Sacramento, California

• 1. Introduction

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  Sacramento sits at the meeting point of two rivers, the Sacramento and the American, in a valley that a Spanish soldier once said smelled like champagne. Gabriel Moraga rode through in 1808, and his party was so struck by the landscape that someone in the group cried out in Spanish: "Es como el sagrado sacramento" - it is like the Blessed Sacrament. That exclamation became the name of a river, a valley, a city, and eventually the capital of the most populous state in the country. How did a riverbank settlement in the California wilderness become a city of more than half a million people, the seat of state government, and a place claimed by some measures to be the most diverse city in America? The answer runs through gold, floods, fire, cholera, railroad empires, and one Swiss entrepreneur who built something extraordinary - and then watched his family tear it apart.

• 2. Sutter's Gamble

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  John Augustus Sutter Sr. arrived at the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers on the 13th of August 1839, carrying a Mexican land grant of 50,000 acres. He was a Swiss-born Mexican citizen, and he named his colony New Helvetia - New Switzerland. What he built over the following years was by any measure remarkable. Sutter's Fort rose with adobe walls 18 feet high and 3 feet thick. He grew a 10-acre orchard. He assembled a herd of 13,000 cattle. By 1847, he received 2,000 fruit trees, planting the seeds of the Sacramento Valley's agricultural industry. Fort Sutter became the standard stopping point for the growing number of immigrants pushing into California from the east. Sutter was the political authority and dispenser of justice in the new settlement - effectively a one-man government on the frontier. That same year, Sutter hired a carpenter named James Marshall to build a sawmill to help expand his growing empire. What Marshall found at that mill would undo everything.

• 3. Gold and Its Consequences

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  James W. Marshall discovered gold at Sutter's Mill in Coloma on the 24th of January 1848 - the mill was roughly 50 miles northeast of the fort. The news set off a human flood. Thousands of gold-seekers poured into the region, squatting on unwatched sections of Sutter's land and making off with his property. For the man who owned the mill, the discovery was a catastrophe rather than a windfall. Sutter Sr. had built his empire on thin margins of credit, and he could not contain what came next. His own son, John Sutter Jr., arrived in August 1848 to help manage the debt. By December of that year, the younger Sutter, working with a partner named Samuel Brannan, had begun laying out a new city two miles south of his father's settlement. Sutter Sr. opposed it, but being deeply in debt, he had no power to stop it. The new city was named Sacramento City after the river, and it was an overnight commercial success. The grid Sutter Jr. and Brannan commissioned included 26 lettered and 31 numbered streets. Relations between father and son grew bitter. Sutter's Fort, Sutter's Mill, and the town of Sutterville - all founded by the senior Sutter - eventually failed. Sacramento incorporated as a city on the 27th of February 1850, becoming the oldest incorporated city in California.

• 4. Flood, Fire, and Plague

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  Sacramento incorporated in 1850 and then spent the next several years fighting to survive. On the 10th of January 1850, a flood struck the city, uprooting homes and drowning livestock. The city was nearly destroyed. The first elected mayor, Hardin Bigelow, pushed through construction of a levee, completed in early 1852 and earning the city the nickname "The Levee City." Within a month of its completion, the levee was breached during the first major storm of the season. A replacement levee was built for $50,000. It also broke. Between October and December 1850, a cholera epidemic killed 1,000 residents - including Mayor Bigelow himself, along with 17 of the city's 40 physicians. Up to 80 percent of the population fled. On the 2nd of November 1852, a fire called the Great Conflagration burned more than 80 percent of the city's structures, with estimated damages of around six million dollars. Within a month, 761 new structures were rebuilt, many in brick. The worst flooding in the city's history came in the winter of 1861-1862, when the Great Flood ran from December through January. Governor Leland Stanford, who had just been inaugurated in early January 1862, had to travel to his own inauguration by rowboat. In response to the recurring flood risk, the city undertook an extraordinary engineering project: from 1862 through the mid-1870s, Sacramento raised the level of its entire downtown by building reinforced brick walls along its streets and filling the space with dirt. Former first floors became basements. Parts of the old street level still exist today as the "Sacramento Underground."

• 5. Capital and Railroad

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  California's capital had wandered before it came to rest. Under Spanish and then Mexican rule, Monterey held the title. After statehood on the 9th of September 1850, the legislature convened in San Jose, then moved to Vallejo in 1852, then Benicia in 1853. Sacramento locked in permanent status in 1854, with the support of Governor John Bigler. In 1852, the city had made the decisive move: it offered its county courthouse to the state to house the legislature. The Classical Revival-style California State Capitol, modeled on the national Capitol, was started in 1860 and completed in 1874. Sacramento's strategic location brought another distinction. The city was designated the western terminus of the Pony Express. Then it became the starting point for the First Transcontinental Railroad, which began construction in Sacramento in 1863. The railroad was financed by the men known as the Big Four: Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, Collis P. Huntington, and Leland Stanford. Sacramento effectively controlled commerce on the Sacramento and American Rivers, and the city funded public works through taxes on goods moving between the boats and the rail cars at the historic Sacramento Rail Yards. The combination of government seat and rail hub gave Sacramento an economic foundation that no flood or fire could erase.

• 6. City of Trees and Diversity

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  Sacramento's nickname "City of Trees" dates to at least 1855, and the city holds what Treepedia - a project run by MIT using Google Maps street-view data - calculated as the third-greenest city ranking globally, behind only Vancouver and Singapore, among 15 cities studied in the United States. The city was the first in the country to receive the Arbor Day Foundation's City of Trees designation, in 1978. The main species today is the London plane, though other varieties are being introduced to handle climate change. The city's tree identity was not accidental: early Sacramento had been called the "City of Plains" for its lack of trees before residents planted cottonwoods, then eucalyptus, then locusts, willows, elms, palms, and fruit trees in succession. A water tower bore the "City of Trees" slogan until 2017, when it was repainted with "America's Farm-to-Fork Capital." After 4,000 residents signed a petition, officials agreed to include both slogans. On diversity, the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University named Sacramento "America's Most Diverse City" in a 2002 study conducted for Time magazine. The 2020 census recorded a population of 524,943, with the city's Asian residents comprising nearly 19 percent of that total and Hispanic or Latino residents nearly 29 percent. Sacramento has the largest Fijian American community in the country. Chinese people are the largest Asian ethnic group in the city, followed by Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Hmong, and Japanese communities.

• 7. Music, Sport, and Culture

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  Sacramento has produced an unlikely density of rock bands for a city its size: the Deftones, Papa Roach, CAKE, and Dance Gavin Dance all came from the Sacramento area, as did bands in punk, metal, and experimental genres. Scottish pop group Middle of the Road recorded a European hit titled "Sacramento" in 1972. Tower Records was founded in Sacramento and remained based there until the company closed. The Sacramento Jazz Jubilee drew thousands of visitors every Memorial Day weekend until 2017. The Aftershock Festival, launched in 2012 at Discovery Park, grew to attract up to 160,000 visitors over four days. On the sports side, the Sacramento Kings arrived from Kansas City in 1985. In 2013, the NBA Board of Governors voted 22-8 to keep the team in Sacramento after a sale nearly sent the franchise to Seattle. The Golden 1 Center, which opened on the 30th of September 2016, was built at a final estimated cost of $558.2 million. The Sacramento Republic FC set a USL Pro regular-season single-game attendance record of 20,231 in their first home match in April 2014. Sacramento also has the Sacramento Monarchs' WNBA championship of 2005 in its history, though the team folded in November 2009. On the cultural side, the Crocker Art Museum, founded in Old Sacramento, is the oldest public art museum west of the Mississippi River. Its 2010 expansion tripled the museum's floor space to more than 145,000 square feet. The Wide Open Walls Festival, which began in 2016, has added more than 140 murals across the city from artists around the world.

• 8. Climate and Geography

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  Sacramento sits just 25 feet above sea level at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers. The city covers 100.1 square miles, and its position makes it the second most flood-susceptible city in the United States after New Orleans. The Yolo Bypass, a vast flood control basin to the west in Yolo County, permanently constrains growth in that direction, which is why the metro area sprawls up to 30 miles northeast into the Sierra Nevada foothills while extending only 4 miles west. The climate is a hot-summer Mediterranean type, and the numbers around sunshine are striking: July in Sacramento averages 14 hours and 12 minutes of sunshine per day, amounting to roughly 98 percent of possible sunshine, a figure described as the highest for any single month anywhere in the world. On the extreme end, the hottest temperature ever recorded in the city was 116 degrees Fahrenheit on the 6th of September 2022. The coldest was 18 degrees Fahrenheit on the 22nd of December 1990. Annual precipitation averages 18.14 inches, with February 1992 producing an unusual stretch of 16 consecutive days of rain, accumulating 6.41 inches in that period alone. The greatest snowfall ever recorded in Sacramento was 3 inches, on the 5th of January 1888. In summer the heat is sometimes relieved by a sea breeze called the "delta breeze," which flows through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta from San Francisco Bay, a detail that connects the city's climate directly to the bay that has driven so much of its population growth in recent decades.