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61 Capt. William Dane Phelps of Gloucester, Massachusetts, arrived in the Sacramento Valley in July 1841. A merchant in the California hide and tallow trade, Phelps had taken leave from his business along the coast to visit John Sutter at New Helvetia, where a team of Indian laborers put the final touches on Sutter’s adobe fort overlooking the American River. While touring the grounds, Phelps also met John Sinclair, a Scottish immigrant who settled lands north of Sutter. Over dinner, Sinclair proposed a hunting expedition to the Feather River, sixteen miles to the north, where herds of tule elk grazed along the riverbanks. Departing the following morning, Phelps marveled at the Sacramento Valley countryside. “After crossing the American Fork,” he observed, “our route lay over a beautiful country of plains and gently rising hills all well covered with oats, with here and there groves of trees, presenting a fine landscape to the eye.” Returning to the fort the following day, however, Phelps encountered a different landscape. “On our way back,” he wrote in his journal, “we passed the remains of Indian villages, long since abandoned.” Through his hosts, Phelps learned that some of the valley’s “gently rising hills” were in fact living quarters built by Indians for the flood season. “Their villages,” he remarked, “were on a mound which they had raised about 18 feet high with the earth taken from the plain on which they built, and the plain being overflown with water in the winter, puzzled me to imagine why they should select such a location.”1 Perhaps it would have further puzzled Phelps to know that, within twentyCHAPTER 3 “We Must Give the World Confidence in the Stability and Permanence of the Place” PLANNING SACRAMENTO’S TOWNSITE, 1853–1870 Nathan Hallam 62 nathan hallam five years, thousands of Americans would undertake a very similar project in very nearly the same location, raising the streets and buildings of Sacramento twelve feet above the surrounding American River flood basin. Today, most residents of Sacramento are familiar with the city’s gold rush origins, but few recall the twenty-year effort to build the foundations of a stable, permanent city. For all that Sacramento offered merchants and miners in 1849—a natural river landing, a marketplace for goods and supplies, ample space for squatters—its physical location posed problems. Between 1850 and 1862, Sacramento endured four major floods and scores of smaller inundations, costing residents millions in property damage. “We all admit that this is no place for a city,” remarked J Street iron dealer Isaac Van Winkle in 1862. “The ground is like a sponge. The water comes in from the river, and overflows the lower part of the city, even when there is no flood.”2 For merchants like Van Winkle and others who stayed in Sacramento after the gold rush, flooding posed an acute dilemma: abandon the city and relinquish the time, money, and effort invested in building homes and businesses, or stay on and help shoulder the considerable burden of making the townsite tenable. Some left, but many remained; staying on in Sacramento had its advantages, too. Situated at the crossroads of California and surrounded by rich farmland, the city lay at the foot of some of the richest gold and silver mines in the world. “Whether we stayed here or left and sacrificed our property,” reasoned one K Street business owner, “this was destined to be a great point for trade, and we should not allow others to reap the benefits we might enjoy.”3 Nor would they. During the 1850s and 1860s, Sacramento’s residents graded and planked streets, raised the city twelve feet above the flood basin, opened new channels for the American River, and altered their street grid to accommodate prominent public institutions. All of this came at great expense to property owners, who levied taxes upon themselves and complied with condemnation proceedings to ensure the stability and permanence of their city. “Planning,” as Robert Fishman writes, involves “collective action for the common good, but particularly action that concentrates on building and shaping the physical infrastructure for present needs and future growth.”4 One can read the early history of Sacramento as a turn toward such collective action, as property owners came to perceive their individual fortunes as bound together in a shared investment in the townsite—a townsite planned not for long-term growth but short-term speculation. Planning Sacramento’s Townsite Sacramento’s “townsite” refers to the streets...

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