Sacramento

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SACRAMENTO

SACRAMENTO, the major urban center of California's Central Valley, is located at the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers. The region has been a crossroads of trade and commerce since its earliest habitation. John A. Sutter, a German-speaking Swiss adventurer, arrived in Sacramento in 1839 and built a fort as a frontier outpost for the Mexican government. The gold rush that began in 1848 led the following year to the platting of the city of Sacramento, which became the state capital in 1854. It was the western terminus of the Oregon Trail and of the first transcontinental railroad (completed 1869). By the late 1850s, agriculture had begun to supplant mining as the city's primary economic venture.

Located at the lower end of one of the world's highest-volume watersheds, Sacramento experienced its first flood in 1849. Completion of the Shasta Dam on the Sacramento

River in 1949, the Folsom Dam on the American in 1956, and the Oroville Dam on the Feather in 1968 led to extensive development on the floodplains. A major flood in 1989, which eclipsed all previous runoffs, and local flooding in January 1995 caused local, state, and federal agencies to reassess land use patterns.

The completion of Interstate Highways 5 and 80 in the 1960s reaffirmed Sacramento's role as a transportation hub. Several factors shielded the local economy from the problems that beset other regions of California after the Cold War. In the 1990s housing and land prices were one-third lower than in the San Francisco Bay area, approximately eighty miles to the southwest.

Local, state, and federal government employment provided a stable, albeit declining, share of the job market. With many institutions of higher learning, including community colleges, California State University, Sacramento, and the University of California, Davis, the region has a well-educated labor force. After the 1970s, data processing centers, high-tech manufacturing companies, bio-technology enterprises, and financial services companies were created in or relocated to Sacramento. The city's population increased from 275,741 in 1980 to 366,500 in 1990, when the Sacramento–Yolo County area had a population of nearly 1.5 million. From its inception Sacramento has had a multicultural population. Like the state of California, but at a much slower pace, Sacramento has experienced increased ethnic diversity since the 1970s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kelley, Robert L. Battling the Inland Sea: American Political Culture, Public Policy, and the Sacramento Valley, 1850–1986. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

McGowan, Joseph A., and Terry R. Willis. Sacramento: Heart of the Golden State. Woodland Hills, Calif.: Windsor Publications, 1983.

Gregg M.Campbell/f. b.

Dictionary of American History