Gold

In 1848 a man found gold and soon the secret was out. So lots of guys from all over the world came here bringing spades, gold rockers and cradles. By 1864 the big guys came with their hydraulic pumps and pumped their debris into the Sacramento river. In 1884 debris dumping was banned so in came the dredgers for 65 years until the rivers were bare. In 1956 HARD ROCK mining became unprofitable, so it ended. With a male to female ratio of 10 to 1 prostitution thrived.

The Fruit Farming

This area became the Fruit farming centre of America. This afforded the wealthy bankers to gain control of fruit distribution by owning the Railways and the River Boats. This was a Bonanza for the wealthy Robber Barons, at the expense of the farmers. These practices came to an end  with the arrival of road transport; the farmers were able to create their own distribution systems. The museum has an interesting display of early fruit box advertising labelling and the canning industry which also meant that rapid distribution was less required, I imagine.

The Flood

In 1862 came the flood creating a lake some 100 miles long by 60 miles across. Now, if I was here I would have scarpered but after a number of attempts to raise the height of the levies, which failed to solve the flooding the grand citizens of Sacramento decided to raise the height of their roads by some 15 feet. This means that all the buildings have their original ground floors as a basement unless they raised their building on manual jacks. Thus it was that the Americans created the desire to build tall buildings and have continued with the habit to this day. This work was carried out by Chinese labourers. The city motto ‘URBS INDOMITA’ does NOT mean ‘We want to look down on everyone’ or ‘Lets build higher’.

Under the direction of the History Museum we toured these basements for an hour where recovered paraphernalia has been used to give visitors some idea of what life was like in those days. (You know, brutal dentistry and the like. Photos not allowed down here.)