Sacramento River - History

History

The Sacramento River and its valley were one of the major American Indian population centers of California. The river's abundant flow and the valley's fertile soil and mild climate ensured enough resources for hundreds of groups to share the land. Most of the villages were small. Although it was once commonly believed that the original natives lived as tribes, they actually lived as bands, or family groups as small as twenty to thirty people. The Sacramento Valley was first settled about 12,000 years ago, but permanent villages were not established until about 8,000 years ago. Historians have organized the numerous separate original native groups into several "tribes". These are known as the Shasta, Modoc, and Achomawi/Pit River Tribes of the volcanic plateaus in the north; the Wintu and Hupa in the northern Klamath and Trinity mountains; the Nomlaki, Yuki, Patwin, and Pomo of the Coast Ranges; the Yana, Atsugewi, Maidu, Konkow, and Nisenan in the Sierra and their western foothills; and the Miwok in the south.

Life for Native Americans in the Sacramento Valley was relatively simple and involved little violence. Little agriculture was practiced; most were hunter-gatherers and fishermen. Settlement size ranged from small camps to villages of 30–50 permanent structures. As with tribes in the San Joaquin Valley and throughout much of California, the acorn was a staple food. The historic abundance of live and valley oaks in the Sacramento Valley was capable of supporting a large population. American Indians usually pounded the acorns into flour, which they used to make bread and cakes. Despite the prevalence of acorns in their diet, they also consumed a variety of other foods—wild roots, seeds, berries, and game that included fish, deer, rabbits, and birds. The natural abundance of the Sacramento River and its valley, along with the San Joaquin, probably once supported most of California's original 275,000–300,000 Native Americans.

The first outsiders to see the river were probably the members of a Spanish colonial-exploratory venture to Northern California in 1772, led by Captain Pedro Fages. The group ascended a mountain, likely in the hills north of Suisun Bay, and found themselves looking down at the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. However, due to their vantage point, neither Fages nor any of his men saw the Sacramento clearly. They assumed that the San Joaquin, coming from the south, was the largest of the merging rivers they saw. In 1808, explorer Gabriel Moraga, on a journey to find suitable sites for the construction of missions, became the first foreigner to see the river clearly. Judging its huge breadth and power he named it Rio de los Sacramentos, or "River of the Blessed Sacrament". In the following years, two more Spanish expeditions traversed the lower part of the river, the last one in 1817.

The next visitors were Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) fur trappers exploring southwards from the disputed Oregon Country, starting in the 1820s. The first organized expedition, led by Peter Skene Ogden, arrived in the area of Mount Shasta in 1826. By this time, California was under the control of Mexico, although few Mexican settlers had come to what would later become the state, mostly settling in the small pueblos and ranchos along the south and central coast. The HBC mountain men created the Siskiyou Trail out of several Native American paths that ran through the mountains between Oregon's Willamette Valley and the northern part of the Sacramento Valley. In the years to come, this path, which eventually extended from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon following parts of the Sacramento, Willamette, Klamath, Rogue, and other rivers would become an important trade and travel route.

Although just one of thousands of American emigrants that poured into California over the next few years when California became part of the United States, John Augustus Sutter became one of the most significant settlers of the Sacramento River valley. In 1841, he and his men built a fortress at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers (the latter of which was actually named by him) and he was granted almost 50,000 acres (200 km2) of land surrounding the two rivers. Naming it New Helvetia, he created an agricultural empire in the lower Sacramento Valley, attracting hundreds of settlers to the area, and relied on Native American labor to maintain his domain. Sutter had something of a two-faced relationship with the many Native American groups in the area. He was friendly with some of the tribes, and paid their leaders handsomely for supplying workers, but others he seized by force and made them labor in his fields.

Sutter's prosperity, however, indirectly led to his financial demise, and the rise of one of the most significant events in California history. When one of his employees, James W. Marshall was assigned to build a sawmill on the South Fork American River in Sutter's interests, he discovered gold in the headrace. It was not long before the secret slipped out attracting three hundred thousand hopefuls from all over North America, and even the world, to the Sacramento River in search of fortunes, kicking off the California Gold Rush. People flocked to the region by the Oregon Trail-Siskiyou Trail, California Trail, Southern Immigrant Trail and various land and/or sea routes through the Isthmus of Panama and around southern South America by ship. Steamboats traveled busily up and down the Sacramento River carrying miners from San Francisco to the "gold fields". As the miners expanded their diggings deeper into the Sierra Nevada and Klamath Mountains, Native Americans were pushed off their land and a long series of skirmishes and fights began that continued until intervention by the state and national governments.

The influx of migrants brought foreign diseases like malaria and smallpox, which American Indians had no immunity to. These diseases killed off a large proportion of their population within a few decades of the arrival of Sutter and the following settlers, the start of the gold rush, not to mention the numerous battles fought between the settlers and native bands as well as the forced relocation of some of the tribes to Indian reservations in several places scattered around the Sacramento Valley, mainly in the Coast Ranges. In the early 1850s, several treaties were signed between the U.S. government and the Native Americans involving their relocation onto a reservation in the Sierra foothills; this promise was broken, of course. Therefore in 1863, the tribes from the area surrounding the middle Sacramento and Feather rivers, the Konkow group, were removed and marched forcibly to the Round Valley Indian Reservation near the Eel River. A total of 461 people were forced from their homes, but only 277 made it to the reservation before dying of disease, starvation or exhaustion.

As mining developed from simple methods such as panning and sluicing to a new form of commercialized extraction, hydraulic mining, profits from the petering gold rush made a second leap, earning more profits than those miners in the early years had ever made. The city of Sacramento, founded on the original site of Sutter's fort, began to flourish as the center of an agricultural empire that provided food to feed the thousands of miners working in the hills as well as a place of financial exchange of all the gold that was mined. Sacramento was officially established in 1850 and was recognized as the state capital in 1854. As the economy of the Sacramento Valley grew, the Southern Pacific Railroad established tracks along the river to connect California with Oregon following the ancient path of the Siskiyou Trail, in the 1880s and 1890s. Many parts of the railroad were treacherous, especially in the mountainous areas north of Dunsmuir. It was not long after the city had reached a relatively large population of about 10,000, then the Great Flood of 1862 swept away much of it (and almost everything else along the Sacramento River) and put the rest under water. The flood waters were exacerbated by the sediments washed down by the millions of tons by hydraulic mining, which filled the beds of the Sacramento, Feather and American rivers up to 7 feet (2.1 m) in Sacramento and also covered thousands of acres of Central Valley lands. A flood in 1875 covered the city of Marysville and when it subsided the town's streets were filled with debris and rocks washed down from the "hydraulicking" going on upstream.

Repeated floods and increased demand for Sacramento River water saw a plethora of massive changes to the environment beginning in the 20th century. An early project was undertaken to raise the entire city of Sacramento about 11 feet (3.4 m) above its original elevation. This, however, was followed by engineering projects to try and stem the flows of water rather than defend against it. The engineering era of the 20th century on the Sacramento thus begun.