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313 To drive or walk in Sacramento’s downtown core is to witness the clash of time. New high-rise buildings blend with old brick façades, and multiple generations of advertising messages peek from behind peeling paint and maintain a faded vigilance over the bustling metropolis. On a building near the corner of Twelfth and J Streets hangs an example of one of Sacramento’s many public art projects. Pasted to the side of the Masonic Temple is a huge version of Charles Christian Nahl’s famous gold rush era painting, Sunday Morning at the Mines. This painting illustrates the extremes of camp life, with one side depicting a raucous horse race and drunken miners and the other, miners engaged in Bible study and domestic tasks. It is a comment on the uneven nature of piety, virtue, and excess among the men living in the mining camps of the Sierra. But urban artists also added images of miners emerging from the painting and climbing down a ladder; as they descend the ladder, they evolve into modern Sacramentans, one complete with sports coat and briefcase in tow. The message is clear: our presence here today is the product of our literal and figurative descent from our gold rush past. In short, it is Sacramento ’s genesis story. Sacramento, like Minerva, the Roman goddess who graces the Great Seal of the State of California, was born of only a father. The ladder that extends from the region’s past to the present, however, extends back farther than the gold rush, and the human dramas, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, were no less tumultuous. While one can center the activities related to the gold rush on Sacramento, one cannot fully understand Sacramento through such a narrow lens. Sacramento, once a land occupied for millennia exclusively by native peoples and then loosely governed by Spain and later Mexico, saw the influx of gold-seeking adventurers and the merchants who sold them supplies. With the founding of the city and the continuation of an entrepreneurial spirit, EPILOGUE Sacramento, Before and After the Gold Rush Ty O. Smith 314 ty o. smith the “Big Four” established the Central Pacific Railroad and the western leg of the transcontinental railroad. Agriculture boomed, as did the need for water, irrigation systems, and flood control. By the twentieth century, the entrepreneurial boomtown had been transformed into a government town: the state’s capital and home to three major military bases. The city grew but was eclipsed in stature and status by California’s coastal cities. By the early twenty-first century, Sacramento once again confronted dramatic change as its military bases were shuttered and its own name became used to simply describe the place where state government dysfunction occurred. Taken as a whole, the various eras of Sacramento’s development, before and after the gold rush, are nothing short of epic. And each of them has formed the tributaries that flow into the river of Sacramentans’ daily lives. Sacramento’s history as an urban area is often dated to the gold rush. Local habitation, of course, did not begin in the Sacramento region with the “days of ’49,” when, as historian J. S. Holliday characterized it, “the world rushed in.”1 If not rushing, the fact is, the “world” was already at least trickling into California. For those departing from the East, the gold rush only served to accelerate a process of western migration that had been going on for more than a decade. Before a single ounce of gold ever hit the assessor’s scale, Anglo families risked it all to come to places like California, many swearing off allegiance to their former country and receiving land and citizenship in Mexico. The covered wagons that rolled west through prairie and over mountains to destinations like Sutter’s outpost, in what would later become Sacramento, were not traveling to the edge of nowhere, just the edge of somewhere else. Hudson’s Bay Company trappers and Russian explorers exploited resources in the Central Valley for years before that. Such activities had already begun to drastically reshape the environment, in intended and unintended ways. Although not writing specifically about the Sacramento region, William Preston in his study “Serpent in the Garden,” describes the process of environmental and demographic change brought by a host of “companions of conquest,” from germs to plant seeds to ideologies, all of which would transform the California environment, before, during, and after the mission period...

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