The history of San Francisco
This record gathers one piece of ground in San Francisco: Alcatraz Island, a rocky point in the bay named by Spanish explorers for its pelicans, built up as a United States Army fort, turned federal penitentiary, occupied by Native American activists, and now kept as a national park.
Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay began as a Spanish-named rock, became a United States Army fort finished in 1859, served as a military and later federal penitentiary until 1963, was occupied by Native American activists from 1969 to 1971, and has operated as a national park since 1973.
A pelican island becomes a fortified army prison
Alcatraz Island is a small island in San Francisco Bay, now preserved as a national park and museum. Spanish naval officer Juan Manuel de Ayala charted the bay in 1775 and named a nearby island "La Isla de los Alcatraces," meaning the Island of the Pelicans. The name later stuck to this rock instead.
In 1846, acting military governor John C. Fremont bought the island for the United States government, paying Francis Temple $5,000. The government later refused to honor the deal, and Fremont spent decades suing for payment he never received.
President Millard Fillmore set the island aside for military use in 1850. The Army Corps of Engineers began building a fort here in 1853 under Lieutenant Zealous B. Tower. Workers finished Fort Alcatraz in 1859, giving the bay a three-story citadel, gun batteries, and a fortified guardhouse. That same year, Captain Joseph Stewart arrived with 86 men. Within months his soldiers locked eleven of their own in the guardhouse basement for desertion, theft, and drunkenness. It was the start of Alcatraz as a prison, years before any civilian criminal set foot here.
Confederate, Modoc and Hopi prisoners held on the rock
When the Civil War began in 1861, Alcatraz held Confederate sympathizers and political prisoners under suspended habeas corpus. In 1863, soldiers here arrested the crew of the J. M. Chapman, a Confederate privateer caught trying to slip out of the bay.
The prison kept growing after the war. In 1873, Paiute Tom became the first Native American held on the island. That same year, two Modoc men, Barncho and Sloluck, arrived after being sentenced to hang for killing peace commissioners during the Modoc Wars. Their sentences were commuted to life on the rock instead.
In 1895, the Army imprisoned nineteen Hopi men from Orayvi, Arizona, for refusing to send their children to government boarding schools. They were sentenced to hard labor and released that September, on condition they stop resisting federal policy.
The army builds the concrete cellhouse that still stands
The 1906 earthquake cracked the rock on Alcatraz but left its buildings standing. Major Reuben Turner designed a massive concrete cellhouse, finished in 1912, with 600 cells, a kitchen, a hospital, and offices. By 1907, the Army had dropped the name Fort Alcatraz altogether, calling it the Pacific Branch of the United States Military Prison instead.
The island becomes a federal penitentiary for hard cases
In 1934, the Justice Department took over the island and turned it into the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, a maximum-security prison meant to hold the country's hardest cases. Cold water and fast currents around the island convinced officials no one could swim away from it. The prison closed on March 21, 1963, after 29 years.
Native American activists occupy the island for nineteen months
On November 20, 1969, 89 Native American activists landed on the closed prison island. Richard Oakes, a Mohawk organizer, led the group, which called itself Indians of All Tribes. The group claimed Alcatraz under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which returned unused federal land to Native nations. The group wrote the "Proclamation to the Great White Father and All His People," laying out their demands for Native American sovereignty. Oakes had also offered, half in earnest, to buy the island from the government outright.
The occupation lasted 19 months. Federal agents finally removed the last 15 occupiers on June 11, 1971, ending the longest Native American occupation of federal land in the country's history.
The island opens to the public as a park
In 1972, President Richard Nixon signed the law creating the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, folding Alcatraz into the new park system. The island opened to the public in October 1973. In 1986, it was named a National Historic Landmark.
Today, more than 1.4 million people visit Alcatraz Island every year. Visitors walk the same cellhouse corridors where federal inmates once lived, see the ruins of the warden's house, and look out from the island's lighthouse, the oldest operating one on the West Coast.
Alcatraz Island today is a National Park Service museum, reached by ferry from Pier 33.
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