Louis Daguerre had invented the daguerreotype (an early photographic method) in 1839 in France. The invention spread quickly to the American continent and daguerreotypist shops popped up in all major cities.

Robert Vance, who had photographed the silver mines of Chile, arrived in California with the 49ers, opened art galleries in San Francisco and Sacramento, and in 1851 exhibited in New York some 300 daguerreotypes of the Gold Rush (all lost).

The largest California producers of lithographs was the studio established in San Francisco in 1852 by Joseph Britton, an English 49er who had arrived with the pioneering George Gordon party by way of Lake Nicaragua and had failed as a gold prospector, and French immigrant Jacques-Joseph Rey, who had arrived in 1850 by way of Panama.

Swiss immigrant Charles Conrad Kuchel and German immigrant Emil Dresel traveled around California in 1853 and produced a series of litographs of California's gold towns (1855-58) and even one of the tiny pueblo of Los Angeles.

Carleton Watkins, who had arrived in 1851 with his childhood friend Collis Huntington, exhibited in New York in 1862 the daguerreotypes he had taken the year before in Yosemite, and that's how the East Coast got to see the wonders of Yosemite for the first time.

Alfred Hart was hired by the Central Pacific Railroad to document the progress of the railroad out of Sacramento and sold his 364 stereo photographs to Watkins. In 1870 he published "The Traveler's Own Book" describing how to travel by train from Chicago to San Francisco.

In 1852 Silas Selleck, originally a daguerreotypist from New York, opened in San Francisco the Cosmopolitan Photographic Art Gallery with his Sacramento partner George Howard Johnson (he also took daguerreotypes of corpses in their caskets at a cemetery).

The most bizarre and creative of the bunch was English immigrant Edward Muybridge, who had befriended Selleck since emigrating to New York in 1850 and in 1856 had opened a shop in San Francisco selling books, wood engravings, lithograph prints and Carleton Watkins' daguerreotypes before adopting in 1867 the pseudonym "Helios" and becoming a traveling photographer in a wagon called the Flying Studio, taking daguerreotypes that were sold by Selleck's gallery.

After killing his wife's lover in 1874, Muybridge spent a year in Central America and returned in 1876 with several albums of photographs.

He became famous in 1878 when he photographed a running horse for Leland Stanford at the race track of his Palo Alto Stock Farm (now part of Stanford University), which was the first example of chronophotography. In 1878 Muybridge also created a 360-degree five-meter long panorama of San Francisco from 13 photographs taken from the turret of Mark Hopkins' mansion. Muybridge's magnum opus was the 11-volume book "Animal Locomotion" (1887) containing 781 illustrations of people and animals in motion (walking, playing, dancing, galloping, flying, etc).

Los Angeles' photographers mostly captured views of prominent buildings and landscapes. William Godfrey, both photographer and miner, who had arrived in Placerville in 1850, took the first photo of downtown Los Angeles (of "The Plaza") in 1864. His business partner Henry Payne became one of the most prolific photographer of the city's buildings. Swedish-born Valentine Wolfenstein opened in 1871 in Temple Block a photography studio that catered to rich families.

Between 1850 and 1870 several important newspapers were born. The 20-year-old Edward Kemble, who had worked as editor of Brannan's Star, purchased the printing presses of both The Californian and The Star and founded the Daily Alta California in January 1949. He moved one printing press to Sacramento to start The Placer Times in April 1849. In 1851 a John Emerson and his business partners started San Jose's newspaper San Jose Weekly Visitor (later renamed Mercury News, named for the nearby New Almaden mercury mines near San Jose). In 1855 James King (a former 49er) began publishing the Daily Evening Bulletin in San Francisco (King was assassinated by a politician who was then lynched by a mob). The Daily Morning Call was launched in December 1856 by five investors and edited by one of them, George Eustace Barnes (who in 1864 hired Mark Twain, as Samuel Clemens was now calling himself, as the only full-time reporter). James McClatchy launched the Sacramento Bee in 1857. The Democratic Press (later renamed San Francisco Examiner) was born in 1863 (and acquired in 1880 by mining tycoon George Hearst). The Daily Dramatic Chronicle (later renamed San Francisco Chronicle) was founded in 1865 by brothers Charles and Michael de Young. The literary journals edited by Bret Harte were devoted to the (scant) literary scene of San Francisco: the Golden Era, founded in 1852 by Rollin Daggett (a failed 49er) and John Macdonough Foard, the Californian, founded in 1864 by poet Charles Henry Webb, and the Overland Monthly, founded in 1868 by Bavarian-born bookseller Anton Roman.

In 1876 the Bohemian immigrant Francis Korbel founded San Francisco's legendary satirical magazine The Wasp, whose lead cartoonist was the Prussian-born George Frederick Keller.

The wealthy politician Frank Pixley, a former 49er who was now a political ally of Leland Stanford, co-founded in 1877 a weekly literary magazine, The Argonaut, that hired Ambrose Bierce as the editor. Bierce had arrived in San Francisco in 1867, a humble employee of the mint, and had married San Franciscan socialite Mollie Day (the daughter of a Virginia City mine superintendent), before becoming a journalist. Bierce joined the Wasp in 1881. In the 1880s the Argonaut was notable for hosting female writers such as: novelist Gertrude Atherton, the wife of George Atherton (who had inherited the fortune of his father Faxon Atherton as well as his mother Dominga's mansion, built in 1881 in San Francisco) and later Ambrose Bierce's lover; the reclusive supernatural-fiction writer Emma Dawson (who never married); the Los Angeles-based short-story writer Yda Addis, daughter of peripatetic photographer Alfred Addis (she never married but caused a scandal when she became the lover of former governor John Downey, thirty years her senior).

California began building its academia, which was obviously lagging by centuries behind the East Coast, where Harvard had been founded in 1636, Yale in 1701, the University of Pennsylvania in 1740 and Princeton in 1746. Evangelical organizations led the way. The Jesuits founded Santa Clara University in 1851 and Saint Ignatius Academy (later renamed University of San Francisco) in 1855. The Young Ladies’ Seminary was founded in Benicia in 1852 by Sylvester Woodbridge and other members of the First Presbyterian Church of Benicia. That church, founded in 1849, had been California's first Protestant church, and Benicia in 1850 had become one of the first California cities with a city council and a mayor. The seminary was meant to educate the young women from the Mother Lode region as well as from Gold Country towns like Sacramento and Stockton. Two missionaries, Cyrus Mills and his wife Susan, acquired it in 1865, relocated it to the Oakland foothills and renamed it Mills College, the first women's college west of the Rocky Mountains.

In 1857 John Swett and Henry Janes funded San Francisco's normal school to train teachers, directed by George Minns, a school that moved to San Jose in 1871 and was renamed California State Normal School and eventually became San Jose' State University, the oldest public university on the West Coast. A failed 49er, Hugh Toland, established a private medical school in San Francisco, Toland Medical College, which in 1873 was incorporated in the University of California and in 1898 moved to a their new building on Parnassus Hill, becoming the medical school of UC San Francisco. The University of California was established in 1868 on the ashes of the College of California created in 1853 in Oakland by Henry Durant (as Contra Costa Academy) and it opened its Berkeley campus in 1873.

Pomona College was founded in 1887 by pastor Charles Sumner and other members of Pomona's Pilgrim Congregational Church, 50 kms east of Los Angeles (originally a five-room cottage but soon relocated to the Claremont Hotel that was conveniently going out of business during the economic crisis of 1888). Occidental College was founded in 1887 in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles by pastor Samuel Weller and other members of the Presbyterian Church, with help from Lyman Stewart and Thomas Bard of the future Union Oil and from cattle rancher James Bell.

California was also beginning to appreciate its stunning natural beauty. The western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, both on the west and on the east sides, were littered with mining camps and boomtowns but the Sierra Nevada itself was largely unexplored. The California Geological Survey finally conducted a survey of the Sierra Nevada, led by Josiah Whitney along with William Brewer, Charles Hoffmann and Clarence King, starting with the future Yosemite Park in 1863, continuing in 1864 with the future Kings Canyon Park, where they discovered the highest mountain of the USA, named Mount Whitney (higher mountains would be added to the USA three years later with the purchase of Alaska). Clarence King returned to the mountains for several years and summarized his climbing adventures in the book "Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada" (1872). Mount Whitney was first summited in 1873 by three Lone Pine fishermen. The mountains were largely explored by the least documented of all explorers: the European shepherds, who probably created many of the trails used today by mountaineers. The High Sierra was an ideal terrain for sheep, thanks to its many meadows and relatively mild climate. One such shepherd was John Muir, originally from Scotland, a nomadic sawyer who had reached San Francisco in 1868, having traveled by steamship from Florida via Cuba and Panama, and settled in Yosemite for a few years becoming an amateur botanist and geologist besides a legendary mountain guide. In 1871 Ralph Waldo Emerson traveled in eleven days from his home in Massachusetts to California, where he spent seven weeks, visiting Yosemite and meeting John Muir. Muir eventually became influential enough to convince the USA to create Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks in 1890, but never actually hiked what is today North America's most famous trail, the John Muir Trail from Yosemite to Mt Whitney. The idea for that trail must be credited to Theodore Solomons, born and raised in San Francisco, who in 1892 set out to independently explore regions of the Sierra Nevada that no white man had seen before.