantasist in a novel that gave the Golden State its name. California, and other stretches of North America’s Pacific shore, would become the fated and fateful destinations of adventurous journeys westward by European settlers, cowboys, miners, Forty-Niners and dreamers. There the travellers would pass, or so they hoped, from their old lives – and the Old world – into a heaven on earth.

In spite of the seemingly inexorable European settlement of the Pacific Coast, there are strangers in the Western paradise. Other peoples, too, have sought the “good country,” though instead of crossing the continent, they have crossed an ocean; instead of looking back to Europe, they...