Historical Overview

Archeological evidence suggests early man's presence near Auburn as early as 1400 B.C. However, little is known about these earliest of settlers. The first culture that can be documented is the Nisenan, who were a southern linguistic group of the Maidu Tribe. Several major Nisenan villages were established in the Auburn area.

Unlike the valley Nisenan, who were missionized by the Spanish, killed by the great epidemic (thought to be malaria in 1833, and controlled through persuasion and force) by the white man, the hill Nisenan had little disruption to their peaceful, native lifestyle until the discovery of gold. The hill Nisenan, living in the prime gold hunting areas, were overrun in two to three years following James Marshall's discovery of gold near the Nisenan village of Cullomain (Coloma).

The earliest Euro-Americans to come to the Auburn area were hunters and fur trappers, followed by such men as John Charles Fremont and his party of surveyors (1843-44), John Bidwell (1844-45), and Theodore Sigard (1845). A few adventuresome young men joined the earliest emigrant wagon trains in the late 1840s. Claude Chana, who was born in Burgundy, France, in 1811 and immigrated to New Orleans in 1839, joined one of these early wagon trains and made the treacherous continental crossing, ending up at Sigard's ranch on the Bear River.

After learning of Marshall's discovery and visiting the site first hand, Chana returned to Sigard's ranch and formed a party of three other Frenchmen, 25 Indians and 35 horses to return to the diggings. The party camped one night on a ravine where Chana tried his luck and found some "good sized specimens." The ravine was located near Old Town Auburn; the date was May 16, 1848.

By April 1849, a new mining camp was well established. Sometimes called North Fork Dry Diggings, Rich Ravine, Wood's Dry Diggins or Auburn Ravine, the mining camp was officially named Auburn in August of 1849. Auburn was centrally located as a "jumping off" spot to other remote gold areas. It was the farthest a wagon could travel from Sacramento - from Auburn the road became trails traveled by pack mules carrying supplies to the miners. When the gold began to play out, miners discovered Auburn was a good place to spend the winters. The land in Auburn was free for the taking. The Indians were all but destroyed, the Spanish grants did not include the area, and federal law allowed free access to public and private land for the purpose of prospecting and mining. Much of the land in Auburn was acquired through mining claims, but the majority were held as "shotgun titles"; that is, a squatter defending the land in his possession. In 1850 the population of Auburn was 1,500.

By the 1860s Auburn was a full-fledged town with a sense of permanency. The biggest event in the 1860s was the coming of the transcontinental railroad through Auburn. The planning and building of the railroad was a complicated affair with three separate companies: The California Central, the Central Pacific (Stanford, Crocker, Huntington and Hopkins) and the Sacramento, Placer and Nevada Railroad (conceived and financed by local residents). There were millions of dollars to be made from the ownership of the first transcontinental railroad and the competition was fierce. The California Central and the California Pacific literally carried on a war "ripping up each other's tracks by night and fighting by day." At one point the Auburn Greys, the local militia, were called out, and they actually fired on a railroad crew intent upon ripping up a rival's track. The Central Pacific eventually won the railroad war, and their railroad came to Auburn on May 13, 1865. After a short-lived incorporation in 1860, Auburn was incorporated for a second time on May 2, 1888. By 1900, the population numbered just above 2,000. The building of the railroad depot and the development of several major commercial building blocks in Upper or East Auburn caused a mass exodus of merchants from Old Town. This new commerce center caused a major rift among the townspeople. The area began to call itself East Auburn and even tried to declare itself a separate town. Although the feud continued for many years and ended when the U.S. Post Office refused to recognize East Auburn, separate centers of commerce were firmly established and still exist today.