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Administrative Draft Environmental Impact Report Gill Medical Center Project Buena) and Monterey.The rancho owners lived in one of the towns or in an adobe house on the rancho. The Mexican Period includes the years 1821 to 1848. John Sutter, a European immigrant, built a fort at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers in 1839 and petitioned the Mexican governor of Alta California for a land grant, which he received in 1841. Sutter built a flour mill and grew wheat near the fort. Gold was discovered in the flume of Sutter's lumber mill at Coloma on the South Fork of the American River in January 1848. The discovery of gold initiated the 1849 California Gold Rush, which brought thousands of miners and settlers to the Sierra foothills east and southeast of Sacramento. The American period began when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed between Mexico and the United States in 1848. As a result of the treaty, Alta California became part of the United States as the territory of California. Rapid population increase occasioned by the Gold Rush of 1849 allowed California to become a state in 1850. Most Mexican land grants were confirmed to the grantees by U.S. courts, but usually with more restricted boundaries,which were surveyed by the U.S. Surveyor General's office. Land outside the land grants became federal public land which was surveyed into sections, quarter-sections, and quarter-quarter sections. The federal public land could be purchased at a low fixed price per acre or could be obtained through homesteading (after 1862) (ECORP 2020). 4.7.1.4 Project Area History Captain Charles Weber, leader of one of the first overland parties to travel in the San Joaquin Valley, was favorably impressed by the Stockton area's abundance of fertile lands and oaks on the banks of the San Joaquin River (Costello and Brejla 2003).Although he ended up settling further west in San Jose, he formed a partnership with William Gulnac, a blacksmith who became a naturalized Mexican citizen. Eventually, the two men founded a colony at Campo de los Franceses, also known as French Camp, and in 1844 they were successful in receiving a land grant from the Mexican Governor of Alta California under that name at the future site of Stockton (Costello and Brejla 2003). The entire Stockton area was part of the Campo de los Franceses land grant, the second largest of the many land grants made by the Mexican government. It was later sold and, with the assistance of Weber, the town of Tuleberg was founded on the south side of the Stockton Channel.The town was renamed in 1849 for Commodore Robert F. Stockton, U.S. Navy, becoming the first town name in California not of Spanish or Native American origin (McElhiney 1992). The City of Stockton was officially incorporated on July 23, 1850 and the first City election was held only one day later (City of Stockton 2020). During the Gold Rush, numerous claims were worked along the American River and on the upper reaches of the Cosumnes River. Many miners traveled into the Sierra Nevada via the San Joaquin Valley, and a number returned to the area around Stockton to start farms and ranches to supply the gold camps with meat and other comestibles. The city became a major commercial hub, with flour mills, grain and flour exporting facilities, and factories for agricultural equipment such as harvesters and track-type tractors. In addition, boat building, which began in the 1850s, provided many of the paddle wheel steamers that plied the Delta and the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers from 1849 to 1938 (McElhiney 1992). Biological Resources 4.7-3 October 2021