The confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers had been Nisenan (Maidu) homeland for thousands of years. In 1839 a Swiss emigrant, John Sutter, built a fort he called New Helvetia near the rivers and ran a private agricultural colony on Nisenan land — the settlement that became Sacramento began at his gate. The Gold Rush that followed brought enormous wealth and, for the Nisenan and other Native peoples of the valley, displacement, disease, and violence; the fort still stands as a state historic park, a record of where the city started and at what cost.
The gold itself was found upriver. In January 1848 James Marshall spotted flakes in the tailrace of a sawmill at Coloma, and within a year the world arrived. Sacramento, sitting at the head of river navigation where the goldfields met the water, became the great supply hub of the Rush — the Embarcadero port, the wholesale houses, the wagon roads up into the Sierra. The city was platted at the end of 1848 and incorporated in 1850, the oldest incorporated city in California, a boomtown built to outfit a gold rush.
Why People Visit Sacramento
Sacramento rewards travelers who want history, rivers, and shade rather than a beach — the Gold-Rush waterfront, the railroad that started here, the capitol, and a walkable grid under a famous tree canopy. People come for Old Sacramento and the Railroad Museum, for the Capitol and the gold bridge, and for an easy California day where frontier history and a leafy capital city sit side by side at the meeting of two rivers.
