I was up at Dawn's Early Crack today to help run some errands in Davis, Dixon, and Woodland. It was great when I started, with Saturn still high in the west and Venus very high in the east. Beautiful! Later the smoke started to obscure the view again, though it's cleared up considerably.

I left the Woodland courthouse at about 8:30. About an hour later, a convict escaped from there. (Let's see, they took him there from the Sacramento jail, removed his handcuffs while he was in a holding cell, left a door propped open, and then, surprise! he escaped.)

Rich, Sailor and I were on a walk when this happened. We spotted some pheasants, some ground squirrels, a small hawk, and a jackrabbit which led Sailor on a merry chase. Fortunately, it didn't zig onto the golf course till Sailor was tired out enough to come when we called him. About a mile, this walk, and netted three golf balls and a softball. When I got back and heard about the Woodland escape, I e-mailed Wowbagger to find out if he was around when it happened. No, he'd left about an hour before that.

Further proof that his life and timing are working a little better of late was the other major local story of the day, the BASE jumper who splatted in Yosemite. It could have been last week when he was gallivanting there. He said it wouldn't have bothered him, but I suspect it might have. He also claimed she was doing what she loved... well, she was responsible for a lot of MY money which could have been spent on something more worthwhile than picking up the pieces, thankyewverymuch. And somehow, I imagine the faster seconds of that fall erased the exhileration of the beginning. I note the group is trying to blame the Park Service. Anyway, life is timing. Hers was faulty.

Rich and I went to the second play in a trilogy, put on by InterACT, the Asian theater near here. Bernadette and I had seen the first part, "A Taste of Kona Coffee", and wanted to know what happened next. That one was about a Japanese family in Hawaii in 1929 and the children who wanted to leave the farm and go to the big city. "Manoa Valley", the second one, occurs in 1959, with the sons now the older generation. Justine played a teenager, just like me in that year, in fact. Neat. I decided I was interested enough in the trilogy and the family to get the book.

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As promised, the notes from the last gold rush lecture Wednesday night:

"Begun by Gold, Sacramento and the Gold Rush Legacy After 150 Years", lecture by Professor Ken Owens. (Before the lecture Rich and I told him we deserved college credit for going to 14 of the lectures.)
Consider Sacramento in the 1800s, (if you can bear it.) At the confluence of two rivers, to the north it's dry and hot for 150 miles. There are huge nearly impassible mountains to the east. South there is a tule marsh, and it's unnavigable by sail. It floods annually. Agriculture can't survive here. Sutter's Fort was built higher than it appears now, as the hill was levelled. Who would be foolish enough to build a city on a floodplain (editor's note, just about everyone in history.)

River cities are historically unhealthy places. Sewage and waste do people in. Malaria first came to Sacramento in 1832-33 from the Columbia River Basin and killed off 70% of the natives, about 80,000 people. Malaria is endemic to the Sacramento region.
"Worldwide, great cities were enormous killing machines kiiling off more than birth would replace."

Without gold, there would be no Sacramento. (Whatever you're thinking, Your Fearless Editor thought as well!)

The thing about placer gold, is that it is easy for the untrained to get.

Therefore, Sacramento was unique at the time, a city which grew suddenly, a diverse mixed population, an instant city. It was almost entirely male. There was a male saloon and brothel subculture. Since then, other places, like Stockton, Denver, Rapid City, Fairbanks, and Tulsa (oil, not gold) have grown quickly like Sacramento, but it was the first of its kind.

So, come 1848 and John Sutter Jr. and Sam Brannan ("gold, GOLD, come look for gold and buy my stock!") commisioned Captain William Warren and his subordinate, a William Tecumseh Sherman, to lay out the new city along the River. Unimaginatively, they started at the American River with "A" street and at the Sacramento with "1st." Anyone can find his way around, but the city has no city center. Peter Burnette began to sell lots a month later. There was no land for public space, a city center, courthouse square. (Though Cesar Chavez Plaza, which used to be "Plaza Park" (which means park park) is close.) John Sutter Junior gave 12 undeveloped square blocks to the city, and these are where the State Capitol and Cesar Chavez Plaza are now. These "public squares" didn't get used as such. There was an oak on K and 6th (this is the middle of the enclosed Downtown Plaza mall nowadays) which was used as the city center. It was the site of a lynching in 1851. It wasn't till the 1880's and the State Capitol that more than a block was used for anything. Professor Owens thinks the town has no character because of the unimaginative plats. (Gee, maybe he likes the traffic calming!)

I-5 should have gone west of the River, but the City Fathers wanted the revenue. It was also a good excuse to clear out the Skid Row along the Sacramento. Of course, they also demolished a lot of ethnic neighborhoods for the freeway, as well. It was only by some hard work by preservationists that Old Sacramento was saved. Now they are making the River a destination, instead of cutting the city off from it. Those were the same City Fathers who built "tank traps" on the K street mall, well designed to collect and radiate city heat. I always liked these, but enjoy K street more nowadays with the light rail and trees.

For the gold, the world rushed in, and it rushed right out again. January of 1850 was the first great flood. A cholera outbreak in October of 1850 left 364 dead. The successful citizens spent their summers in Santa Cruz. D.O.Mills went to his San Jose farm in summer. Respectable women were few. Luzina Wilson wrote: "We worked in '49, how we worked --- to the wall. A hand-to-hand fight with starvation to the front." Mary Crocker, wife of one of the Big Four, missed society.

The people weren't interested in building a city, they were interested in making money. John Sutter left. His son left (though the city retrieved his bones in 1930 for the Pioneer Cemetery, which would have appalled him. He hated Sacramento.) Bidwell left. Brannan left. The first mayor, Peter Bigelow, died in the squatter's riots in 1850.

Others did stay. James McClatchy, founder of the Bee, was one of the squatters in the riots. The town and society were only shaped by the few thousand who stayed, the Crockers, McClatchy, Father Morse. Irish refugees, and German and east European refugees from the failed '48 revolutions, and Chinese refugees stayed. They had nothing to go back to. If people hit it big, they moved to better places, or if they didn't make it, they left. Sacramento, therefore, was made of the reasonably prosperous but not wealthy middle class. In fact, the gold rush may have helped shape the middle class.

The money left. Sacramento has few monuments to wealth, but Palo Alto has Stanford University. Schleimann excavated Troy with Sacramento gold. Champion racehorses were bought with gold rush money. Even today, Sacramento money owns the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Old money is what keeps up ballet, symphony, opera. Old money founds history museums. We lack this support, which is why our symphony died and the philharmonic is struggling. The middle class depends on government to take care of these things. Then Owens quoted David Fiddyment, whose family has been here since 1853, thereby contradicting his theory that all the old money left. Fiddyment, supporting the orchestra, says "you can't go to the public trough because of the huge government prescence. Government supports mediocrity."

Nowadays, there's a new kind of gold rush. With air conditioning, Folsom Dam for cheap electricity and flood control, levies, clean water, the dangers and discomforts of living in Sacramento are gone so people come to live here. Professor Owens wants to improve the city without shooting the sheriff!

He didn't say anything about the Darth Vader building, but when he was talking about public monuments, I was thinking about that ugly ugly tower.

Rich wants to know what would have happened if Sam Brannan hadn't advertised the rush. I think someone would have... it was a tailor made situation for entrepreneurism! I look to all the people trying to make money from Y2K panic, and realize people haven't changed.