Perhaps the single most daunting thing about trying to distill the history of the Bay Area into a few blog posts is the sheer volume of stuff out there — first-person accounts, histories, documentaries, websites — detailing the region’s past.

A big part of that story, of course, is how quickly a landscape we can scarcely imagine today was remade into the metropolis. Here, we attempt to give a glimpse of that process, from the earliest days of the Gold Rush to this morning’s stop-and-go traffic on the 101.