Adobe, Brick & Steel

Much of what we know locally about this early period comes from The First History of Sacramento City, 1850, written by Dr. John Frederick Morse. Like many, he had traveled the combination route by sea and land--south along the Atlantic coast, across Panama, north along the Pacific coast to San Francisco, then up the Sacramento River to the new town that provided a main entrance to the Sierra Nevada foothills and the gold fields.

Although travelers arriving in San Francisco frequently suffered from scurvy and its severest complication, as well as contagious diseases, typically they made immediate arrangements for the five-to-ten-day trip up the Sacramento River to Sacramento City and its acres of swampy, mosquito infested riverside. In early letters the city was called Valley City and Levee City, but finally, Sacramento City for the river it lay beside.

John Sutter had established his fort here in 1839, on a sand hill near the American River, about two miles from where it entered the Sacramento River. Built at the crossing of two early routes, one from the east by way of the Great Salt Lake and the other leading down from Oregon, the fort attracted many fortune seekers who needed to stop and resupply. The first hospital was set up by Sutter inside the fort for his Indian employees and dependents, but it soon accommodated the adventurers and new settlers as well.

In his diary Sutter reported in July 1847: "Great sickness and diseases among the Indian tribes and a great number of them dying notwithstanding of having employed a doctor to my hospital." On March 7, 1848, he complained of the fort's desertion by those seeking gold. They "left me only the sick and the lame behind."

He later added, "I need not mention again that all the visitors have always been hospitably received

In April 1849, there were some 150 residents bunched along the Sacramento River below the mouth of the Sacramento River and the American River. Two months later there were thousands more, most of them in poor health from the debilitation of hard travel and poor diet. Outside the fort, not far away, there was little more than trees for shelter. Lumber was scarce and canvas was substituted to provide not only roofs, but also walls and inside partitions. James Eaton's Memoirs, dictated in 1911, describes the construction of early hospitals by private enterprise: "These were made by setting three rows of posts in the ground--the outside rows and the frame for the sides of the hospital were fastened to and the middle was used to support the roof; the sides and roof were made of cloth."