The history of the city today known as San Francisco, California, has been greatly influenced by its coastal location as a port city. San Francisco is the contemporary name of both the city and the county, which share the same boundaries.
Among other factors, the presence of a bay well-suited to become a major port caused San Francisco to become a natural center for maritime trade and military activity. The first Native Americans to settle this region found the Bay to be a vast natural resource for hunting and gathering their provisions and for the establishment of many small villages. Collectively, these early Native Americans were known as the Ohlone, and the language they spoke belonged to the Miwok family. Their trade patterns included places as far away as Baja California, the Mojave Desert and Yosemite.
The first Europeans to see what would become San Francisco were Sir Francis Drake and his crew, in 1579. They mapped the coast and called the cliffs by the bay Nova Albion, but the British made little effort to claim or settle the land.
The earliest European colonial enterprises came from Spain. The Spanish found this location to be of great strategic significance, both for trade and defense. When the Spanish arrived, they began the missionization of some 10,000 Ohlone who already lived there, eventually displacing them altogether. The Mission San Francisco de Asís was known as Mission Dolores because of its nearness to a creek named after Our Lady of Sorrows. The small town that grew up near the mission was known as Yerba Buena after the herb of the same name that grew in abundance there. Today's city takes its name after the mission, of course, and Yerba Buena remained the name of a San Francisco neighborhood until the late 1970s or early 1980s, when new names arose and now, only a few buildings and a garden retain the name. The Moscone Center was built within the boundaries of this first town, Yerba Buena, near the Mission.
San Francisco became part of the United States with the annexation of California in 1850, San Francisco is now estimated to be the twelfth largest city in the United States, and has been characterized by rapid economic change and cultural diversity.