Perhaps the real founder of Sacramento is the explorer Gabriel Moraga, as noted in our 2005 research report on the Lower Reach, which is on our website:
“[O]ne October morning in 1808 when Spanish sea captain Gabriel Moraga, 39, trekking up the big river [then called the Buenaventura] in a horseback expedition, was struck by the lovely scene. Canopies of oaks and cottonwoods, many festooned with grapevines, overhung both sides of the blue current… the Spaniards …drank in the beauty around them. ‘Es como el sagrado Sacramento!’ …This is like the Holy Sacrament! So the river [Sacramento] got its [new] name …”
(p. 9) Holden, W. (1988). Sacramento: Excursions into its history and natural world. Fair Oaks, California: Two Rivers Publishing Company.
John Sutter: The man behind the spin
New biography puts bright light on what author says was myth
By Chris Bowman - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PST Sunday, February 11, 2007
A Sacramento native who in childhood idolized city founder John Augustus Sutter as a Western hero has knocked him off the pedestal and humanized him in the most rigorously documented biography of the frontiersman yet told.
Reflecting recently on his new book, "John Sutter: A Life on the North American Frontier," Albert Hurtado said the common version of the pioneer's story -- a magnanimous baron of cattle and wheat who got bilked to the bone by unscrupulous Gold Rushers -- is largely a myth of Sutter's own making.
"I don't regard myself as a debunker of Sutter," said Hurtado, a University of Oklahoma history professor. "Sutter's own words and actions debunk" his legacy.
In navigating Sutter's dizzying trail of property records and promissory notes, Hurtado said he found him to be a "serial bankrupt" long before the 49ers flooded the banks of the Sacramento River.
"The Gold Rush did not ruin Sutter," Hurtado said. "Sutter ruined Sutter by his own foolish business operations."
