Gold Rush Legacy

GOLD RUSH LEGACY

AN INTERPRETIVE PLAN FOR AN INTERACTIVE TOUR IN OLD SACRAMENTO

A Thesis

Presented to the faculty of the Department of History

California State University, Sacramento

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Public History

Zoey Elizabeth Jennings

SPRING 2020

Zoey Elizabeth Jennings

GOLD RUSH LEGACY:

AN INTERPRETIVE PLAN FOR AN INTERACTIVE TOUR IN OLD SACRAMENTO

A Thesis

Zoey Elizabeth Jennings

Approved by:

______, Committee Chair Dr. Patrick Ettinger

______, Second Reader Janessa West

______Date

iii

Student: Zoey Elizabeth Jennings

I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and this thesis is suitable for electronic submission to the library and credit is to be awarded for the thesis.

______, Graduate Coordinator ______Dr. Anne Lindsay Date

Department of History

Abstract

GOLD RUSH LEGACY:

AN INTERPRETIVE PLAN FOR AN INTERACTIVE TOUR IN OLD SACRAMENTO

Zoey Elizabeth Jennings

The creation and development of Sacramento is connected to the California Gold Rush. While the legacy and history of the Gold Rush is well known in Sacramento, few possess an understanding of what the development of the city was truly like for the original residents. To educate visitors, the Sacramento History Museum developed tours of Old Sacramento. The most recent version of the tour, The Gold Fever! Game Tour invites local residents, tourists, and school groups to take an interactive tour that transports them to the Gold Rush through interactive elements. While the tour has been successful, it lacked an interpretive plan to train new tour guides with resources to lead an engaging, interactive tour. This thesis describes my development of an interpretive plan: specifically for the Gold Fever! Game Tour. This interpretive plan enable the tour’s continued success and ability to inspire visitors to Old Sacramento about its Gold Rush legacy.

______, Committee Chair Dr. Patrick Ettinger

______Date

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have so much to be thankful for.

To the History Department and Public History Program, thank you. I have had wonderful professors, mentors, and classmates that have guided and helped me through this process.

To my readers, Dr. Ettinger and Janessa West, thank you. Through your guidance and edits, I was able to complete this project.

To the Sacramento History Museum staff, thank you for the continuous help and encouragement throughout this process.

To my family and friends, thank you for the love and support during this time and with everything that I do.

To my Grandma Elizabeth and Grandma Nancy, thank you for always believing in me and pushing me to continue, even when it was difficult.

To my Mom and Dad, thank you for everything. Without the two of you, I would not be who I am today. You have always been my biggest supporters, my guiding light, and provided encouragement when I have needed it.

To my Fiancé, Jared, thank you for the love, support, and having my back through everything, even when I was not sure if I could do it.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

Acknowledgements ...... vi

Chapter

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

2. SACRAMENTO’S EARLY HISTORY ...... 7

3. DEVELOPMENT OF INTERPRETIVE PLAN ...... 28

4. CONCLUSION ...... 63

Appendix: Project ...... 67

Bibliography ...... 122

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Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

The small historic area of Sacramento known as Old Sacramento; has evolved through different iterations since 1849. Following its establishment at the waterfront, and the continuous expansion of population, the city grew outward from the original city center. Similar to other cities in the United States, the establishment of suburbs in the twentieth century led to a decline of the downtown area. With more people moving out of the downtown, the urban center of Sacramento fell into disrepair and ultimately became a blighted area and an “ideal candidate for slum clearance and urban renewal.”1

In the 1960s, a redevelopment effort began. During redevelopment there was debate about what to do with the oldest section of Sacramento. There was interest in building

Interstate- 5 where the historic buildings once stood. As historian Lee Simpson notes

“plans to route Interstate 5 through the city’s western edge” in what is now the Historic

District of Old Sacramento.2 Through preservation efforts, it was decided “to bulge the freeway route to the east to preserve what became the Old Sacramento Historic District.”3

The district planning went through a few versions and eventually became a twenty-eight acre historic district with reconstructed, relocated, or rebuilt buildings to replicate the original look of early Sacramento. Through the development of the historic district,

1 Lee M. A. Simpson and Lisa C. Prince, “The Invention of Old Sacramento: A Past for the Future” in River City and Valley: An Environmental History of the Sacramento Region, ed. Christopher J. Castaneda and Lee M. A. Simpson. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 290. 2 Ibid.,299. 3 Ibid., 300.

“recommendations to establish a state park, a city-county museum, impose architectural controls” were adapted.4 Today Old Sacramento features both private, state- and city- owned buildings. The once “blighted district…had been converted into a vibrant commercial district and the city’s premier tourist attraction.”5 While some of the businesses are independent novelty and boutique stores, restaurants and cafes, there is also a strong historical community. The district has four museums, a working railroad experiences, living history reenactors, and several options for tours. The focus of this thesis is the Gold Fever! Game Tour, produced by the Sacramento History Museum, which is one of the tours currently in operation in the historic district. The district strives to preserve the history of the Gold Rush and the development of Sacramento. Through these tours, tourists and locals alike are able to learn and experience the history

Sacramento has to offer.

In 2017, I was approached to create an updated interpretive plan for the new above-ground walking tours for the Sacramento History Museum. While there was a current version of the above ground tour, The Gold Rush Experience Tour, it was not attracting the attention of visitors like that of the Underground Tour.

The Gold Rush Experience Tour was a guided, non-interactive, static tour. The tour led visitors around the Old Sacramento Historic District, discussing the history of

Sacramento, the importance of the buildings, and the early days of Sacramento. This tour,

4 Lee M. A. Simpson and Lisa Prince, “The Invention of Old Sacramento” in River City and Valley Life, 301. 5 Ibid.,305.

3 while interesting and factual, was not engaging or interactive for the visitor and only lasted one tour season. Visitors walked around the city listening to the tour guide, not fully engaging with the history they were learning.

In 2017, key staff of the Sacramento History Museum decided to redesign the tour in line with the experience they wanted for their visitors. They aspired to create a new tour using a hands-on approach that included a game component. The game element would require the visitor to become an active and engaged participant. They wanted visitors to figuratively become someone from the Gold Rush, adopting a persona for the length of the tour. The creative group researched key individuals from the Gold Rush era which highlighted the diversity of the city, including well-known individuals like Sam

Brannon and John Sutter. They designed and printed paper hand-fans with the pictures and biographies of these ‘characters’ to handout to visitors, inviting visitors to assume the identity of the historic figure for the length of the tour. The premise was that the new and improved tour would engage the public and give them a chance to not only learn the history, but to become a part of it. The Gold Fever! Game Tour was born.

While the tour was carefully created, a training manual was not developed at the same time. Instead, the tour relied upon the old manual from The Gold Rush Experience

Tour and added an appendix with the description of the new elements, (the fans, and chance cards) used on the tour. Unfortunately, this led to a disconnect between the tour guide’s training materials and the new tour. Thus, in order to learn and master the new tour curriculum, new tour guides needed to follow existing tour guides and practice with the Tour Manager until they were considered trained in the new material.

In 2017, I was approached by key staff at the Sacramento History Museum to create an updated interpretive plan for the new above ground walking tour, Gold Fever!

Game Tour. I began by looking over different interpretive plans that the museum already had. I also reviewed the tour plans for the walking tours and other supplemental tour information. Besides the Underground Tour Interpretative Plan and the Gold Rush

Experience Tour Interpretative Plans, there were other materials from older programs which dated from 1980s when the Sacramento History Museum was founded. My first observations of these materials were that they provided good information but were in the form of a script to follow rather than a training document. Also, they did not have footnotes or a bibliography, which made it difficult to review and check the facts about

Sacramento or the specific buildings being discussed. Nonetheless, these materials provided a good starting point with information on the buildings, the tour route, the different stops along the tour, the time period to focus on, and the length of the tour. After looking through these different scripts and manuals, I met with the Education Manager and Tour Manager at the Sacramento History Museum to discuss what was important to keep in the new interpretive plan.

The time period to be discussed on the tour is critical. The interpretive time period for the above ground walking tour is from 1849, with the start of the Gold Rush, until the

1860s as the boom town mentality wore down. The Sacramento History Museum’s

Underground Tours cover the later period of 1860s, when the city was physically lifted because of constant flooding. By focusing on this period, the walking tour discusses how

5 the riverfront became the gateway to the gold fields, the enterprises that sprang up because of the Gold Rush, and Sacramento’s subsequent development from this location.

The built environment figures prominently in the tour, and there are specific buildings on the tour that need to be discussed. Several are restored and reconstructed buildings important to the history of Sacramento. The Lady Adams building, for example, is one of the only original buildings dating from the Gold Rush period, having survived the fire of the 1852. The Eagle Theatre, a reconstructed building, represents the first theater in California. These buildings are important to the history of Sacramento.

After examining different tours, interpretive plans, and discussing the purpose of an interpretative plan, I began to construct the interpretive plan for Gold Fever! Game, which will be discussed in the following pages of this thesis. The interpretive plan that I was asked to develop is not a script. Rather, it is the basis for the tour guides to create their own distinctive tour. It provides information about the tour, the tour route, and how to manage the game in different situations. It contains information for developing a tour persona, and creating or finding historic attire. This is meant to be a starting point for the tour guides, not a definitive script to memorize. Tour guides are encouraged to conduct further research about Sacramento’s history to make their tour unique and different from other tour guides as well as other local tours.

Chapter 2 focuses on the history of Sacramento’s boomtown development following the discovery of gold in 1848. The brief historical synopsis is not intended to be a complete history of the area. Rather, it is a stepping stone for new guides to gain a basic understanding of the area as well as a sense of the type of character they will adopt

6 for their tour persona. Guides will do additional research once they have chosen their tour guide identity. Chapter 3 concentrates on the role of interpretation within the field of

Public History and how I developed my interpretive plan. There I will discuss the importance of tours in museums and historic sites and how an interpretive plan is a vital component for any interpretive program or tour.

The new interpretive plan is located in the appendix. The new interpretive plan is designed specifically for the Gold Fever! Game Tour and its interactive elements. It contains an executive summary, themes, tour route, the description of the game with the use of the hand-fans and chance cards, the different stops along the tour with a corresponding map, and additional resources for further research and tour development.

Prior to the creation of the new interpretive plan, the Gold Fever! Game lacked a complete and concise document about the tour. Instead, tour guides had to refer to an old and outdated training manual from a different tour. This caused confusion for new tour guides and made it difficult to train new guides. By creating an interpretive plan specifically for the Gold Fever! Game, I was able to create a document that centers on the interactive elements of the tour, explains how the interactives feature on the new tour, and provides useful information for tour guides to develop their own tour. The goal of this interpretive plan is for it to remain current and be updated as the tour continues to grow and be revised.

Chapter 2

SACRAMENTO’S EARLY HISTORY

This chapter examines Sacramento’s history from the early days of Nisenan settlement to John Sutter’s arrival, the discovery of gold in 1848, and to the founding and growth of Sacramento. From the 1830s through the1860s, Sacramento grew rapidly and overcame natural disasters to become the State Capital. In order to understand the work undertaken on The Gold Fever! Game, the reader needs knowledge of the key people and events that helped influence the development of Sacramento.

The first people in the Sacramento Valley region were the indigenous Nisenan,

Miwok, and Maidu peoples. The Nisenan had various settlements around the Sacramento

Valley. While they lived in the region, they did not settle directly near the Sacramento and American Rivers. They knew that the rivers flooded each year and thus made sure their settlements were not near the flood areas. The region was abundant with water and natural resources and provided all they needed to survive. Men hunted for the various animals that could be found in the valley, such as deer and elk. The women gathered berries and acorns and gathered reeds and local grass to make baskets in which to store their goods. According to historian Albert Hurtado:

The people of central California hunted, fished, and gathered wild foods. They did not practice agriculture because they had no need for it. The temperate climate and a variety of food resources made for an abundant and relatively easy life without tilling the fertile valley lands. 6

6 Albert Hurtado, “John A. Sutter and the Indian Business,” in River City and Valley Life: An Environmental History of the Sacramento Region, ed. Christopher J. Castaneda and Lee M. A. Simpson (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 19.

They established their communities near local resources to ensure the survival of their people.

Unlike the native groups on the coast, the Nisenan had little interaction with the

Spanish and later Mexican governments who claimed California. While some groups of

Spanish and Mexicans had ventured into the interior of California, they did not disrupt the Nisenan way of life as they had done on the coast. The Nisenan tribe had some interaction with French and Russian fur traders who came into this area, but otherwise they were able to avoid contact with other non-native groups.

John Sutter’s Arrival

In 1839, the Nisenan’s isolation ended. John Sutter arrived in the Sacramento

Valley to establish a settlement in the interior of California. Sutter was a Swiss-German immigrant who arrived in the United States to escape debtor’s prison. Once in the United

States, he joined trade routes from Santa Fe and eventually joined a trapping company that was on its way to the Oregon Territory. From there, he plotted out a safe route to

California and was advised “to sail to Hawaii and then California.”7 Hawaii was a central trade hub, which made it easier to find a ship going to California. Sutter found a Russian ship heading to California, however it was not direct, first making a stop at the Russian

Fort in Sitka Alaska and then at Fort Ross, their agriculture settlement along the

California Coast.8 Eventually Sutter arrived in California, landing in San Francisco

7 Hurtado, “John A. Sutter and the Indian Business” in River City and Valley Life, 16. 8 Ibid., 17.

9 before traveling to Monterey, the capital of Mexican California. Once in Monterey, Sutter met with Governor Juan Bautista de Alvarado and asked permission to homestead in the

Sacramento Valley. Alvarado “advised Sutter to venture into the central valley, to pick a site and begin settling himself on it, then return to Monterey one year later and apply for

Mexican Citizenship.”9 Sutter headed to the Sacramento Valley, where he would eventually settled in what is now known as Sacramento.

Upon his arrival in 1839, Sutter brought “eight or ten Kanakas he had brought with from the Hawaiian Islands and five to seven ‘white men’ who were artisans. The cargo included stores of provisions, ammunition, implements and three small cannon from Honolulu.”10 Sutter’s vision for this area was to create an empire with crops, cattle, and settlers to cultivate the land. From his travels, he had learned how other forts and trade posts operated. He established a fort and called the area New Helvetia, or New

Switzerland, after his homeland. This area lay a mile south of the American River, at what is now the intersection of 26th and L Street. Sutter brought with him Hawaiians who were skilled tradesmen as well as sailors contracted to work with him for three years.11

Sutter negotiated with native tribes for workers. Historians debate the arrangements made between Sutter and the local tribes. Were the natives willing laborers or if they were slaves? Albert Hurtado notes, “Indian labor was the key to transforming native resources

9 Mark A. Eifler, Gold Rush Capitalist: Greed and Growth in Sacramento, (New Mexico: University Of New Mexico Press, 2002), 20. 10 J. Horace Culver, Sacramento City Directory for the year 1851, (1851; repr., Sacramento, CA: California State Library Foundation, 2000), 40. 11 Hurtado, “John A. Sutter and the Indian Business” in River City and Valley Life, 13.

10 into commodities for a growing worldwide capitalist marketplace.”12 Having a workforce was essential to Sutter’s businesses and vision of a vast empire. Sutter intended to use the land grant to raise wheat and cattle, but with abundant resources in Sacramento and a sizable new labor force, he was able to achieve much more. According to historian Susan

Lee Johnson, “They harvested wheat, washed and sewed clothes, distilled liquor, made hats and blankets, tanned leather, trapped beaver, killed deer, caught salmon, sailed goods up and down the Sacramento, constructed the buildings of New Helvetia, and served in

Sutter’s militia.”13 Indians were vital to Sutter’s success and the creation of New

Helvetia. The ability to transform this land into a profitable fort attracted other settlers to this area.

Due to its location on the western edge of the Sierra Nevada’s, Sutter’s Fort was the last overland stop on the emerging California Overland Trail. Newly arrived pioneers purchased goods and rested following their six-month wagon journey to California.

Arriving settlers could also purchase land from Sutter and could even find work at the fort. The fort offered shelter and security for new settlers in a new land. Sutter was issued more than 40,000 acres of land in the Sacramento Valley, on the conditions that he become a Mexican citizen, convert to Catholicism, and become a representative of the

Mexican government.14 For the weary travelers who arrived after months of overland travel, Sutter’s Fort became an essential stop. Here they were provided shelter and a

12 Hurtado, “John A. Sutter and the Indian Business” in River City and Valley Life, 13. 13 Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of California Gold Rush, (New York: Norton, 2000), 92. 14 Eifler, Gold Rush Capitalist, 29.

11 chance to buy provisions as well as the chance to purchase their own land. Skilled carpenters and coopers could established shops in and around the fort to sell their goods.

Historian Mark Eifler notes that “Sutter’s grand vision of empire required as many skilled workers as were available. He welcomed anyone capable of boosting his frontier enterprise.”15 Two such men were James Marshall and Sam Brannan. James Marshall was a skilled carpenter employed at the fort. Marshall would eventually partner with

Sutter in constructing a saw mill. Sam Brannan was a businessman who operated businesses at the fort and in San Francisco. Brannan, an elder with the Church of Jesus

Christ of Latter Day Saints, arrived with other followers on the ship the Brooklyn in

1846. This ship traveled around Cape Horn and arrived in San Francisco. Some of the

Brooklyn’s passengers settled at Mormon Island, which is located near the present town of Folsom.16

The Creation of the Sutter’s Saw Mill and the Discovery of Gold

Eventually, Mexico granted Sutter additional lands, and he established a saw mill on the American River about forty miles from Sacramento, in what is now Coloma.

Marshall helped build the saw mill. Though Marshall’s training only qualified him to construct a sawmill structure, he had the ability to perform the “construction of the shed and platform that would house and support the millworks.”17 The saw mill was powered by the current of the south fork of the American River and the cut lumber was transported

15 Ibid., 28. 16 William L. Wallis, History of Sacramento County California, (Los Angeles, CA: Historic Record Company, 1913), 38. 17 H.W. Brands, The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream, (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 2.

12 via the American River to the fort. Lumber was an important commodity, needed for construction of additional buildings not only in New Helvetia but also in San Francisco.

On January 24, 1848 Marshall was examining the mill and saw something glimmering in the river. Marshall reached into the river and pulled out a piece of gold. Wanting confirmation of the nature of his find, Marshall went to Sutter’s office where they conducted tests to see if the gold was real. There “they consulted Sutter’s Encyclopedia

Americana, which had a long article describing the properties of gold.”18 They also used nitric acid which “Marshall’s samples withstood” and they “reproduced Archimedes’ famous experiments.”19 These tests determined that it was gold. This discovery came

“nine days before the treaty signing” between the United States and Mexico which gave

California, as well as other lands under Mexican Government control, to the United

States.20

Sutter and Marshall wanted to keep the news of the gold discovery quiet so that others would not be tempted to squat on his land. The only other people who knew of the discovery were the men who worked at the saw mill. Sutter wanted work to continue at the saw mill. Historian J.S. Holliday observes that Sutter, “fearful that work on the sawmill would be interrupted, possibly stopped all together in the face of the greater cause… asked his workers to stay on the job,…They could continue in their spare time to dig for gold.”21 Sutter wanted to keep his saw mill and the vision for his empire growing.

18 Ibid, 18. 19 Ibid, 18. 20 J.S. Holliday, The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 25. 21 Holliday, The World Rushed In, 33.

Soon, however, the secret got out and turned John Sutter’s vision upside-down. One worker from the mill entered a shop at the fort, purchasing his goods with a nugget and told the owner, C. C. Smith, where he found the nugget. C. C. Smith ran the shop with his partner Sam Brannan, and told Brannan the news of the gold discovery. After confronting

Sutter about the gold discovery, Brannan was told that it was real. But Sutter asked him to “keep the discovery quiet until the mill was complete.”22 Brannan saw the opportunity to spread the news of the gold discovery to further his own interest. Sam Brannan owned several businesses: a store at Sutter’s Fort, a store in San Francisco, and a newspaper. He orchestrated how the news was spread and made sure he was prepared to sell supplies when people rushed to Sacramento lured by the opportunity for gold. By May, news had spread in the newspaper Brannan owned. Brannan also ran through the streets of San

Francisco yelling about the gold discovery. Astutely “Brannan and Smith had quietly been buying up as many shovels, picks, and blankets as they could find, which they now sold at greatly inflated prices.”23

The arrival of the 49ers

Following the news, people from all over the world started to arrive. Though

American and other foreigners had been arriving in Mexican California before the Gold

Rush by wagon train, the discovery of gold spurred more and more people to travel by sea. Sea travel became the preferred method for coming to California from all over the world. From the East Coast, two routes were possible by ship via the Isthmus of Panama

22 Eifler, Gold Rush Capitalist, 46. 23 Ibid., 47.

14 or around Cape Horn. Each had dangers, but most gold seekers wanted the fastest route to

California. The gold had ignited global desire. According to historian Mark Eifler, “A dense web of economic, political, and cultural transformations, both global and local, brought Mexicans, Chileans, Anglo and African Americans, French, and Chinese to the

Miwok gathering and hunting grounds in response to the discovery of gold in

California.”24 Though an opportunity for many people, native cultures suffered after the gold discovery. The sudden influx of tens of thousands of miners onto their lands quickly disturbed the environment and their access to natural resources.

Soon, Sutter was in debt and he transferred his holdings to his son to avoid losing his holdings. Eifler notes that “Sutter abandoned his vision of empire and decided to transfer all of his property to his son, John Sutter, Jr., only twenty-two years old, who had arrived in California just two months before.”25 In 1848, Sutter, Jr., who was new to this country, wanted to sell off his father’s property to pay off the debts. He started to work with Sam Brannan and other merchants to sell off his father’s lands. Sam Brannan saw this as an opportunity to purchase land for the new city at the confluence of the

Sacramento River and the American River. Historian Eifler notes,

This site had several advantages. The Sacramento River that fronted the embarcadero was deep enough for oceangoing ships to be reached relatively easily. It was closer to Sutter’s Fort than Sutterville, and in 1848 Sutter’s Fort was still the more recognized local landmark.26

24 Johnson, Roaring Camp, 95. 25 Eifler, Gold Rush Capitalist, 35. 26 Eifler, Gold Rush Capitalist, 48.

People who had traveled by sea came up the Sacramento River from San Francisco, landed at the waterfront, and then journeyed up to the gold fields. Therefore, Brannan wanted to build the city in this location, where miners could easily purchase supplies before leaving for the gold fields. This site was a good location for the new city because

“John Sutter already owned” the land which would make it easy for Brannan to purchase the land from Sutter.27 John Sutter, Jr. began to lay out the future city and sell off his father’s land to pay off debts. Sutter Jr. contracted Capt. William Warner and Lt. William

T. Sherman to survey the land and plot it with town lots.28 The size of the new city was impressive since its boundaries did not only encompassed the waterfront, but also space for the future growth of the city. Extending “from Front Street to Thirty-First Street, the city would stretch nearly three miles from the river, ensnaring the crumbling Sutter’s Fort in its wide-ranging scheme.”29 With the town lots organized, it was easy to sell off the land. The “first lots were auctioned off on January 8, 1849.”30 With the help of Brannan, lots were sold off at the riverfront quickly, and crude structures constructed.

With most of his land sold off, and a disagreement with his son about the location of the new city, John Sutter left and retired to his other property at Hock Farm, near present day Yuba City. Famously, “the resulting rush had produced wealth for the nation but had ruined the region’s founding father, who lost both his land and his livelihood.”31

Losing the fort, his lands, and sawmill, Sutter was left with little.

27 Ibid. 28 Culver, Sacramento Directory 1851, 69. 29 Eifler, Gold Rush Capitalist, 50. 30 Culver, Sacramento Directory 1851, 69. 31 Eifler, Gold Rush Capitalist, 19.

Settlement at the Embarcadero

The city of Sacramento became a boomtown overnight. Many merchants who owned businesses at Sutter’s Fort soon moved to the waterfront as business was more lucrative closer to the ships and departing passengers. Brannan was one such merchant,

“during the first few months of 1849, Brannan erected several buildings, some for his private use but more often to lease out to others.”32 Others who settled at the waterfront included the Hensley, Reading & Company and Priest, Lee & Company. These merchants succeeded at Sutter’s Fort and they knew the increase of people coming through Sacramento, would mean a chance for greater profits. These merchants “saw the people passing through Sacramento’s streets not as potential settlers, but as temporary, transitory customers.”33

The city was built of quick, simple structures made out of wood and canvas often from abandoned ships sitting in the river. By the year 1849, the city was comprised of

“some thirty buildings occupied as stores. Two barks and a brig were moored along the shore.”34 Ships often served as some of the first buildings in Sacramento, including the first post office and jail. Tents also served as houses and offices; “like the large, temporary camps that formed at river crossing on trails, Sacramento was another bottleneck on their journey towards the mines.”35 The city’s founders had planned the city to start from the waterfront with the potential to grow. However, the founders were

32 Eifler, Gold Rush Capitalist, 57. 33Ibid., 55. 34 Thomas Hinckley Thompson and Albert Augustus West, History of Sacramento County, California, (1880; repr. Berkeley, CA: Howell-North, 1960), 47. 35 Eifler, Gold Rush Capitalist, 89.

17 not fully prepared for the influx of people that flooded into Sacramento. Most miners were single young men who came by sea. Most were not expecting to stay in California long. Rather their plan was to strike it rich and head home with their pockets full of gold.

Typically, those arriving by sea would arrive at various times throughout the year. Those who traveled overland, on the other hand, arrived at the end of fall or the beginning of winter. By the end of their respective journeys, the new arrivals were sick, tired, and often poor. While Sacramento was a supply center for miners, it also served as the winter base camp for miners and newly arrived overland travelers. This was a chance for these people to rest and regroup before making their plans to begin mining in the spring. Along with the miners and overland travelers, Sacramento attracted more merchants. Their goals were similar to the land speculators and early founders who realized the business potential of the emerging Gold Rush.

Sacramento, and California in general, became a place of opportunity. For many miners, it was a chance for finding gold and going home wealthy. But for others, the development of the city was a chance to start a new life. Miners from all around the world arrived in Sacramento for their chance to strike it rich. At the same time, the lopsided ratio of men to women created a completely new social experience for the mining world. The ‘normal’ social structures were changed. Men in the gold mines and camps had to band together and take on work considered women’s work like cooking,

18 cleaning and sewing. At the same time, woman had opportunities to own property, start businesses, and make decisions for themselves.36

How Sacramento Mitigated Disasters

When locating the city next to the American and Sacramento Rivers, founders only thought of the convenience. They did not take into consideration why Sutter or the natives had not settled by the rivers. With new merchants, new citizens, and transient miners coming to town from the gold fields, the decision to build the city next to the rivers proved to be disastrous. In the winter of 1850, the new city by the Embarcadero faced its first flood. That January “torrential rains fell which melted snow in the mountains and caused the American River to flood over the banks in the vicinity of Sutter

Lake which lay just north of I street from Front to 6th .”37 The flood extended past Front

Street at the river and into the city. The earlier dry winters had not prepared the young city for the flood. Eifler reports that “in less than twelve hours water covered the town, in some places to the depth of twelve feet. The flood destroyed or washed away the early tent structures. Though residents immediately started rebuilding, the flood had devastated the town.”38 Wanting to prevent this disaster from striking again, the residents sought a solution.

With the city destroyed by the first flood, citizens had to quickly rebuild.

Although many citizens thought a flood would not happen again, they still developed a

36 Johnson, Roaring Camp, 105-106. 37 Culver, Sacramento Directory 1851, 69. 38 Eifler, Gold Rush Capitalist, 95.

19 plan to prevent the possibility of floods by building levees. Hardin Bigelow’s decision to build a levee would protect the city for a while. According to contemporary sources “with a moiety of means and a handful of men, he commenced damming up the intruding waters at every low point, and finally extended his temporary levee almost to its present limits.”39 Bigelow realized the importance of the levee in protecting the city “started building a levee on the waterfront and pestering everybody to help.”40 Since Sacramento was still in its infancy, he wanted to ensure it would continue to grow and develop. The flood had devastated the city, and it was only because of the citizens’ desire to rebuild that the city survived.

Floods were not the city’s only problem. Following the floods, the transient citizens again set up camps and tent cities, squatting on vacant lots and the newly built levees. For many new to this city, they did not understand the land rights of California.

When California became a territory of the United States, the original titles of land “held by the grantees of the Mexican Government, who were protected in their rights by treaty.” 41 Since the land grants were protected, it made it difficult for newly arrived settlers to find land that was unclaimed and to understand why they were not able to just settle open land. In other parts of the United States, they were able to take over open land, claiming the property for themselves. However, this was not the case in California, and it caused many tensions, which would come to ahead in 1850. This caused conflict between

39 Samael Colville, Sacramento Directory for the year of 1853-54, (1854; repr., Sacramento, CA: California State Library Foundation, 1997), 23. 40 Holden, Sacramento, 160-161. 41 Thompson and West, History of Sacramento County, California, 50.

20 the merchants and the squatters and eventually “resulted [in] bloodshed and death to members on both parties.”42 The squatters were taking over the embarcadero, preventing access to cargo ships. Squatters were also occupying lots owned by other people. This caused conflict between the squatters who were on the land illegally and the merchants or land owners who owned the property raised tensions. One particular incident started what became known as the Squatter Riots. A dispute arose between John P. Rodgers and

Dewitt J. Burnet who owned a lot at 2nd and N Street and John T. Madden, who was squatting on the property and had built a house. A case was brought in court, where

“[d]espite an extremely active defense over many weeks, the plaintiffs prevailed, and

Madden lost his final appeal on August 10.”43 In response, squatters rallied and took action. They gathered a group of “about 200 men to defend Madden’s house from any action by the sheriff. They also issued a manifesto printed on a large broadside which refused recognition of both the State and City governments.”44 After squatters defended the house, a few men, including James McClatchy, were taken to jail on the La Grange prison ship. More squatters, however, raised tensions between landowners and squatters.

On August 14, 1850, the mayor and sheriff led an armed group against armed squatters.

Meeting at J Streets, both groups fired upon each other, and Mayor Bigelow was shot.

Bigelow was moved to San Francisco to recover from his wounds but eventually died in

San Francisco of cholera.45 The conflict would continue until August 15 when the threat

42 Culver, Sacramento Directory 1851, 79. 43 Ibid., 80. 44 Ibid. 45 Culver, Sacramento Directory 1851, 81.

21 of additional armed forces arriving from Benicia resulted in the death of Sheriff Joseph

McKinney, and the arrest of the squatter’s leaders for the Squatter’s Riot to finally end46.

Cholera Epidemic

Still more trouble came to Sacramento. The arrival of the ship The New World in

Sacramento in October brought word that California had become the 31st state in the

Union. However, The New World also brought cholera. The “infection was brought to

Sacramento from San Francisco by The New World.”47 One of the passengers from the ship was found lying on the levee after leaving the ship. With the start of the epidemic, citizens began to leave the city, and “Dr. Morse estimated that only 20% remained” in the city.48 The outbreak lasted from October, when the ship arrived, until the end of

November. No exact record exists of the people who died during the epidemic; estimates range from 600 to 1,000. Seventeen doctors died treating the cholera victims. The doctors had been “painfully aware of the odds against survival through this ordeal, not a single educated physician turned his back on the city in distress.”49 Dr. John Morse, one of the early settlers and the city’s first historians, was instrumental in taming the outbreak. While this outbreak lasted only a month, it had devastating effects on the city and marked the end of the first year of Sacramento City’s turbulent birth. The first year echoed the triumph and tragedy of the Gold Rush itself. However, this did not prevent the city from continuing to thrive and overcoming further adversity.

46 Ibid, 82-86. 47Ibid., 89. 48Ibid., 90. 49 Ibid., 91

The Continued Development of Sacramento

Following the flood and disease outbreak in the first year of the city, its founders’ perseverance helped their young city overcome new obstacles. Citizens were able to rebuild structures and continued to create a city that would become more than a boomtown city. By 1852, the initial challenges had been overcome and city continued to thrive.

However, in 1852, a massive fire wiped out most of the city. The fire started at

Mrs. Lanos’ hat shop, and she was blamed for the fire even though she was not there at the time.50 Though some buildings had been made out of bricks, most were still crude structures made of wood and canvas. These simple structures were no match for the massive fire that struck the city. The fire destroyed “over 40 square blocks- nine-tenths of the city.”51 Strong winds “carried burning boards several feet in length through the air and lighted the roofs of buildings often one or more blocks in advance of the main conflagration.”52 By some accounts, the glow of the fire could be seen from as far away as San Francisco. Some structures, such as the dry goods store the Lady Adams, survived the fire. This building had iron window shutters and multiple roofs made of layers of tin and sand that protected it from fire. The building had been constructed out of the brick ballast from the ship its owners had arrived on and thus was named the Lady Adams after the ship.53 Following the fire, the city rebuilt once again; “within 30 days of the 1852 fire,

50 William M. Holden, Sacramento: Excursions into its History and Natural World, (Fair Oaks, CA: Two Rivers Publishing Co, 1987), 176. 51 Ibid., 176. 52 Thompson and West, History of Sacramento County, California, 77. 53 Ibid., 177.

23 an incredible 761 buildings had risen. “54 This time they constructed more permanent structures that could possibly survive a fire. The 1853-1854 city directory noted that following the fire in 1852, “56 brick structures were completed in 1852 and 115 by

1853.”55 After the destruction, business owners wanted to rebuild their business quickly and construct their buildings out of materials that could withstand disasters. Following the fire, the Orleans Hotel was “rebuilt entirely of brick three stories high and 80 x 50 in

21 days and six hours from the time the first brick was laid.”56 The citizens once again came together to rebuild their city and maintain their livelihoods and “new city ordinances mandated that fireproof materials be used in construction of all commercial buildings.”57 However, this was not the case for homes and non-commercial buildings for which wood was still used as framing in construction. This would become an issue in a few years when another fire struck the city.

Once again, in the winters of 1852 and 1853, more flooding affected the city. The levees built to protect the city from flooding, were not tall enough. According to one account, “the safety belt of the levees bulwarking Sacramento lulled the people into a feeling of security- until the great flood of 1852-53.”58 The city built its original levee to the level that the 1850 flood had reached. They did not consider the possibility that the flood waters could rise much higher. The original levees “were three feet high, six feet on top, and twelve feet base except immediately in front of the city, where the levee was

54 Ibid., 178. 55 Colville, Sacramento Directory for the year of 1853-54, xi. 56 Ibid. 57 Holden, Sacramento, 178 58 Ibid., 161.

24 much wider.”59 While these dimensions were adequate for the small flood of 1850, nothing would prepare the city for the winter of 1852 and 1853, ultimately “the high water of 1852 proved the levee to be inadequate to resist the pressure of water against it, and too low to keep the water from running over top.”60 In 1852, flood waters once again overtopped the levee. The levees then trapped the flood waters inside the city, and the levees had to be broken to allow the water to recede. After the 1852 flood, the city built a taller levee, but once again only as high the level of the most recent flood. Then, in

January 1853, yet another flood happened. The water levels flowed over the levees, “but did little damage.”61 In the same year “an ordinance was passed appropriating $50,000 for raising and strengthening the levee.”62

Despite these issues, Sacramento became the state capital of California in 1854.

The capital had moved from Monterey to San Jose to Vallejo, Benicia, and even San

Francisco in its early years. Meeting at the beginning of 1854, the Legislature discussed negotiations with Sacramento where they were promised “tendering the free use of the

Court House…to the State, together with a deed to the blocks of land between I and J,

Ninth and Tenth streets.”63 These terms were desirable since the conditions in Benicia were not perfect for properly running the Capital. In February 1854 a bill was introduced to make the “permanent seat of Government at Sacramento and accepting the block of

59 Thompson and West, History of Sacramento County, California, 73. 60 Ibid. 61 Wallis, History of Sacramento County California, 355. 62 Ibid. 63 Thompson and West, History of Sacramento County, California, 91.

25 land.”64 This bill was passed officially making Sacramento the state capital. The

Legislature met in the county court house and while factions’ argued whether Sacramento was the “legal Capital”, Sacramento remained the Capital.65 The Legislature operated out of the court house, originally located in the B.F. Hastings’ Building at 2nd and J Street, until a capitol building was constructed. It was not until 1856, when the Legislature voted on the bonds to build the capitol at 10th and L streets that the construction began.66

The city seemed to settle for a while and began to look toward the future with the capital officially moving to Sacramento. Unfortunately, 1854 not only brought the capital to Sacramento but yet another fire and flood.

Tragedy in 1854

Fire struck the city in 1854. But following the fire’s devastation, “some 500 new bricks and 2,000 framed buildings had been risen in the city.”67 The fire began around 3rd and 4th streets between J and K streets. It “started in a small wood frame building” and spread to “the kitchen of the Sacramento Hotel, and became a very large fire.”68 Unlike, earlier fires, volunteer firefighter companies were now in place and helped contain the fire. A new city water works building was constructed, holding the city’s water supply in tanks on top of the building and succeeded “in containing the fire between Third, Seven,

J and K streets.”69 The court house where the capital was operating was also threated by

64 Ibid. 65 Wallis, History of Sacramento County California, 360. 66 Ibid., 361. 67 Holden, Sacramento, 178. 68 Thompson and West, History of Sacramento County, California, 77. 69 Thompson and West, History of Sacramento County, California, 77.

26 this fire and Governor John Bigler asked several bystanders to help rescue the furniture, including a portrait of George Washington.70 This quick thinking helped save many items from the temporary capitol. Ultimately, “this 1854 fire did not burn as many blocks as the fire two years earlier but was every bit as costly in damage.”71 The city had to reexamine its location, and building structures, to determine the best action to prevent fires and protect the city. The city took measures to ensure that a disaster like the fires in

1850 and 1852 would not destroy the whole city, and those measures succeeded.

Sacramento’s Connection with the World

Following the disasters of the early 1850s, the city continued to grow and expand.

The once isolated boomtown had become a permanent city, the state capital of California, and a hub for transportation and communication. The Pony Express, and eventually the telegraph, connected Sacramento to the rest of the country. The use of steamboats connected Sacramento to San Francisco and allowed for transportation and trade for citizens of both cities. Eventually the Sacramento Valley Railroad was constructed in

1854. Theodore Judah was “convinced of the practicability of a railroad over the Sierra

Nevada,” and his vision of building over and through the Sierra Nevada Mountains helped pave the way for the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad which connected Sacramento to the East Coast as well as the rest of the world. 72 “The construction of the Pacific railroad was a huge project, the largest job of the age; its

70 Ibid. 71 Holden, Sacramento, 179. 72 Thompson and West, History of Sacramento County, California, 196.

27 effects on the American capital, commodity, and labor markets were felt from coast to coast (and beyond the coasts to Europe and Asia). But the significance of the railroad emerged only upon its completion.”73 As the railroad connected the United States, it helped to launch Sacramento on the global level as well. Sacramento connected to more places than ever before.

Despite constant disasters and diseases affecting Sacramento, the city continued to thrive and rebuild. Today, the city has had many nicknames, but ‘Indomitable City’ is the one that describes the city best. The city continues to thrive just as it did from its very beginning.

73 Brands, The Age of Gold, 362.

Chapter 3

DEVELOPING AN INTERPRETIVE PLAN

This chapter will concentrate on the development of my interpretive plan, the use of interpretation in tours, and the practical use of tours in Public History. This interpretive plan is intended as training material for tour guides. It focuses on specific historic resources for the tour, the interactive elements of the tour and how to engage the public while discussing the history of Sacramento. When developing the interpretive plan for the

Gold Fever! Game tour, I consulted current walking tour interpretive plans, various guide books, and looked at reviews of tours at other historic sites and museums. Tours of historic sites and museums connect the public to sites’ history and are popular interpretive tools to make history more accessible to all audiences. Effective tours use interpretive principles that engage the public with the historic site by making connections between their current life and the past. The intent of the Gold Fever! Game is to bridge the public’s perception of the Gold Rush with the reality of the Gold Rush. The traditional static walking tour instead becomes an immersive experience by giving tour patrons an active rather than a passive role during the tour. The visitor is able to take in their surroundings and imagine how their life would have been affected if they had lived in Sacramento in the 1850s. My interpretive plan is the instructional manual for new tour guides learning the Gold Fever! Game and serves as both a guide and historical reference for the guides to use to create an engaging, and immersive tour. The tour guide becomes the steward to the past and engages the visitor to make parallels between the past and

29 modern life. It is through effective, immersive interpretation that tour guides are able to help the visitor create these connections. Without an immersive experience, the public views the past as something that happened a long time ago that is not relevant to their history. Furthermore, a static tour only requires the tour patron to follow along behind the tour guide. An interactive tour challenges the tour patron to think about cause and effect of their character as they experience the highs and lows of the early Sacramento city.

Thus, the tour guest is personally invested in the tour and directs their own tour experiences.

The purpose of this chapter, is to discuss the creation of my interpretive plan as well as the practical use of museums and traditional walking tours at historic sites. The chapter is divided into three sections; the role of interpretation in developing an interpretive plan, the importance of tours at historic sites, and how I developed my interpretive plan.

Section One- Role of Interpretation in Developing an Interpretive Plan

This section will review scholarship on the development of interpretive plans, and the importance of interpretation at historic sites and tours. Each guide book I consulted helped influence different parts of my interpretive plan. The first book, Great Tours:

Thematic Tours and Guide Training for Historic Sites, discusses how to develop a cohesive interpretive plan, showing the different components of a successful tour and how each component builds on one another.74 The other two books, Interpreting Our

74 Barbara Abramoff Levy, Sandra Mackenzie Lloyd and Susan Porter Schreiber, Great Tours: Thematic Tours and Guide Training for Historic Site, (United Kingdom: AltaMira Press, 2001).

Heritage75 and The Good Guide: A Sourcebook for Interpreters, Docents, and Tour

Guide focus on interpretation, the use of interpretation on tours, and different techniques of interpretation.76

Great Tours, by Barbara Abramoff Levy, Sandra Mackenzie Lloyd, and Susan

Porter Schreiber is a workbook for developing a tour. While the other books focused on interpretation and the role of the interpreter, this book was more practical and helped me to start writing my interpretative plan for the Gold Fever! Game. The first step the workbook discussed was to “identify the most accurate and informative written materials that are available.”77 I did this by finding old tour scripts, the current interpretive plans, and the supplemental materials. Along with gathering materials, I met with staff to

“discuss the current state of the guided tour at the site and consider new possibilities.”78 I used this meeting to find what out what was expected to be included in the interpretive plan, what was currently missing, and issues that the tour had been having. Great Tours was useful for developing a storyline and tour themes of the tour. This section helped describe what the tour is about and the themes to reiterate the storyline. This helped to centralize the story being told on the tour. While Great Tours was meant for creating a new tour, it was helpful for redeveloping an interpretative plan for an existing tour.

75 Freeman Tilden, Interpreting our Heritage, 4th ed. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 76 Alison L. Grinder and E. Sue McCoy, The Good Guide: A Sourcebook for Interpreters, Docents and Tour Guide (Arizona: Ironwood Publishing, 1985). 77 Barbara Abramoff Levy, Sandra Mackenzie Lloyd and Susan Porter Schreiber, Great Tours, 7. 78 Ibid., 11.

Interpretation in a historical site is vital to connect visitors with their surroundings. Visitors bring unique experiences with them when they visit sites. With the help of a docent or guide, visitors use their unique point of view to connect to the past in an organic and personal way. Public programs, and walking tours in particular, use interpretation to guide visitors through a historic site and explain the importance of the past while also showing similarities with the present. So what is interpretation? The

National Association for Interpretation (NAI) defines interpretation and interpreters in the following manner:

Interpreters connect visitors to important natural, cultural, and historical resources at parks, nature centers, historical sites, aquariums, zoos, and anywhere that people come to learn about places. NAI defines interpretation as “a mission-based communication process that forges emotional and intellectual connections between the interests of the audience and the meanings inherent in the resource.79

Thus, the interpreter is the link between the public and the resource they are showing.

The interpreter is the one applying the interpretation to the resource and making it come to life for the audience. This definition of interpretation and of interpreters allows anyone at any site to become the guardians of interpretation and to make connections with the visitor or audience.

The role of interpreter in a museum is usually taken on by docents or tour guides.

There are differences between docents and tour guides. The easiest distinction is that docents are typically volunteers, while tour guides are paid staff. Docents and tour guides

79 National Association for Interpretation, “What is Interpretation?,” http://www.interpnet.com/NAI/interp/About/About_Interpretation/What_is_Interpretation_/nai/_About/wh at_is_interp.aspx?hkey=b5ddeff3-03a8-4000-bf73-433c37c8a7af (accessed September 1, 2019).

32 also interpret for different audiences. Docents usually lead school groups or guided tours within the museum that are scheduled ahead of time. These programs typically happen during the week. Tour guides usually lead tours for weekend audiences. There might be families or tourists visiting for the day that decide spontaneously to take a tour. Tour guides also lead tours that take place outside the museum, similar to the Gold Fever!

Game that was discussed in section one. Outside walking tours take the interpretation outside the museum and allow the visitor to engage directly with the sites being discussed. They are able to see the buildings, walk down the same streets, and are placed directly into the historical environment. While self-guided tours and smart-phone app- based tours are also popular, they do not create the same experience as a walking tour with a guide. For self-guided and app tours, there is no trained person in charge of the experience, and while it might be convenient to have the tour accessible on your own time or at your fingertips, the visitor cannot have the same immersive experience without a guide.

For guided, in person tours, this responsibility falls to the tour guide. Not only are tour guides leading the tour but they are also directing how the information is delivered, fielding questions, and expressing a heightened interest in the subject. In the short amount of time with the visitor, the tour guide is responsible for engaging them in the tour and with the historic site. By taking tours, visitors become immersed in the site in multiple ways. They are connected to the tour guide, but also are connected to the site by physically being there. A good tour allows visitors to see the site through the experience of people that were here before. They can understand the struggles and consequences that

33 people experienced and see similarities to their lives today. This makes history not just something in the past but an ever-changing story that we are all a part of.

Often hailed as the father of interpretation, Freeman Tilden, expanded upon the meaning and uses of interpretation by way of his six principles expressed in his book,

Interpreting Our Heritage.80 He defined interpretation as “an educational activity which aims to reveal meaning and relationship through the use of original objects, by firsthand experience, and by illustrative media, rather than simply to communicate factual information.” 81 Interpretation is using historic locations, their history, and associated objects to tell the story of that particular site. Interpretation is important to creating a connection to the site and creating a bridge to the past that helps the visitors to understand the history and create their own firsthand accounts. While the facts help to create the interpretation, interpretation is more than the fact it is conveying. It is the story behind the history and the experiences that helped create that history.

After visiting several national parks, Tilden wrote Interpreting Our Heritage in

1957, it is still regarded as the essential handbook for interpretation. His six principles remain the most influential guidelines in the field. His six principles are quoted below:

80 Freeman Tilden, Interpreting our Heritage. 81 Ibid., 34-35.

3. Interpretation is an art, which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical, or architectural. Any art in some degree is teachable. 4 The chief aim of interpretation is not instruction but provocation. 5. Interpretation should aim to present a whole rather than a part and must address itself to the whole man rather than any phase. 6. Interpretation addressed to children (say, up to the age of twelve) should not be a dilution of the presentations to adults but should follow a fundamentally different approach. To be at its best it will require a separate program.82

These principles are the guiding force behind interpretation at many historic sites and are the backbone behind this interpretive plan for the Gold Fever! Game. The Gold

Fever! Game aims to connect the visitor to the Gold Rush by experiencing it rather than just hearing it. The visitor is being engaged with the material on the tour rather than just hearing facts. By becoming a ‘character’ within the tour, the visitor is rooting for their character, worrying about the ‘bet yer britches’ chance cards dealt at each stop, and focused on the historic events in Sacramento and how it might impact their character.

This connects to Tilden’s first and fourth principles; “the visitor’s chief interest is in whatever touches his personality, his experiences, and his ideas.”83 The character and the hardships that they faced during the gold rush can inspire the visitor to learn more. The game component inspires the visitor to be more connected to these people from the past.

This can inspire the visitor to “widen his horizon of interest and knowledge.”84 The tour includes obscure people and events that visitors might not know, and it provides a larger

82 Freeman Tilden, Interpreting our Heritage, 34-35. 83 Ibid., 36. 84 Ibid., 59.

35 context for the development of Sacramento during the gold rush era. Visitors need to be interested in something to feel connected to the history they are learning. If the public does not make connections to the history, a tour is just an outside lecture with static fact.

The Gold Fever! Game is more than just the facts, it is an experience. The tour guide is the intermediary between the visitor and the history of the Gold Rush.

Interpretation inspires the visitor to learn more about history. Interpretation gives the visitor a chance to feel a connection to the past that without the tour, museum, or interpretative text, they would not have felt. By using the principles of interpretation as the backbone for the tours, the Gold Fever! Game offers a bridge to the past for the visitor.

Another important source for development of my interpretive plan was The Good

Guide: A Sourcebook for Interpreters, Docents, and Tour Guides, by Alison L Grinder and E. Sue McCoy.85 This is a manual for museum tours. While the book focuses on museum tours rather than walking tours, the information is still useful and relevant to walking tours. The central point of the book is the different learning styles of the public and how to appeal to these varied learning styles. The Good Guide defines the interpreter as “those who ‘translate’, ‘decode’, or explain and describe exhibits.”86 While simpler than Tilden’s definition, it still highlights that the most important role of an interpreter is to explain the history of the site to the visitor. For Grinder and McCoy, the interpreter’s

85 Alison L. Grinder and E. Sue McCoy, The Good Guide: A Sourcebook for Interpreters, Docents and Tour Guide (Arizona: Ironwood Publishing, 1985). 86 Ibid., 3.

36 role within the museum is critical. “Museums not only preserve our culture, but they must assume the responsibility for passing it on to new generations by becoming centers of learning in their own right. In this context, museum interpreters, as spokespersons for museums and historic sites, become critical sources of education information.”87

The interpreter, whether museum staff, a docent, or a tour guide, is an extension of the museum and the history interpreted there. The interpreter is able to provide deeper insight to the history than exhibit text is able to do. With museums seen as learning centers, the role of the interpreter becomes more important. The authors discussed the three types of learning styles: cognitive, affective and motion. Different types of people who visit museums have varying learning styles. Effective tour guides apply each style to their tours so that visitors stay engaged with the tour. Cognitive learning “deals with intellectual learning.”88 This style of learning “requires reasoning, interpretation, and synthesis.”89 For tour guides, the simple use of interpreting the facts can help the visitor to expand their understanding. Many people have preconceived notions of the gold rush, but the Gold Fever! Game tour provides new information about the Gold Rush,

Sacramento, and the people who were here. With new understanding, visitors can create new meaningful connections. Affective learning is defined as learning in which

“individuals center on the feeling and emotional level of learning.”90 Whether anger, fear, or happiness towards the subject, emotions are at the heart of affective learning. Affective

87 Alison L. Grinder and E. Sue McCoy, The Good Guide, 20. 88 Ibid., 24. 89 Ibid., 25. 90 Ibid., 25.

37 learning inspires the visitor to feel something towards the history or topic being discussed. Finally, motor learning focuses on the visitor doing something. The authors define this as “the first level of comprehension is simply that of figuring out what the necessary steps should be.”91 Along with providing new information and appealing to the cognitive learning style, the Gold Fever! Game also appeals to the affective and motor learning styles. The character fans and the cards can spark emotion because the visitor is acting as that character. They will be directly affected by the chance cards, and the visitor does not know the fate of their character until the end of the tour. The visitor not only is focused and emotionally attached to their character, but can also see how the events they learned about would have actually affected citizens in Sacramento during this time. The actual walking part of the tour is an active and physical way to learn the history. The visitor is walking along the same streets that citizens from the past walked down; they can touch and see the same buildings that these people would have seen during the Gold

Rush period. On the Gold Fever! Game, each tour stop also discusses a new time period and new events that affect the people on the tour. Through these styles of learning, the tour guide is able to appeal to all types of visitors. By combining all three styles of learning, tour guides are able to connect to and evoke understanding about the history that is being presented. The most important part of the tour is the experience for the visitor and how it connects them to the history. Interpretation plays a vital role for museums as well as historic sites. Museums have developed into more than just a site

91 Alison L. Grinder and E. Sue McCoy, The Good Guide, 25.

38 with objects on static display with brief identification cards, rather, they have become a site of learning and a bridge to the past. In the next section of this chapter, the role of interpretation in museums and on tours is expanded from a concept to a review of practical uses of tours and how tours can enhance the museum experience.

Section Two-Professional Review of the Use of Tours in Museums

This section is my professional review of the literature on walking tours and their practical application at museums and historic sites. Museums display objects and create exhibits to discuss parts of history related to a specific site, subject or event in history.

Many use tours to provide more context for an exhibit or to connect to a specific area of the city. By using tours, museums are able to engage directly with the public, expand their interpretation of the site in an attempt, to bring history alive. This section is a review of books and articles that discuss the importance of museums and the history they convey to the public, how museums and historic sites make history accessible to the public, and the use of tours to connect the public to the history of a site.

Museums are a trusted source of information and can be appealing to tourists and local residents alike. The first part of this section examines how museums engage with the public. Museums make history more accessible and relatable for the public. The public is able to visit museums, see exhibits, and take tours to learn about a specific place or aspect of history. The role of museums is to present history to the public. Museums serve the public, and strive to keep history relevant, finding a way to connect the past to the everyday. Along with providing information, museums and historic sites strive to find new ways to connect with their audience. Performance techniques are one method

39 museums employ to make history more dynamic and engaging. Tours and the use of first- person interpretations help to connect the public to the past and give visitors the option to experience a piece of history for themselves.

The Importance of Museums and Connection to the Past

In Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, the authors examine how the collective memory of the past is used in American life92. The authors surveyed Americans to learn about how they connect to the past and what the past means to them and their identity. According to their findings, museums are a trusted source for information about the past and “Americans put more trust in history museums and historic sites” than any other source.93 While

American’s trust museums for their information, the way many connect to the past is through personal and familial connections. People want to find meaning within history and make a personal connection that makes the past relevant. The “past that engages them most deeply is that of their family.”94 Through these personal connections, visitors are able to see history as more than just a past experience for people long ago but rather to see it as a personal history to which they are connected. They write that “visits to historic sites and museums sparked an associative process of recalling and reminiscing about the past that connected them to their own history.”95 When a visitor engages directly with a museum and the history it presents, they are able to make connections and

92 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 93 Ibid., 104. 94 Ibid., 22. 95 Ibid., 32.

40 realize that their personal history fits into the larger context of history and our own participation in history.

Museums provide a lens to the past through the use of objects, exhibits, and interpretation. By engaging with the objects, visitors can be taken “straight back to times when people had used the artifacts on display or occupied the place where ‘history’ had been made.”96 Museums make the objects and the history accessible to the public; the past is in a central location for visitors to see and examine for themselves. “Approaching artifacts and sites on their own term” the authors note, “and feel that they were experiencing a moment from the past almost as it had originally been experienced.”97

Visitors are able to see an object, a piece of the past, to make their own connections without outside influences. History is what connects communities to one another and provides background and context to a collective past. Museums are the stewards of this past, and provide a trustworthy locale for visitors to research and learn about the past.

Similar to the ideas discussed by Thelen and Rosenzweig, Museums in Motion looks critically at what a museum is and how museums provide history for the public.98

The authors note that museums have transformed into more than just a collecting facility, becoming places where the focus on “exhibition, education, or interpretation… and a commitment to community and social welfare have grown to be important aims for the

96 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past,105. 97 Ibid.,106. 98 Edward P. Alexander and Mary Alexander, Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums, (United Kingdom: AltaMira Press, 2008), 10.

41 museum.”99 Museums strive to serve the public and concentrate on making history available for the masses. By creating new exhibits and interpreting history, museums are trying to provide each visitor with an experience that connects with the past and a space to discuss ideas about the past. As museums have become a “center for learning”, museums gather a variety of objects and take on the “role as guardian or ‘keeper’” of the past.100 Objects are used to “convey the historical perspective and inspiration as well as a sense of what it was like to live in other ages.”101 The objects are the connection to the past, and the use of objects help to develop narrative museums seek to tell about the past.

Along with objects to tell about the past, museums use tours as a way to create connections with their visitors. Through guided and self-guided tours, visitors are able to engage with the museum or historic site. For visitors, tours offer an opportunity to explore and examine the history that interests them. Guided tours also provide a unique perspective that aids understanding of historical events or sites and enhances the museum experience. Having a human guide “add a valuable human dimension to the interpretation and can extend the length of a museum visit.”102 These types of tours provide an experience for the visitor that creates a deeper connection to the historic site. They provide more context and understanding about the site. The main objective of museums has always been to give visitors an opportunity to connect to the past. It is through these connections that museums are able to stay relevant and to keep history relevant as well.

99 Ibid., 10. 100 Edward P. Alexander and Mary Alexander, Museums in Motion, 11. 101 Ibid., 114. 102 Ibid., 262.

Engaging History is a collection of essays that discusses making history come to life by using performance art techniques. This anthology discusses the types of different elements such as historic based plays, or historical reenactments, to find a new way to engage with the public. The book contains insights into alternate ways museums and historic sites connect with the public. Applying performance art techniques to different areas of museums, such as tours, the goal is that direct or personal connections to the information relayed makes the visitor an involved participant in the performance. By using these methods, museums need to find “a respectful approach to past lives with accessibility and authenticity (not to mention entertainment) for present day audience.”103

The balance of accessibility and authenticity with entertainment for a modern audience is a balance that museums struggle with. Museums already provide accessibility to the history and the past, but by providing entertainment along with history the museum becomes more accessible to the public. While the “space between performance and the past” can be blurred, the ability to create this engaging history experience can capture a broader audience.104 The use of performance history provides a deeper connection to the topic; they feel a part of the history. “A performance invites the spectator inside the experience” notes Catherine Hughes.105 By becoming part of the performance, the visitor or spectator has become active in the story, rather than being a passive bystander.

103 Scott Magelssen,”Introduction” in Engaging History, ed. Scott Magelssen and Rhona Justice- Malloy (Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2011), 4 104 Ibid., 9. 105 Catherine Hughes, “Is That Real?: An Exploration of What Is Real in Performance Based on History,” in Engaging History, ed. Scott Magelssen and Rhona Justice-Malloy (Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2011), 134.

Similar to the use of a guided tour, performances within an exhibit or performances based on historic events can transport the visitor to that time period and make them feel a part of the history being performed. In this way “the spectators’’ imaginations can transport them to another reality.”106 By being a spectator to a history performance, the visitor can see the history through a first-person point of view. The use of performance in a history space provides a new take on telling the story of history. It expands the reach of a museum’s audience and provides an active history narrative.

The creation of self-guided tours with a phone application has become popular in sites where a tour guide is not always accessible. Megan Cottrell discusses the uses of a history application (app) developed by the North Carolina State University (NCSU)

Libraries and the impact it has for a college community. The author notes, “The app grew out of a popular walking tour that the schools’ African American Cultural Center gives a few times a year.”107 The app allows the user to explore the campus and find buildings and locations important to the history of African Americans at the NCSU campus. The app also allows the tour to be offered year around. Visitors can experience the history of the campus on their own terms, choosing the time and day is good for them. Students that might not otherwise take a tour due to time or location constraints can learn the history of the area. The app brings the history directly to the user, based on where they are located on campus. Cottrell emphaticizes that “the app gives people access to materials and

106 Catherine Hughes, “Is That Real?” in Engaging History, 146. 107 Megan Cottrell, “University’s App Provides a Walking Tour of Black History,” American Libraries Vol 44, No. ½ (January/ February 2013): 20.

44 information they wouldn’t normally see.”108 While the use of an app and self-guided tour is different from a traditional guided tour, the ability to bring the information directly to the visitor on the tour or the user of the app remains the same.

In Mary Jo Lynch’s article, “A New Approach to the Guided Tour”, Lynch discusses redesigning a tour to better support and provide information. Although not historical in nature, her work examines the use of a guided tour for new students to introduce them to the library. The existing tour was unsuccessful and offered little help to incoming students. These factors caused a new type of tour to be developed. Rather than a guided tour, the tour was transformed into a self-guided tour with specific tasks to complete during the student’s time in the library. For the students, “they preferred doing something to listening to someone.”109 Guided tours can be difficult if the information is not relevant to the audience, as examined in the work by Lynch with college students.

The ability to relate to tours and the subject matter regardless of whether it is a history topic or how to use the library, is what creates a connection between the person and the subject being discussed. One example Lynch discusses is a summer session which had weekly visits by a librarian with lessons about the library. Following these visits and lessons there was a self-guided tour with questions to answer afterwards. 110 By changing the tour from guided to self-guided, students were able to explore on their own and found

“it was an experience”.111 By allowing students to be in charge of their own tour, and by

108 Megan Cottrell, “University’s App Provides a Walking Tour of Black History,”20. 109 Mary Jo Lynch, “A New Approach to the Guided Tour,” RQ, Vol 11 No. 1 (Fall 1971):47. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid.

45 providing information useful to them, rather than general information, students were able to gain useful knowledge. A tours’ success is dependent on the accessibility to provide information and for the visitor to find relevance in the information they are receiving.

“Neighborhood Adventure: Researching Self-Guided Walking Tours” by Cynthia

J. Little looks at the usefulness of creating a neighborhood walking tour highlighting the ethnic and immigration history in the city of Philadelphia. Little discusses how the

Historical Society of Pennsylvania has students research and develop neighborhood walking tours. Students must research different areas of the city to examine immigration and the establishment of ethnic neighborhoods. Little states “exploring ethnic neighborhoods and discovering the complexity of its past clarifies the relationship between local, regional, national, and global history.”112 While this article primarily examines self-guided tours, it brings up important points about how the tours can keep their audience engaged with the tour and the site. To keep the interest of the visitor “there must be a variety of places to see.”113 Finding different institutions, like churches or main streets, not only provided visual interest in the tour but provided context for the history being discussed. Little notes that students learn “patterns of immigrations and migration to their city, when and where groups located upon arrival, and where these communities flourish today.”114 By understanding these patterns and locating important institutions, like churches or main streets, a tour can become informative and engaging

112 Cynthia Little, “Neighborhood Adventures: Researching Self-Guided Walking Tours,” OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Summer, 1989):21. 113 Ibid.,22. 114 Ibid.

46 for the people taking the tour. For self-guided tour, these points of interest are instrumental in creating a successful tour. The tour needs to provide enough history and context to understand the importance of the site or, in the case of Little’s article, a select neighborhood. For guided tours, a tour guide provides a narrative about the history of a site, but the ability to physically see the building or site being discussed is still just as critical on a self-guided tour. Little notes that a tour “provides an excellent means for teaching history, historical research, and writing skills” for students to understand their city.115 It also provides a relevant tour for local citizens. Walking tours make the history accessible and can transform a normal neighborhood into a lively active community through the stories and context presented.

Harriet Davis-Kram also examines use of tours as a different form of teaching social history. In her article, “Nontraditional Teaching: Social History in the Streets”

Davis-Kram looks at walking tours as an important tool to teach architectural history.

Architectural history can spark the discussion of larger urban topics such as “blight, overcrowding, and tension which often lead to violent outbreak.”116 Rather than focusing on change over time in a place, the architectural history furthers the discussion of topics that might have affected working class people, or the class struggle between different groups and the location within the city. As Davis-Kram states, students begin to appreciate and understand “the need for urban parks, and development of leisure activity

115 Cynthia Little, “Neighborhood Adventures”, 21. 116 Harriet Davis-Kram, “Nontraditional Teaching: Social History in the Streets,” OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Fall, 1990):11.

47 space…after they’ve walked through crowed, dirty streets.” 117 By taking the lesson out of the classroom and moving it to the urban location, students can experience the location and understand the history from a personal perspective. Walking tours allow the visitor to

“recreate historical events by… walking through areas of historical significance.”118

Walking tours allow visitors to experience an urban space and understand how the changes in the urban environment can reflect a more specific topic of history that effected that city.

William Holton takes a similar approach in his article “Walking Tours for

Teaching Urban History in Boston and Other Cities”. Holton finds that walking tours can be “very effective in supplementing classroom teaching about urban history.”119 Walking tours not only allow students to experience the urban environment but adds another layer of learning since they are able to personally experience the space. By taking students directly into an urban setting, tours “bring vitality and realities of the urban environment to life and replace common misconceptions and fears of cities with a more realistic viewpoint.”120 By putting students directly into the urban environment, they can see how different topics like social ecology, invasion and succession, and gentrification that they learn in class actually affect cities and neighborhoods.121 Holton uses different parts of

Boston such as the North End and Beacon Hill as examples of neighborhoods that have

117 Harriet Davis-Kram, “Nontraditional Teaching “,12. 118 Ibid., 11. 119 William Holton, “Walking Tours for Teaching Urban History in Boston and Other Cities,” OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Fall, 1990):14. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid., 15.

48 been effected by these topics. Holton also suggests using the tour “as an integral part of the curriculum by highlighting central concepts and themes” and has students “complete assignments based on their experience.”122 By making the tour part of the curriculum and having students’ complete assignments related to the tour, students are able to see the value of the tour and can record their personal experience with the area. By making personal connections to the history and the tour, the tour becomes a relevant teaching instrument rather than just an average field trip. Both Cynthia J. Little and Harriet Davis-

Kram’s articles look at using walking tours to highlight the urban history of a city and how neighborhoods are shaped through economic issues, immigration, or overcrowding.

Holton agrees that walking tours can be used to understand these patterns in the city and neighborhood development; “because residential neighborhoods are usually differentiated by class, ethnicity, and racial groups, walking tours can help students to understand how and why group segregation or group integration occur.”123 By seeing and understanding the patterns, students can understand urban development and change over time. Walking tours allow the visitor to see and understand the development of their city in a way that a lecture cannot. They are able to see the location, see the community, and make a connection to that site in the same way that the previous generation did.

Walking tours have received criticism as boring and static, little more than a lecture that takes place outside. But walking tours do serve a purpose and can be

122 William Holton, “Walking Tours for Teaching Urban History in Boston and Other Cities,”14. 123 Ibid., 15.

49 redesigned to be more engaging. In Jennifer Dickey’s review of Historic Milwaukee,

Inc’s “Downtown thru the Eras” tour, she discusses the walking tour and its shortcomings. She described “feeling disappointed” after the end of the tour and “felt that a narrative that tied the buildings and landscape to the broader history of the city would have made the tour more meaningful.”124 However, she still found the tour a “worthwhile experience” as it made her “want to learn more about Milwaukee and helped [her] find

[her] way” when she explored the city on her own.125 While tours relay facts, they must also do more by inspiring visitors to learn more about the city or the topic of the tour.

Ron Thomson’s “A Different Path for Historic Tours”, advocates that tours do more than just relay facts. Thomson states that “the primary motivation for the typical historic district tour seems to revolve around the transfer of information.”126 However, he provides eleven principles for guides to use to make the tour more engaging. The principles include making links to modern day, using descriptive language, and including context to the facts that are presented. Thomson points out that these techniques “provide an enhanced experience that can be enjoyed by an expanded audience” and “build new support for preservation, based on deeper understanding and appreciation of historic structures.”127 Tours based on these principles appeal to a broader audience and can help find new support for preservation and history. While tours can be static and stale, they do not have to be. Walking tours can be engaging, thought provoking, and informative.

124 Jennifer Dickey, “Review,” The Public Historian, Vol 34, No. 4(Fall 2012): 76-77. 125 Ibid., 77. 126 Ron Thomson, “A Different Path for Historic Walking Tours,” History News, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Summer 1996): 1. 127 Ibid., 5.

Walking tours take the visitors directly to the site of history, create a narrative that brings the history to life, and provide different experiences for visitors.

The main objective of a walking tour is to place the visitor directly in the environment being discussed and to have them make relevant connections between the history of the site and their own experiences. While tours can struggle to be engaging and interactive, walking tours can make history accessible and relevant to the public.

Museums are a place to learn about history and are a trusted resource for research, but a walking tour helps enhance that history by putting the visitor into the history that is being discussed. Walking tours bring the history and information to the actual site and can become more than just a retelling of facts, but actually create a story of the past and how it is still relevant today.

Section Three- Developing the Interpretive Plan

To explain how my interpretive plan was developed, this section will examine the history of various tours at the Sacramento History Museum as well as the current tours at the Museum. It will explore the current tours and interpretive plans at the Sacramento

History Museum, discuss elements that are missing, and explain the creation of my interpretive plan to address these missing elements.

I was first given the task to help develop an interpretive plan for the above-ground tour at the Sacramento History Museum when the Museum Director, and Tour Manager, determined that the existing plan was insufficient. This museum has two major tours: the

Underground Tour and the above-ground tour. The Underground Tour is the more popular of the two. The above-ground tour, which was eventually renamed the Gold

Fever! Game in 2017, is a tour that takes place in the Old Sacramento Historic District, a twenty-eight acre district comprised of State Parks and public grounds. The Underground

Tour, which takes place beneath the buildings in Old Sacramento, discusses how the city was raised in the 1800s to deal with flooding. At that time, the above- ground tour was in the middle of a major overhaul to create a more dynamic and interactive tour. The original version of the tour was called the Gold Rush Experience Tour. The tour was an hour- long tour where the guide led visitors around Historic Old Sacramento. During the tour, the guide adopts the persona of someone from the past who lived in Sacramento during the Gold Rush; and they discussed what life was like for them during the early days of Sacramento. Typically, the tour focused on the various buildings in Old

Sacramento and the development and growth of the city. The tour guides also discussed the various architectural styles of the building. While this tour delivered information about the city life during the early days, it was an hour-long tour with little to no participation from the visitor. Another aspect of the tour that was difficult is the noise of the modern day world. These distractions can make it difficult for visitors to be fully

‘transported’ back in time to the Gold Rush especially when there is no interactive element to the tour. For visitors, the lack of hands-on or interactive component prevents them from being engaged with the tour. With the exception of asking questions, tour patrons were merely along for the tour rather than being an active participant.

Members of the tour department at the Sacramento History Museum worked hard to redesign the above-ground tour and create a game component. This step preceded my involvement. In developing this game component, they came up with a fun, interactive

52 component to get visitors engaged. First, the visitor is given a fan with a hand-drawn image of a person from the Gold Rush period. On the back of the fan is a brief biography of this person, including who they are, how they arrived in Sacramento, whether they were a pioneer, dreamer or merchant. During the tour, the visitor adopts this persona. The visitor is also given a bag of fake ‘gold’ which is their currency for the tour. Finally, the tour guide holds onto chance cards known as ‘bet yer britches cards’. There are three cards for each tour stop location. Each card introduces a different topic or event that happened in Sacramento and how these events affected each character (pioneer, merchant, or dreamer). Similar to such cards in a board games, the chance cards determine the fate of the characters on the tour. The inclusion of the fan, gold, and the chance cards make the tour much more interactive. They encourage the visitor to interact with both the tour guide and other visitors on the tour. Visitors become invested in their character, and their fate on the tour. Thus, the tour patron becomes an active tour participant and plays an active role in their own tour. This also means that every tour is unique as you have different characters on each tour, and the chance cards are different at each tour stop. This brings longevity to the tour and hopefully will create a desire among locals to come back to take the tour again.

Typically, guides learn the Underground Tour before the above-ground tour. The

Underground Tour is a well-established tour, with ten years of successful operation. After developing their own tour persona for the tour and leading several Underground Tours, guides may also choose to learn the Gold Fever! Game. While this order seems slightly backwards, since the Gold Fever! Game represents an earlier time period than the

Underground Tour, the Underground Tour is the more established tour, with more tour opportunities. The Underground Tour is a slightly simpler tour that does not have as many components as the new Gold Fever! Game with the fans, gold, and ‘bet yer britches’ chance cards. The Underground Tour centers on the underground spaces and the process of lifting buildings in Old Sacramento, undertaken to prevent flooding. Models are used to demonstrate how the buildings were raised, while maps show how the river was moved. In addition, it has fewer distractions along the tour route since the tour goes inside buildings which blocks out the noise and modern distractions. Thus, it makes more sense for tour guides to learn Underground tour and gain experience leading tours before they move onto the more involved Gold Fever! Game tour.

Development of the New Interpretive Plan

The first step in developing the interpretive plan was to look over the current interpretive plans and older tours that were once offered at the Sacramento History

Museum. I found a few early versions of walking tours that discussed the history of Old

Sacramento which had not been used in many years. There were also interpretive plans for the current tours offered at the Sacramento History Museum. The earlier tours included one developed by the Junior League of Sacramento, an architectural tour, and a carriage tour for drivers of the horse-drawn vehicles. They were informational, but had practical problems. The tour developed by the Junior League of Sacramento, for example, was a two-to-three hour tour which went throughout the entire twenty-eight acre Old

Sacramento Historic District. For a walking tour, a two to three hour tour is much too long, especially in Old Sacramento where the summers can be extremely hot and there

54 are few trees for shade or places to sit. The architectural tour contained important information about the various buildings and discussed the reconstruction and redevelopment of Sacramento. While this tour appealed to history and architecture buffs, the common public did not find the tour particularly interesting. The carriage tour for horse-drawn vehicles contained information about the city, its development at the waterfront, and the history and importance of various buildings in Old Sacramento.

However, the problem with this tour was that it required a separate tour guide to ride in the carriage along with the visitors which proved impractical. The carriages in Old

Sacramento are available daily, but visitors sign up for a short carriage ride of the city, typically fifteen minutes to a half hour. The carriage tour took about an hour, so it required special times when the carriages and tour guide were available. Also, the horses cannot be out in weather over 100 degrees and during the summer months when there is an influx of visitors, there are many days over 100 degrees. While each of these early tours were full of useful information, the tours did not appeal to everyday visitors, tourists, or current residents of Sacramento. The common feature of all these tours was that the tour patron was not an active participant but rather along for the static tour.

Current Tours at the Sacramento History Museum

The current tours offered at the Sacramento History Museum are the Underground

Tour, the Underground Afterhours, and the Gold Fever! Game. For these tours there are two different interpretive plans; one that covers the Underground and Underground

Afterhours tours, and one for the Gold Fever! Game. The purpose of my interpretive plan is to train the guides leading the Gold Fever! Game. Currently, for the Gold Fever! Game

55 the tour guides must rely on the old interpretive plan developed for the old Gold Rush

Experience tour as well as the new supplemental documents for the fans, chance cards, and current route map. This causes the tour’s training materials to be disconnected from the tour, since the interpretive plan was intended for an entirely different tour. It was evident that an interpretive plan specifically for the new Gold Fever! Game was needed.

While the Gold Rush Experience interpretative plan is comprised of a background history of Sacramento, important people to the development of Sacramento, and material borrowed from a Living History training manual, there is nothing connecting the information in the plan to the new version of the tour. The Gold Rush Experience interpretive plan is a good starting point for background information, but is good for little else. My next step in creating the interpretive plan was to determine exactly what a prospective guide would need to understand about the tour and guiding the Gold Fever!

Game. To do this, I participated in several Gold Fever! Game tours as a visitor, looked over the supplemental materials, read the Gold Rush Experience interpretive plan, and met with the Education and Tour Managers to discuss the tours.

Interactive Elements of the Tour

The first element of the game tour are the fans. The fans are simple cardstock on a stick that the visitors will be holding during the tour. The tour group size is limited to twenty participants. The fans consist of twenty main characters with four extra characters allowing for sudden add-ons, or if one of the twenty main fans is damaged. Each fan character is an actual person from the Gold Rush Era. The fans have an idealized image of that person on the front. On the back there is information about that person’s journey

56 to Sacramento, what they did when they were here, and the archetype the character belongs to: dreamer, pioneer, or merchant. Each character is placed into one of these archetypes to represent the types of people who were in Sacramento for the Gold Rush.

The pioneers were the early people in Sacramento who came before the gold discovery, the merchants were the businessmen and women who established Sacramento as more than just a boomtown, and the dreamers are the ones who came to Sacramento because of the opportunity the Gold Rush offered. In addition to the archetypes, there are four characters referred to as the ‘core four’ which are meant to be on every tour. Each of the

‘core four’ represent one of the archetypes. The guide needs to know each fan that can be used on the tour, which archetype category each fan falls under, and which fans to hand out to the public if the tour is not full.

The other interactive element is the ‘bet yer britches’ chance cards. The chance cards serve as a way for specific topics to be discussed on the tour. There are three cards for each stop on the tour and they are labeled with the name of the building at each tour stop. There is a main topic at the top of the card then three consequences that happened because of that topic. For example, at the Eagle Theatre the card reads: What?! The city floods in its first month? Oh well, it probably won’t happen again!

The consequences are listed below as bullet points:

 Merchants- Pay Hardin Bigelow for saving your hides!  Dreamers- Pay merchants for the supplies as you head to high ground.  Pioneers- cool your parched throats: Margret Frink has fresh milk.

Generally, the consequences are that one tour participant must forfeit some of their gold, while another receives the gold. From the example card above, the merchants need to pay Hardin Bigelow, the first mayor of Sacramento who helped build the first levees; the dreamers have to pay the merchants for supplies because of the floods. This is just one of the cards for this stop, but all cards are related to 1850 and the first year of

Sacramento’s existence. The ‘bet yer birches’ cards help keep the tour fresh since a different card is picked each time and the outcome of the consequences are determined by the fans/characters represented on the tour.

After examining the supplemental materials and taking several tours, I met with both the Education Manager and the Tour Manager to discuss which parts were working, which parts were currently missing from the interpretive plan, and what should be added to the new interpretive plan. We looked over both the Underground and the Gold Rush

Experience interpretive plans. The two were very similar with the Museum’s required materials for tour guides, such as the job description and the emergency procedures, at the front of the plan, followed by the description of the tour and the routes to follow.

Also, both interpretive plans feature a historical synopsis of early Sacramento. While many of these elements are important and vital to the tour, there were still some items missing. One piece is the history of Sacramento during the Gold Rush period. The Gold

Rush Experience tour’s interpretive plan has a general overview history of Sacramento and while it centers on the Gold Rush it does not cover all the topics that are discussed on the Gold Fever! Game. Also, since the Gold Rush Experience Tour focuses on different

58 buildings from the Gold Fever! Game, the buildings that are stops on the Gold Fever!

Game do not have the necessary background history that is important for the tour guide to know. In addition to these missing pieces, the main missing element was the connection between the old Gold Rush Experience interpretive plan and the new supplemental materials developed for the Gold Fever! Game. The old interpretative manual does not include information about the fans, or the ‘bet yer britches’ chance cards, and how they are used in the tour. While the supplemental material packet includes a one-sheet explanation of the fans, cards, and tour route, there is not an in-depth explanation and sample tour to use as reference. Along with the missing components from the interpretive plan, there are some practical issues that needed to be addressed in the new interpretive plan. These issues became apparent shortly after the Gold Fever! Game started. An example of this is figuring out which fans to use if there are less than four people on the tour. The Gold Fever! Game has become more popular since it was first developed but there are times when the tour does not have all twenty visitors; and in some cases, the tour has less than four people on a tour. This causes some difficulty when the fans and chance cards depend on all fans being in play during the tour. Therefore, an alternative scenario needed to be available for when there are fewer tour guests.

Another practical part of the tour that some guides have trouble with are combining their tour persona’s narrative of these events with the historical narrative of the tour. On the Underground Tour, the guides portray someone from that time period and discuss how their character dealt with the building being raised during the 1860s-

1870s. For the Gold Fever! Game, the game component constantly changes the narrative,

59 which can be hard to master for new guides. The guides need help in creating a narrative that can be flexible in reaction to the game. The supplemental materials are vital for the new tour and have transformed a normal tour of Old Town into an interactive tour for the visitor. However, the old interpretive plan and the packet of supplemental material was ineffective for the tour guides. With the missing elements of the interpretive plan identified, as well as feedback regarding the practical issues from current guides, the need for a new interpretive plan was confirmed.

The Creation of the New Interpretive Plan

The new interpretive plan focuses on the elements that are currently missing from the outdated Gold Rush Experience tour interpretive plan. It expands on the elements in the supplemental materials, creating one cohesive interpretive plan that tour guides can implement to lead the Gold Fever! Game while also creating a general narrative about the

Gold Rush. The new interpretive plan contains an overall history of Sacramento during the Gold Rush, highlighting important topics for the tour, instructions for how the fans are used, how to use the ‘bet yer britches’ cards, a sample tour for a group of twenty, and what to do if there are fewer guests.

It is important for new tour guides to understand the tour entirely including the rules and game logistics. In this section I explain how to use the fans and the ‘bet yer britches’ chance cards. My first step was creating a chart that organizes the hand-fan characters into the three archetypes: merchant, pioneer, and dreamer. I also added another section that included the ‘core four’ and the archetypes they represent. The chart allows guides to quickly and easily see the names of the characters and which archetype they

60 belong to. This is useful when first learning the tour so guides do not need to flip through each fan in the supplemental materials. This also solves the problem of small groups. The

‘bet yer britches’ can also cause some difficulty for tour guides when they learn the tour.

First, I created an informational sheet for every tour stop which shows which ‘bet yer britches’ card corresponds to that tour stop. This lets the guide easily see each card for each tour location.

The sample tour has all twenty character fans being used. The sample tour shows the tour guide how a full tour actually works. Also, in this section, there is a brief history of each tour stop and why the building is important to the tour as well as the main talking points for each locale. With fewer people on the tour, some ‘bet yer britches’ chance cards are harder to use since only a few characters are on the tour. For this, there are suggestions about how to adjust the consequences of the chance cards. This part explains which fans to use if there is one, two, three, or four people on the tour. This is a practical problem that has occurred on the tour. Since the game component is the main point of the tour, it is important to have the correct fans on the tour and to know how to adjust the ‘bet yer britches’ chance cards.

My interpretive plan includes additional sections of information useful to the tour guide. I address how to develop a character and how to put a historical attire outfit together. While many tour guides already have a tour persona on the Underground Tour, for the Gold Fever! Game they are representing a different time period, so they need to develop an additional character. The section about historic attire includes practical advice on where to purchase various items that might not be in the Sacramento History

Museum’s costume closet. Along with information about developing a character persona and costumes, there is also a section that discusses the themes and goals of the tour.

Lastly, I conclude with a section about interpretation and the tour guides’ role as the interpreter. For these sections of the interpretive plan, I consulted several guide books, including Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage.128

With these topics and themes, I was able to develop a complete and concise document which explains the tour and the use of the game elements, which the previous document lacked. This helps in training the tour guides and provides a unique tour experience for the tour visitor. The interpretive plan is also meant to be a living document that can be updated and adjusted with the tour. Through the interpretive plan, tours are able to create a personal experience with history that a visitor might otherwise not have.

In conclusion, museums serve the public by providing a connection to the past and the present day. Through the use of tours and performances, museums look for new techniques that can inspire the everyday visitor to make the connection to the past and find personal meaning. The creation of a complete and concise interpretive plan, helps to instruct and train tour guides. The ability for museums to create tours and find new innovative ways to interact with the public, helps to make them more relevant and accessible. While there is criticism of walking tours, the more the tours evolve and the people who create the tours continue to be innovative, walking tours provide history to visitors that might not otherwise visit a museum. Megan Cottrell quotes librarian Genya

128 Freeman Tilden, Interpreting our Heritage.

O’ Gara, in her article about a walking tour on a phone based app, “people who use the app probably wouldn’t have come into the archives and requested boxes of materials… the app puts [information] in a space where thy already are”129. Tours bring the history directly to people. Tours are a more accessible and a less intimidating way to learn about the past. As Cynthia Little notes in her article about student walking tours of ethnic neighborhoods, that these types of tours “links a major part of American History to the present and to the lives of real people in ways that textbooks and lectures can never do”.130 Tours provide a first-hand connection to the history and participants find

“elements of history that resonate with their own [experiences]”131. History that is provided to visitors in ways other than static information cards, allow visitors to find similarities between their lives and the past. Visitors want to find a connection, and want to have a reaction to the information that they are learning. Tours make history relevant and provide the visitor a chance to have personal insights with the past. The general purpose of the museum is to provide the history to the public, and tours are able to take this one step further by bringing the history outside the museum and directly to the public. By finding new ways to make history accessible through interactive tours, museums stay relevant and can reach new audiences in an ever changing world.

129 Cottrell, “University’s App Provides a Walking Tour of Black History”, 20. 130 Little, “Neighborhood Adventure: Researching Self-Guided Walking tours”, 25. 131 Hughes. “Is that Real?, 147.

Chapter 4

CONCLUSION

Tours make history accessible by bringing the history directly to the location or site being discussed. The Gold Fever! Game provides a unique interactive tour and experience for visitors to Old Sacramento. Through an interactive game component, the tour transports the tour patrons back in time in order to attempt to understand the trials and tribulations that residents endured during the early days of Sacramento. By relaying the history of Sacramento and the early development of the city, the tour provides the ability for a visitor to experience the city in a manner similar to early residents. The unique qualities of the tour make it important to have a clear and concise document to provide explanation and be a resource for the tour guides.

The interpretive plan for the Gold Fever! Game plays a vital role in providing a brief historical synopsis of the Gold Rush in Sacramento and examines the experiences of twenty people who lived here during the Gold Rush amid the destruction and the development of Sacramento City. The goal of my interpretive plan is to create a cohesive document for tour guides. The interpretative plan is meant to be a training document for the tour guides so they can understand the tour, the game component, and be an effective interpreter. Once tour guides have read the interpretive plan they should be able to create a vibrant and unique interactive tour. Tour guides should understand the goals and themes of the tour, know how to use the character hand-fans and the ‘bet yer britches’ cards, and be able to adjust the tour if there are fewer tour patrons. Lastly, tour guides will have

64 enough knowledge of their own interests in the time period to be able to delve into research to develop their tour guide character. The strength of the Gold Fever! Game

Tour is the inherent diversity amongst the tour guides who portray a wide range of Gold

Rush era personalities.

In the appendix of this thesis is the completed interpretive plan. The plan starts with an acknowledgment page, job description, and tour logistics. These are resources for the tour guides to comprehend the expectation of the job as well as the day-to-day activities while on their shift. The following section provides an overview history from the start of Sacramento to the 1860s when Sacramento is the established Capital of

California and a transportation hub with the railroad. Next is the introduction to the Gold

Fever! Game and the interactive components for the tour. This introduction to the tour includes information regarding the interactive elements, a sample tour, and how to make adjustment if there are fewer than four people on the tour. Finally, the interpretive plan concludes with information about character development, effective interpretation techniques, creating historical attire for your character, and starting points for future research.

When the Gold Fever! Game was developed, it consisted of an old interpretive plan for a different tour and the new supplemental materials. The lack of a complete interpretive plan specifically for the Gold Fever! Game made it difficult for tour guides to fully understand the tour and the interactive elements. The Gold Fever! Game provides a unique look at the gold rush, and allows the visitors to be transported back in time. The uniqueness of the tour and the different interactive elements required a specific

65 interpretive plan. By creating an interpretive plan exclusively for the Gold Fever! Game,

I was able to create a complete document that explains the tour, and how to use the interactive elements.

Thus, the creation of the interpretive plan for the Gold Fever! Game plays an important role in creating an effective tour program. First, the interpretive plan will be used to train tour guides. Next, it will be able to tell a different story of the gold rush.

Visitors become part of the tour, and through this first-hand experience, visitors are able to learn about what it was like to live in Sacramento for the average citizen during this time period. It is through these experiences that the visitor understands and appreciates the trials and tribulations that the city’s early residents faced and survived to become the indomitable city.

APPENDIX

PROJECT

GOLD FEVER! GAME INTERPRETIVE PLAN

Table of Contents

Executive Summary ...... 69 Interpretive Planning Team ...... 71 Interpretive Guide Acknowledgement Form ...... 72 Tour Guide Job Description – 2020 ...... 73 Tour Logistics ...... 74 Roles of Staff ...... 75 Themes of the Gold Fever! Game ...... 79 Goals of the Gold Fever! Game ...... 80 Purpose of the Interpretive Plan ...... 81 Introduction to the Gold Fever! Game ...... 82 Interactive Elements ...... 83 ‘Bet Yer Britches’ Cards Information Sheet ...... 88 Sample Tour- With all Twenty Characters ...... 100 Who to select if there are four or fewer people on the tour ...... 110 Effective Interpretive Principles for Tour Guides ...... 113 How to develop a character ...... 116 Historic Attire Basics ...... 118 Bibliography ...... 122

Executive Summary

The intended audience for this Interpretive Plan is the tour guides of the

Sacramento History Alliance in Historic Old Sacramento. With this interpretive plan as the backbone of their narrative, guides will lead distinctive, engaging, and entertaining tours of the historic district. It is not a script to be followed or memorized. Rather, the goal is for guides to research and create their own unique tours. Therefore, the purpose of this document is to provide context for the tour guide; a comprehensive explanation of the interactive game, and additional resources for guides to develop their own tour narrative as well as a historical character to adopt as their tour persona. In addition to an introduction to the Gold Fever! Game, the Interpretive Plan focuses on the tour-game component of the tour which sets it apart from other local historical walking tours. Also included are the goals of the tour, interpretive themes, the intended audience for the tour, a map of the tour route, the ‘bet yer britches’ chance cards dealt during the tour, and hand-fans for the tour guests.

The Interpretative Plan provides the tour guides with a brief background history of Sacramento including native communities prior to settlers in the 1840s, the establishment of Sutter’s Fort, the rush for gold, and the establishment of Sacramento

City. It provides a lens of unique events and people who influenced Sacramento’s burgeoning development.

Lastly, the Interpretive Plan will also provide tools for developing their fictional or historical characters that the tour guide adopts as their tour personas, creating and finding historical attire, and how to further their own research. These components play a

70 critical role in the overall development of the tour guides’ unique tour and the tour guides’ ability to continually change and update their tour.

This Interpretive Plan is a living document. It can be added to and modified with new information or components of the interactive game, such as new cards or character hand-fans. It is by no means a complete document. With new information and continuing research, it can be expanded and modified to address alternate versions and new components for future tours.

Interpretive Planning Team

Zoey Jennings Education Coordinator, Sacramento History Museum 101 I Street, Sacramento, CA 95821 916.808.6896 [email protected]

Shawn Turner Tour Manager, Sacramento History Museum 101 I Street, Sacramento, CA 95821 916.808.7059 [email protected]

Susan Voskuil-Starcevich Education Manager, Sacramento History Museum 101 I Street, Sacramento, CA 95821 916.808.4890 [email protected]

Marcia Eymann City Historian, City of Sacramento and Center for Sacramento History 551 Sequoia Pacific Blvd, Sacramento, CA 95811 916.808.7072 [email protected]

Delta Pick-Mello Executive Director, Sacramento History Museum and Sacramento History Alliance 101 I Street, Sacramento, CA 95821 916.808.7108 [email protected]

Interpretive Guide Acknowledgement Form

The Gold Fever! Game Interpretive Plan was designed to help you understand the policies and procedures of the Gold Fever! Game Program (GF!). We want you to enjoy a rewarding experience with the program, the museum and your fellow employees. Please feel free to contact the Tour Manager with any questions, comments. or concerns.

The material in this plan reflects the policies and practices in effect at the time it was published. It replaces and supersedes all previous interpretive plans and handbooks. You are expected to know and follow these policies and procedures. Please acknowledge your receipt of this plan before presenting your first GF! Game, by detaching this page and returning it, signed, to the Tour Manager. I ______(print your name) have received, read, and understand the Gold Fever! Game Interpretive Plan. I understand that my continued employment is contingent upon my adhering to the policies and procedures contained in the plan. If I need clarification of these policies, I will contact the Tour Manager with my questions and comments. I also understand that the Sacramento History Alliance (SHA), and I reserve the right to terminate my employment at any time and for any reason unless specifically modified by the written agreement with SHA. SHA specifically retains the right to depart from and/or modify these policies by written notice to its employees.

______Signature

______Date

Tour Guide Job Description – 2020

Tour Logistics

The Sacramento History Museum will provide  Training for the tour  Costume  Sound equipment for the tour  Guidance for creating your unique tour script  Research materials

Rules of the Route  No audio or visual recording during the tour.  Still photos are okay, but advise that the group will move at a steady pace.  Turn off or silence cell phones.  Watch your footing as the walkways can be slick and are often uneven.  Advise guests not to wander from tour

Creating Your Tour  Read the sample tour outline.  Read through the Interpretive Plan, keeping in mind the elements you are going to include from the outline.  Use your fellow guides and the tour manager as resources.  Check the tour guide website for newly posted tours.  Go on a tour between now and your first time out to see how the tour operates.  Practice, practice, practice, o Make arrangements to walk the tour route and practice your timing. o Bring in family or a few friends to test your tour. o Do a test run of the tour- expect the unexpected. Types of Tours  Public tours are fifty minutes. o Everyone needs to have material and story for at least a fifty-minute tour. o See tour outline.  School tours are fifty minutes. o Similar to the public tour, uses book marks rather than fans and leaves from the Museum, not the Visitor Center. o Education Department will provide an outline for this tour to adhere to curriculum standards.  Private tours are fifty minutes.

Creating a Character  You must develop a character based on someone who lived during the 1850s in Sacramento, preferably a real person. There will be an additional section in the interpretive plan explaining how to develop a character.

Roles of Staff Guides  Always carry a walkie-talkie with you. Make sure it is on Channel Two. Turn it off at the end of your shift and return it to the charging base.  Ask for help when you need it. We are all here to work together.  Mind the time. Tours are fifty minutes long.  We have twenty-three pieces of audio equipment with two receivers for each of the tour guides.  Watch out for the tours that follow yours, and make sure equipment is available in time for the next tour.  Mind possible obstructions on the tour route.  Be mindful of your tour group and ensure everyone stays together. If tour guests needs to leave the tour early, please take their equipment and let that guest go.  Drink plenty of water and eat salty snacks on hot tour days. Museum/ Visitors Center Staff  Ask staff for the correct time and set your watch accordingly.  Ensure walkie-talkie is on and set to Channel Two.  Verify the number of people on each tour.  Ask the staff to make an announcement about tour departure.  Let staff know if you have guests who have not shown up. Ask staff to help catch up late guests to your tour.  Communicate with staff by walkie-talkie Guide Etiquette  Drink only water while leading the tour; there are cups and water stations available. You are able to have a glass bottle, flask, or another bottle that looks accurate for the historic period.  Go over tour rules with guests before leaving on tour.  Do NOT chew gum, tobacco, or eat during your tour.  Do not ask for tips. You may accept unsolicited tips.  Always say “I do not know” instead of making up an answer. o You can offer to take the guest’s name and contact information and get back to them once you have learned the answer to their question. o You can ask other staff once your tour is over

o Remember to share the facts you learn with the other tour guides.  Have fun!! Enjoy yourself telling the story and your visitors will have enjoyed themselves in the discovery. Compliment questions, thank visitors for coming, be the gracious host.  Please check in with staff when you arrive for the day, in between tours, and before leaving after tours are finished for the day. Clothing  Historic Attire o Call or email Zoey Jennings at 916.808.6896 [email protected] to make an appointment to borrow historical attire from the Sacramento Living History Clothing Closet. o Wear-and-tear happens to the items you borrow. When they get torn, worn through, stained, lose a button, etc., please bring them in as soon as possible so that repairs can be done. o You can borrow up to ten items for twelve months at a time. All items need to be checked in with Zoey every year to start a new rental period. o When returning your items, you need to either wash or dry clean them – ask for details when checking them out. o To return items, please make an appointment with Zoey Jennings at 916.808.6896 [email protected]. Timing  Carry a watch or other timepiece.  Tours are fifty minutes long. o If you plan for a fifty minute tour, when you go over by a few minutes you will not cause harm to the tour following yours. o Be on time, for other guides’ and groups’ sake, even if your own tour start was delayed for whatever reason. Develop a feel for shortening your tour or dropping a story or two if it means returning to the Visitors Center (for public tours) or Museum (for school groups) on time. All tours should be fifty minutes long. Timesheets  Pay periods are the 1st-15th and the 16th through end of the month. Please turn your timesheets into the Tour Manager’s mailbox by the copy machine by the end of the current pay period. The Tour Manager checks and signs your timesheet, and sends it to Operation Manager.  Make sure you put your hours in the correct box for the tour you worked i.e. Underground Tour, Gold Fever! or School Tour. Guides are assigned as Underground or Gold Fever! guides and will put their hours in the designated column. School tours whether Underground or Gold Fever! need to put hours in the school tours column.  Timesheets are kept on the 2nd floor of the museum near the mailboxes.  Paychecks arrive on the 10th and 25th.

o You have an option for direct deposit.  The minimum you will be paid is for two hours of work; even if you give one tour for a day, mark a block of two hours on your timesheet.  Anyone who works more than six hours in a day must take a 30-minute unpaid break. Please note this break on your timesheet. o A typical three-tour shift is 5 hours o You may mark five hours of work for a three-tour day to account for changing into and out of costume Email/Cell Phone  You must have a working email account and check your email on a regular basis.  Schedules and announcements all arrive via email.  Please ensure that the email address you supply is the one listed on the contact form.  A cellphone may be used for tour emergences on tour but must be kept on silent during tours. Scheduling  The tour manager will seek guides’ availabilities for the following month’s schedule about two weeks before the month begins. o The manager will make the first request for availabilities at the monthly staff meeting o The manager will follow up that request by email.  Tell the tour manager the exact dates you can work.  A rough-draft schedule is sent out to guides once all requests come in.  If you need to change a scheduled shift, please first email other guides about taking or trading your shift. Keep the tour manager informed of progress so that the calendar can reflect the change.  Once the schedule is confirmed by all, you are responsible for honoring your commitment and arriving on time and ready to go. o Your shift begins thirty minutes before your first scheduled tour.  The schedule will be posted to the guides’ online website: http://www.sachistorymuseum.org/guides  Remember, tours are added to the calendar as needed basis, make sure to check the calendar often for any new, changed, or canceled tours.  A roster of tour guide contact information will be made available to you.

Parking  You will receive a pass from State Parks to park in the lot behind the California State Railroad Museum.  Provide the tour manager with vehicle information – year, make, model, color, plate number, and driver’s license number.

 You can only use your State Park pass when you are working for the Sacramento History Alliance.  State Parks may restrict parking during holiday events and possibly other times. o The tour manager will encourage you to use alternate transportation, such as using regional transit, bicycling and sharing rides, when parking becomes restricted. Staff Meeting Dates  Meetings will be the third Tuesdays of each month, 6-8 p.m. in the Sacramento History Museum. More information will be announced as dates become scheduled.  Season End Party o More information will be provided when it becomes available.  You are paid to attend the meetings; include meetings on your timesheet  Staff Meetings are mandatory o You can miss one staff meeting o Please let the tour manager know if you are unable to attend Equipment  Equipment is kept in the charging case cabinet in the Visitors Center. It is locked so make sure to get the key at the front desk. Keep liquids away from the equipment. o Wear the light blue transmitter and plug in the microphone. Set the transmitter and receiver to the same numerical channel. o If you are on a general tour you are on Channel Four. o Be aware of where you place the microphone; clothing can rub and create static noises in the headsets.  Ensure all the receivers for your tour are on the same channel as your transmitter  Everyone, except children six and under, receive a receiver and headset. o The lanyard MUST go around each guest’s neck. o The lanyards are washed weekly – twice weekly in hot summer months o Guests who have their own earbuds or headsets can use them. . The equipment works effectively with the headset for most hearing aid models.  Collect all the equipment at the end of the tour. o Ask guests to unplug the headset from the receiver. o Have guests put the receivers on one of your arms and headsets on the other. o Please bring the equipment inside immediately following the end of your tour and put the receivers back on the chargers. . Put equipment away first before taking any questions from guests after the tour. o Clean the headsets and receivers with a disinfecting wipe after every tour.

Themes of the Gold Fever! Game

Unifying Themes of -The Gold Fever! Game

Sacramento has undergone substantial changes; from a modest agricultural center, to a bustling boomtown during the Gold Rush, to the Capital of California. A diverse group of people from around the world arrived in Sacramento in search of greater opportunity and transformed Sacramento through their perseverance and determination into the city of their dreams. Throughout these changes, Sacramento has endured disease, fires, and floods that threatened to destroy it. Yet it has survived and persevered because of its resilient citizens.

Themes

 Diversity: People came from all over the world for the Gold Rush. Sacramento

became a multi-cultural hub unlike any other place in the world.

 Opportunity: Sacramento has always been a place of opportunity. From the early

day of Sutter’s Fort to the development of the Waterfront, Sacramento has always

been a stage to restart and reinvent oneself.

 Perseverance: Though many troubles plagued Sacramento, it has endured and

survived numerous fires, floods, and disasters. The citizens of Sacramento have

persevered through the triumphs and tragedies that defined Sacramento.

Goals of the Gold Fever! Game

Goals

 Provides guests with a unique and insightful view of Sacramento’s Gold Rush

(1849 -1860s) past

 Provides guests with an immersive tour experience that places them in the hustle

and bustle of the Gold Rush

 Provides guests with an understanding about life in Gold Rush Sacramento and

the struggles of everyday life for early citizens

 Provides a unique experience for local residents, tourist, and school groups who

visit the historic district

 Answers the questions: Who were the people that came to Sacramento? Why did

people want to come to Sacramento? Why did people stay in Sacramento?

By Taking the Tour, Guests Will Have

 A first-hand experience to make personal connections to the Gold Rush

 An understanding of the Gold Rush and what life was like for early citizens

 Insights into their own life from the experiences they learned on the tour

Purpose of the Interpretive Plan

Upon Reading this Interpretive Plan, Guides will

 Develop an engaging, interesting, and entertaining tour

 Develop a character (real or fictional) during this time period, 1849-1861

 Provide an understanding of the Gold Rush

 Provide a unique experience for visitors

How to use the Interpretive Plan

This Interpretive Plan is not a complete document nor a script. It is meant as a reference to assist new tour guides in order to understand the concepts and themes of the Gold

Fever! Game. This is an overview of the tour, including sections of historical interpretation, creating an interesting tour, character development, and picking period attire. Though this has information and background history, it is not a comprehensive guide. You will need to conduct additional research.

Introduction to the Gold Fever! Game

The Gold Fever! Game is an interactive walking tour of the Old Sacramento

Historic District. This tour is fifty minutes long and discusses the early history of

Sacramento following the Gold Rush, early development, and establishment as the

Capital of California from 1849-1860s. The audience for the tours is tourists and locals interested in this city’s history. This tour can also be useful for groups such as schools on field trips and company outings. The Gold Fever! Game starts at the Visitor Center and makes six stops around Old Sacramento; Eagle Theatre, Booth Building, Delta King,

Lady Adams, Morse Building and lastly the Heywood Building. Each stop represents a different part of Sacramento’s rich history, and creates a timeline of history and events in

Sacramento. The start of the tour at the Visitor Center represents 1849 with the discovery of gold and the rush of people to Sacramento. The last stop at the Heywood Building ends in the 1860s when the State Capitol is being built, the Transcontinental Railroad is finished, and the Civil War is beginning. Throughout the tour, the tour stops highlight the events in Sacramento’s History and how these events affected the citizens in Sacramento.

The goal of the tour is to tell the visitors about the history of Sacramento and the events that created and shaped the city and its citizens.

The tour is an interactive tour which provides visitors a chance to directly engage with the history through the uses of character hand-fans, “bet yer britches’ chance cards, and ‘gold’ painted rocks that act as currency. The character hand-fans are handed out to the visitor at the start of the tour. The fans represent different people from the Gold Rush

Era and the guests will portray various personas for the duration of the tour. Each fan is a

83 two-sided piece of cardstock with a wooden handle. On one side of the fan bears a likeness of a character; the other side carries information about that person: Who the person was, birth and death dates, and route to California. For purposes of the game, each person belongs to one of three groups: “Pioneer”, “Merchant”, and “Dreamer”. Also, at the beginning of the tour, each guest is given a bag of gold painted rocks which represents currency for their use during the tour. At each stop a guest may win or lose gold based on the “bet yer britches’ cards that are dealt throughout the tour. The last element is the ‘bet yer britches’ chance cards, the tour guide carries these. For each stop, there are three ‘bet yer britches’ cards; each has a different topic to be discussed on the tour and different consequences that affect the guests and the character’s they are portraying. These cards provide important information about different events in

Sacramento and how these events would have affected the citizens in Sacramento.

Interactive Elements

The Gold Fever! Game has a limit of twenty people, with twenty individual fans to accommodate guests. Four additional character fans are available in case of additional guests. Fans are divided into three categories: Pioneers, Merchants, and Dreamers. These archetypes represent classes of people in early Sacramento, and are used in the game to designate consequences to different characters. Within the twenty characters there are the

‘Core Four’ characters. The ‘Core Four’ characters are John Sutter, Sam Brannan,

Margret Frink, and Ned Wakeman. Each represents one of the archetypes: Pioneers,

Merchants, and Dreamers. The ‘Core Four’ must always be on a tour with four or more

84 people. There is an informational ‘bet yer britches’ sheet in the following pages that discusses which fans and cards to use when there are four or fewer people on a tour. The archetypes matter for the ‘bet yer britches’ cards at each stop. The fate of each guest’s character on the tour may differ from what happened to the actual person. The fans are distributed to the visitors at the start of the tour, and they portray these characters throughout the tour. The fate of their characters will be affected by the outcome of the

‘bet yer britches’ chance cards dealt along the way. For example, Theodore Judah might survive the tour, though in real life he died in 1863 of yellow fever while traveling to the

East Coast. At the end of the tour the real fates of the characters are revealed. Below you will find a list of the all the characters and which archetype they belong to. While the supplemental information will have a full copy of the fan, this list is for a quick reference.

Pioneers: Hardin Bigelow, Sam Brannan, Dr. John Morse, Capt. John Sutter, and Dr. Yee Fung Cheung; (Luzena Stanley Wilson is an extra) Merchants: Newton Booth, Margaret Frink, Charles Hackett, Collis Huntington, and Lucinda Lanos Dreamers: Theodore Judah, John C. Keenan, James McClatchy, Lola Montez, and Ned Wakeman; (Charley Parkhurst is extra) Core Four: Sam Brannan (Pioneer but can be a Merchant), Margaret Frink (Merchant), Ned Wakeman (Dreamer); and Capt. John Sutter (Pioneer)

The next interactive element of the game is the ‘bet yer britches’ cards. The ‘bet yer britches’ cards are held by the tour guide and are similar to chance cards in a monopoly board game. The cards are chosen at random at each stop on the tour and there are three cards for every stop. On front of the card is the name of the stop and on the

85 reverse is bold text with an event that happened in Sacramento, followed by three bullet points which describe what happens to each archetype.

For example, one of the cards for the Eagle Theatre says:

What?! The city floods in its first month? Oh well, it probably won’t happen again!

 Merchants- Pay Hardin Bigelow for saving your hides!

 Dreamers- Pay merchants for the supplies as you head to high ground.

 Pioneers- Cool your parched throats: Margret Frink has fresh milk.

For this card, all merchants pay Hardin Bigelow gold; if Hardin Bigelow is not on the tour then merchants pay the tour guide on Bigelow’s behalf. Dreamers pay the merchants and pioneers pay Margret Frink. Each card dealt at the tour stops has consequences for tour patrons: they might have to pay other characters or other characters might pay them. Depending on the tour and the amount of people on the tour, the guide can select the cards when they arrive at the stop or the guide can let one of the visitors select the card. The ‘bet yer britches’ cards are meant to be selected at random so that every tour is different and the consequences for each character are different on the tour.

However, if you have four or fewer people on the tour, the guide will adjust the cards, since some of the characters will not be represented on the tour.

Along with the character fans and the chance cards, each visitor will be given a bag of ‘gold.’ They will need the ‘gold’ throughout the tour. The tour guide will also have a bag of ‘gold’. The gold is used for the ‘bet yer britches’ activity so that the characters pay each other or the guide depending on the outcome of the cards. Also, if

86 one of the ‘bet yer britches’ cards has a person who is not represented on the tour, the tour guide will need to collect the ‘gold’ on that character’s behalf.

Below is a map of each tour stop. This is a quick reference map for tour guides. A more detailed map is included in the supplemental materials. Following the map there are the “bet yer britches’ information sheets which pertain to each tour stop and correspond to the three ‘bet yer britches’ scenarios for that tour stop location. These information sheets are meant as a quick reference for the tour guide so they can understand the topics to be discussed at each stop.

Map of the tour Route

S- Starting point at the Visitors Center- 4- Lady Adams-next card give out fans and gold 5- Morse Building- next card E- Journey’s End- finish across 1- Eagle Theatre- first ‘bet yer the street from the Visitor’s britches’ card Center 2- Booth building- next card 3- Delta King- next card

‘Bet Yer Britches’ Cards Information Sheet

How to use the ‘Bet Yer Britches’ Information Sheets.

This is a reference for guides to easily see all the cards for each stop. For the tour, the required fans that should always be on the tour are the ‘Core Four’ – Sam Brannan,

Margret Frink, Ned Wakeman, and John Sutter. They represent the three archetypes–

Pioneer, Dreamer, and Merchant. Some tours may have four or fewer people. For these tours, the ‘bet yer britches’ cards need to be adjusted since only a few people are represented on the tour. When discussing the consequences of each card, there are notes about how to adjust for a smaller group.

At each stop, tour guides or guests will draw from the appropriate set of cards.

Guides can have guests read the boldface headline at the top of the card or tour guides can read it themselves. Once the headline is read, tour guides can provide backstory to the headline before doling out the consequences on the card.

For example, one of the headlines on the cards available at the first stop reads,

“It’s Showtime! California gets its first theater.” Guides should explain that the Eagle

Theatre was the first official theater in California, and that it only lasted six months (July

1849 to January 1850) because it was too expensive to maintain and had been damaged in

Sacramento’s first devastating flood.

Stop One: Eagle Theatre- ‘Bet Yer Britches’ Cards

Card One What?! The City floods in the first month? Oh well, it probably won’t happen again! Merchants, pay Hardin Bigelow for saving your hides! Dreamers, pay merchants for supplies as you head for high ground. Pioneers, cool your parched throats: Margret Frink has fresh milk!

 Merchants pay Hardin Bigelow (or the tour guide if Bigelow is not on the tour)  Dreamers pay Merchants  Pioneers pay Margret Frink Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: Merchants pay the tour guide, Dreamers pay

Merchants, or tour guide pays Merchants if there are no Dreamers are on the tour, and

Pioneers pay Margret Frink or tour guide if she is not on tour.

Card Two

It’s Showtime! California gets its first theater Pioneers, pay Lola Montez for her stunning performance Merchants, pay Sam Brannan for attracting world-class theater James McClatchy pay two nuggets to Lady Montez- for the unexpected delight of seeing a woman!

 Pioneers pay Lola Montez (or tour guide if Lola Montez is not on the tour)  Merchants pay Sam Brannan  James McClatchy pay Lola Montez  This card will need some adjustments if Lola Montez and James McClatchy are not on the tour. Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: Pioneers pay tour guide for Lola Montez;

Merchants pay Sam Brannan (tour guide might pay Brannan if no other Merchants are on the tour); since McClatchy and Montez would not be on the tour you can eliminate this pay out or use it as a talking point about the ratio of men to women

Card Three

It’s a riot! Squatters fight speculators over the land You’re shot, Hardin Bigelow! Cash it in! James McClatchy, pay your bail. Pioneers, pay Mayor Bigelow’s funeral expenses

 Hardin Bigelow cash it in- guest playing Bigelow give all their gold to tour guide  James McClatchy pays bail  Pioneers pay funeral expenses  This card will need adjustments if Hardin Bigelow and James McClatchy are not on the tour. Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: Bigelow and McClatchy would not be on the tour if there are four or less people. Pioneers pay for Bigelow’s funeral to the tour guide and dreamers will pay for McClatchy’s bail since McClatchy belongs to that archetype. This is also a talking point for the division in the city between landowners and squatters.

Stop Two: Booth Building- ‘Bet Yer Britches’ Cards

Card One Strap on your dancin’ clogs! Newton Booth host a ball! Pioneers, pay the ladies your respects. They’re rare finds! Everyone, pay Mr. Booth for such a fine party. It’ll go into his campaign fund. Dreamers, pay Ned Wakeman two nuggets for getting you upriver in time

 Pioneers pay the ladies  Everyone pays Booth  Dreamers pay Ned Wakeman two nuggets Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: Pioneers pay the ladies on the tour.

Everyone will pay the tour guide representing Booth. The tour guide will pay Ned

Wakeman since he is only dreamer on the tour. If Ned Wakeman is not on the tour, the guide can skip this consequence.

Card Two

Gold Rush reaches its peak! It’s all downhill from here Everyone gets a bonus! … except for you Mr. Sutter: you cash it in!

 Tour guide gives everyone a nugget  John Sutter cashes it in- person playing Sutter give all gold to tour guide. Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: The tour guide pays everyone except John

Sutter. John Sutter will give all his gold to the tour guide.

Card Three All is ash! 1852 fire sweeps through the City! Lucinda Lanos, cash it in: It’s your fault Collis Huntington, you’re ruined: cash it in too! Charity groups sail in to the rescue! Two nuggets to those in need.

 Lucinda Lanos cashes it in- guest playing Lanos give all their gold to tour guide  Collis Huntington cashes it in- guest playing Huntington give all their gold to tour guide  Anyone in need receives gold from the tour guide  This card will need some adjustments if Lucinda Lanos and Collis Huntington are not on the tour. Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: If there are four or less people on the tour, both Huntington and Lanos will not be on the tour. They belong to the merchant class, so the tour guide could have merchants pay for the loss of their business from the fire. The tour guide can hand out gold to anyone in need.

Stop Three: Delta King- ‘Bet Yer Britches’ Cards

Card One Steamboats, schmeamboats! We’re getting a railroad! Merchants, pay Theodore Judah for his vision Everyone, pay Collis Huntington. You’ll have to anyhow, one way or another Dreamers, pay Merchants. The railroad brings down the price on that lovely shawl

 Merchants pay Theodore Judah or tour guide if Judah is not on the tour  Everyone pays Collis Huntington- a main investor in the Railroad.  Dreamers pay merchants- railroad lowers the cost of goods. Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: Merchants pay tour guide representing

Judah. Everyone pays tour guide representing Huntington. Dreamers will pay merchants, tour guide may pay merchants if there are no dreamers on the tour.

Card Two Flood?! Again?! 1852 deluge sweeps through! Everyone, pay the city two nuggets for a higher levee. Merchants, pay Collis Huntington: He’s renting you a rowboat, and it ain’t cheap Dreamers, pay Merchants. You’re stuck in town for a while.

 Everyone pays the tour guide two nuggets, tour guide represents the city.  Merchants pay Collis Huntington or tour guide if Huntington is not on the tour.  Dreamers pay Merchants. Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: Everyone pays two nuggets to the tour guide representing the city. Merchants pay tour guide representing Huntington. Dreamers will pay merchants, tour guide may pay merchants if there are no dreamers on the tour.

Card Three

The Steamboat Pearl explodes in the plain view of the town! Collis Huntington, pay Theodore Judah: time to build a railroad Dreamers, pay Dr.s’ Yee and Morse for their care

Merchants pay Ned Wakeman for helping take up the shipping slack  Collis Huntington pays Theodore Judah.  Dreamers pay Dr. Yee and Dr. Morse (pay tour guide if they are not on the tour)  Merchants pay Ned Wakeman.

Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: if there are four or less on the tour,

Huntington and Judah will not be on the tour. The tour guide instructs Merchants to pay the city for the railroad or eliminate this consequence. Dreamers pay tour guide representing Drs. Yee and Morse. Merchants, pay Ned Wakeman.

Stop Four: Lady Adams/ Ebner Hotel- ‘Bet Yer Britches’ Cards

Card One Not Again! 1853 flood swamps the city! Everyone, pay the city two more nuggets for higher levee. Dreamers, pay Margret Frink and Charles Hackett. You’re in town for a while. Pioneers, pay John Sutter for comfortable lodging at the Ebner Hotel. It’s the least you can do.

 Everyone pays the city two nuggets, tour guide represents the city.  Dreamers pay Margret Frink and Charles Hackett  Pioneers pay John Sutter Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: Everyone pays two nuggets to the tour guide representing the city. Dreamers pay Margret Frink. Pioneers pay John Sutter; tour guide will pay Sutter if there are no other pioneers on the tour.

Card Two It’s official: We’re the permanent Capital! Dreamers, pay Merchants. The cost of living is going up for a while. Merchants, pay Brannan: Benicia didn’t lose the capital without some help! Pioneers, pay Charles Hackett and John Keenan. This calls for a toast!

 Dreamers pay Merchants.  Merchants pay Sam Brannan  Pioneers pay Charles Hackett and John Keenan Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: Dreamers pay merchants. Merchants pay

Sam Brannan. Pioneers pay tour guide for Charles Hackett and Keenan who are not on the tour.

Card Three

We’re the center of the world, as stage coaches go! Everyone wins! Two nuggets, all around!

 Everyone gets two nuggets- tour guide pays everyone two nuggets

Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: No adjustments. Everyone receives two nuggets from the tour guide.

Stop Five: Morse Building- ‘Bet Yer Britches’ Cards

Card One The Pony Express gallops in! Dreamers, pay three nuggets! A letter home is expensive James McClatchy and John Morse, pay the express two nuggets for news from back east.

 Dreamers pay three nuggets to the tour guide  James McClatchy and John Morse pay two nuggets to the tour guide  Will need to make adjustments if James McClatchy and John Morse are not on the tour. Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: Dreamers pay three nuggets to the tour guide. If McClatchy and Morse would not be on the tour, the tour guide has everyone else pay two nuggets for information from back east.

Card Two

This is ridiculous! 1854 Flood covers the City! Everyone, pay the city. We’re raising the levees once more! Merchants, pay the city: You’re raising buildings five feet out of the flood. Dreamers, pay Margaret Frink and Charles Hackett for extended lodging  Everyone pay the city- pay the tour guide who represents the city.  Merchants pay the city- pay the tour guide who represents the city.  Dreamers pay Margaret Frink and Charles Hackett Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: Everyone pays the tour guide representing the city. Dreamers will pay Margaret Frink.

Card Three Not again! 1854 fire sweeps through the city Merchants, pay the city for repairs. Pioneers, pay John Keenan for fire protection. Everyone, pay James McClatchy and John Morse for the newspapers.

 Merchants pay the city- the tour guide will represent the city.  Pioneers pay John Keenan or the tour guide if Keenan is not on the tour  Everyone pays James McClatchy and John Morse

Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: Merchants pays the tour guide representing the city. Pioneers pay tour guide representing Keenan. Everyone pays the tour guide representing McClatchy and Morse.

Stop Six: Journey’s End –‘Bet Yer Britches’ Cards

Card One We’re building the State Capitol! Everyone, pay taxes for construction! John Sutter, receive an honorary pension of three nuggets. Merchants, pay pioneers a tribute.  Everyone pay the tour guide  Tour guide pays three nuggets to John Sutter.  Merchants pay pioneers Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: Everyone pays the tour guide representing the city. Tour guide pays John Sutter three nuggets. Merchants pay pioneers as a tribute for their vision of Sacramento.

Card Two The Transcontinental Railroad brings the world to our door. Everyone, pay Collis Huntington. We’re rich! He’s rich! Theodore Judah, cash it in! Merchants, pay Theodore Judah’s funeral expenses.

 Everyone pays Collis Huntington or the tour guide if Huntington is not on the tour.  Theodore Judah cashes it in- guest playing Judah give all gold to tour guide  Merchants pay for Judah’s funeral, pay gold to tour guide Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: Everyone pays the tour guide representing Huntington. Since Judah would not be on the tour to cash it in, discuss how he died. Merchants pay for Judah’s funeral.

Card Three Hear the distant drums! The Civil War comes to California! Everyone, pay your gold to the war effort!  Everyone pays gold to the tour guide

Adjustments if you have four or fewer people: No adjustments. Everyone receives two nuggets from the tour guide

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Sample Tour- With all Twenty Characters

Start of Tour

Begin at the Visitors Center: Minutes: zero-five

Guides, hand out the equipment and headsets and go over the rules of the road, such as minding uneven surfaces and crossing the street with traffic. Introduce yourself and who you are portraying. Make light conversation while handing out the equipment. After distributing the equipment, pass out the fans and the gold the guests will need for the tour. When handing out the fan, point out that it is double sided; the front has a portrait of the person, while the back has important details about the character’s archetype: Dreamer or Merchant or Pioneer. With a full tour you may not have time to introduce all the character fans as you hand them out. However, there is time for a brief introduction of some of the characters. Recommend that the visitors take a minute to look over their fan and learn the identity of their tour character. Some of the character introductions can be as follows:

Sam Brannan: a pioneer who helped establish the city near the waterfront.

Dr. John Morse: a pioneer who helped during Sacramento’s cholera

epidemic and wrote the first history of Sacramento.

John Sutter: a pioneer who established Sutter’s Fort in 1839. Gold was

discovered at his sawmill in Coloma.

Lola Montez: a dreamer who shocked audiences with her spider dance.

Hand out pouches of “gold” to each guest. The gold is used at the tour stops when the

‘bet yer britches’ cards are dealt.

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Between Visitors Center and Eagle Theatre: Minutes-five to ten

Walking to the Eagle Theatre, the tour guide discusses the gold discovery, the word spreading, the development of the city, and the ‘49ers arriving. The tour guide should relate discuss how their persona arrived in California and their livelihood in Sacramento.

Stop One Eagle Theatre: Minutes: ten to fifteen

Introduce the ‘bet yer britches’ cards and explains to the group that during the tour they will pick from three cards at each stop. Once the card is selected, the guests’ portraying their fan personas will face the consequences listed, good and bad, depending on the cards. Thus, the outcome of their fates will be determined by chance, not unlike the Gold

Rush.

The Eagle Theatre was the first theater constructed in California. The building was made out of canvas and wood materials taken from the abandoned ships that were sitting in the

Sacramento and American Rivers. The theater only lasted about six months before it was destroyed by the flood of 1850. The theater was reconstructed and moved to 2nd street and renamed the Tehama.

Topics to discuss at the Eagle Theatre

 Flood of 1850 o The city was quickly built o Dangers of building next to the river o First of many tragic events that affect Sacramento  Entertainment in Sacramento o Miners looked for entertainment when they came down from gold hills o Saloons and gambling halls were the main pastimes but miners looked for more entertainment

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 Squatters’ Riots o There were tensions between squatters and landowners which led to a huge riot. o Sacramento was divided over the riots with prominent townsfolks on both sides of the argument ‘Bet Yer Britches’ card is dealt

It’s a riot! Squatters fight speculators over the land! You’re shot Hardin Bigelow! Cash it in! James McClatchy, pay your bail! Pioneers, pay Mayor Bigelow’s funeral expenses.

Hardin Bigelow gives all his gold into the tour guide. Bigelow was shot during the riots and later died in San Francisco. James McClatchy pays bail to the tour guide. The city was divided between the squatters and the landowners. During the riots, many people were jailed including James McClatchy. Pioneers pay tour guide for Bigelow’s funeral.

Between Eagle Theatre and Booth Building: Minutes: fifteen- twenty The guide discusses some of the topics from the other cards that were not played and will expand about the topic that was played. For example, the tour guide can discuss their characters’ point of view in the Squatters’ Riot. Talk about the flood of 1850 and how this was the first of many events that would affect the city. Talk about the Eagle Theatre and some of the entertainers who were at the theater such as Lola Montez and her spider dance.

Stop Two- Booth Building: Minutes: twenty to twenty-five

The Booth Building was owned by Newton Booth, who became governor. Booth operated a wholesale grocery store called Booth & Company. On the top of the building

103 was a platform where he was able to communicate with the ships arriving into port by semaphore, signaling with sailing flags. Booth negotiated the price of goods before the ships even docked in Sacramento. While he ran the grocery out of the first floor, the second story was his living quarters. Booth was known to throw lavish balls that held up to 1,500 people.

Topics to discuss at the Booth Building  The lavish balls that Booth hosted o Booth used these parties to gain popularity and to attract potential benefactors  Gold Rush peaks o By 1852 gold production hits a high, then drops in price, leading gold mining to become an industry as prospectors turn to quartz and hydraulic mining o John Sutter lost it all with the start of the Gold Rush. He retired to Hock Farm in Yuba City and lived out the remainder of his life there.  Fire of 1852 o Most of the city and its buildings were destroyed during the fire, the result of wooden buildings closely built, a lantern, and heavy winds. o Most buildings were rebuilt out of brick, marking a transition to more permanent building materials.

‘Bet Yer Britches’ card is dealt:

The Gold Rush reaches its peak! It’s all downhill from here! Everyone gets a bonus! …except for you, Mr. Sutter: You cash it in!

The tour guide gives everyone a nugget. John Sutter gives the tour guide all his gold. The

Gold Rush financially ruined Sutter. He went to Hock Farm, south of Yuba City along the Feather River, and lived out the rest of his life there.

Between Booth’s Building and Delta King: Minutes: twenty-five to thirty

The guide discusses some of the topics from the other cards that were not played or can expand the topic that was played. The tour guide discusses their character if it fits into the

104 topic or if it was an event their character would have been in Sacramento for. For example, the guide can talk about the lavish balls that Newton Booth held and perhaps their experience as a guest at his parties.

Stop Three- Delta King Minutes: thirty to thirty-five

Steamboats travel was unregulated and was often unsafe. Ship captains raced each other and used unsafe practices to get to Sacramento first. This led to several steamship boilers overheating and exploding. The Sacramento Valley Railroad is created.

Topics discussed at the Delta King  The advantages and disadvantages of Steamships o Though reliable, steamboats could prove unsafe, prompting an outcry for more regulation o Doctors played a major role in city operations and were always ready to help when disasters struck, such as steamboat explosions  Creation of the Railroad o Discuss how Theodore Judah was a visionary for the railroad and enticed Sacramento to create the railroad o The development of the Central Pacific Railroad and the Sacramento Valley Railroad helped improve transportation and made trade easier and more reliable.  Flood of 1852 o Though levees were built following the earlier floods, they were not high enough and were not effective against flooding in 1852. o Many people were stuck in the city until the flood has passed but this did not stop merchants from inflating prices for goods ‘Bet Yer Britches’ card is dealt:

Steamboats, schmeamboats! We’re getting a railroad Merchants, pay Theodore Judah for his vision. Everyone, pay Collis Huntington. You’ll have to anyhow, one way or the other! Dreamers, pay the merchants. The railroads bring down the price on that lovely shawl.

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Merchants pay Theodore Judah. Judah was the mastermind and inspiration for the railroad and dreamed of connecting the United States with a Transcontinental Railroad.

Everyone pays Collis Huntington. He was one of the Big Four investors in the railroad.

Dreamers pay merchants. With the railroad, goods are able to get to the city quickly which brings down the cost of goods.

Between Delta King and Lady Adams: Minutes: thirty-five to forty

The guide discusses some of the topics from the other cards that were not played or expands about the topic that was played. The tour guide talks about their character if it fits into the topic or it was an event your character would have been in Sacramento for.

The steamships were unreliable because they often raced each other. There were a few explosions that happened because of this. There was a strong desire from Sacramento’s residents for the new railroad line that it would prove more reliable trade and transportation.

Stop Four- Lady Adams/ Ebner Hotel Minutes: forty to forty-five

Stop at the Ebner Hotel which is located across the street from the Lady Adams. The

Lady Adams is one of the oldest buildings in Old Sacramento. It started off as a dry goods store started by German immigrants. They arrived on a ship named the Lady

Adams and sold their goods straight off the ship until their building was completed. Their store was built in part using the brick ballast from the ship’s hull, thus giving the building its name. When the great fire swept through the city in 1852, the building survived thanks

106 to iron shutters and a well-constructed roof. The iron shutters prevented the fire from jumping from one building to another, helping slow the fire down.

The Ebner Hotel was established by the Ebner brothers. They took over the site of the

Crescent and Antelope hotels and constructed a three-story building. The hotel also had iron shutters which helped protect it from fires.

Topics discussed at the Lady Adams  Stagecoach lines. More transportation to Sacramento o With the steamboat lines, new railroad, the arrival of Wells Fargo, and the Pony Express, Sacramento becomes a shipping hub.  Sacramento becomes the permanent Capital o Sacramento city officials worked hard to make Sacramento the Capital through schemes and tricks. There were several cities vying to be the Capital.  Flood of 1853 o The city floods again. This forces the city to build higher levees. ‘Bet Yer Britches’ card is dealt:

Not again! 1853 flood swamps the city! Everyone, pay the city two more nuggets for a higher levee. Dreamers, pay Margaret Frink and Charles Hackett. You’re in town for a while. Pioneers, pay John Sutter for comfortable lodging at the Ebner Hotel. It’s the least you can do. Everyone pays two nuggets to the tour guide who represents the city. Dreamers pay

Margaret Frink and Charles Hackett. Both were merchants that people purchased goods from during this time. Pioneers pay Sutter for lodging at the Ebner Hotel. With the city flooded, citizens were stuck in the city until the flood waters went away.

Between Lady Adams and Morse Building: Minutes: forty-five to fifty

The guide discusses some of the topics from the other cards that were not played and can expand about the topic that was played. The tour guide can also talk about their character if it fits into the topic or if it was an event your character would have been in Sacramento

107 for. It was not all doom and gloom, Sacramento became the official permanent capital of

California. Sacramento also became a transportation hub with stage coaches arriving in

Sacramento.

Stop Five: Morse Building: Minutes: fifty to fifty-five

Dr. Morse was a prominent doctor in Sacramento. He also wrote the first history of

Sacramento and served the citizens during the cholera epidemic. Dr. Morse bought this building with his wife and some partners. They established a two-story building, the first floor divided into five businesses and the upstairs was a residence.

Topics discussed at the Morse Building  Pony Express comes to Sacramento o Though expensive, it was the fastest way to send mail or receive information, arriving in ten days. o Only lasted eighteen months before the telegraph replaced it  Fire of 1854 o Most of the city that had been repaired from the previous fires are destroyed. o Firefighters help to put out fires, but the companies are all volunteers and compete with each other.  Flood of 1854 o Some want to raise the streets to prevent the floods, this is different from the 1860 street raising. ‘Bet Yer Britches’ card is dealt

This is ridiculous! 1854 flood covers the City! Everyone, pay the city. We’re raising the levees once more! Merchants, pay the city: you’re raising buildings five feet out of the flood. Dreamers, pay Margaret Frink and Charles Hackett for the extended lodging.

Everyone pays the guide who represents the city. The levees needed to be built higher to prevent more flooding. Merchants pay the guide who is representing the city. There was a desire to raise the buildings to avoid further flooding. This is different from the raising in

108 the 1860s-1870s when the city was lifted. Dreamers pay Margaret Frink and Charles

Hackett for the lodgings. Once again the citizens are stuck in the city because of the flooding.

Between Morse Building and the Journey’s End: Minutes: fifty-five to sixty

Start setting up the conclusion of the tour. Once you reach the last stop, play the last card and then collect the equipment from the tour guests.

Stop Six: Journey’ End: Minute: sixty

This is the final stop and will conclude across the street from where you started. This is the last stop to play the Bet Yer Britches cards. After playing the card, wrap up the final comments of your tour. You can answer questions or play Spanish Monte with the guest afterwards. Don’t forget to collect the headsets and equipment from the guests.

Topics discussed at the Journey’s End  Transcontinental Railroad connects Sacramento to the rest of the United States o Sacramento becomes the Western Terminus for transportation and technology. o The Big Four push out Judah, who dies before his contributions are recognized  Sacramento begins building the State Capitol o Sacramento needs an official capitol building. o John Sutter receives a pension because the Gold Rush destroyed his business.  Civil War comes to Sacramento o California becomes the 31st state in the union, joining as a free state. o Sacramento had supporters on both sides of the Civil War.

‘Bet Yer Britches’ card is dealt:

Hear the distant drums! The Civil War comes to California Everyone, pay your gold to the war effort

Everyone pays the guide who represents the city. While California was a free state, there were supporters for both sides of the Civil War. This actually leads to tensions in some

109 cities in California. The gold and taxes from California help support the Union. The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad help the war by transporting goods back east.

After finishing the last card, collect all the tour equipment from the guests and stay after for a few minutes to answer questions and converse with guests. You can play Spanish

Monte in front of the Visitors Center if you have interested guests and time between your next tours.

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Who to select if there are four or fewer people on the tour

When there are four or less people on the tour, the guide will have to take part in the tour by collecting or handing out gold for those characters or archetypes not represented.

When you have fewer tour patrons, make sure to always have John Sutter and Sam

Brannan, then add Ned Wakeman and then Margret Frink. While Sutter and Brannon are both labeled as pioneers, Sam Brannan can also represent the merchant archetype. By having Sutter and Brannan compete against each other during the tour, the guest can see how the outcome for similar characters is affected by the Gold Rush.

If there are three or four people on the tour

If you have four visitors on the tour select the “Core Four”, each of the “Core Four” represents a dreamer, pioneer, and merchant. If you only have three guests, use Sam

Brannan (pioneer/merchant), John Sutter (pioneer), and Ned Wakeman (dreamer).

If there are two people on the tour

Select Captain Sutter and Sam Brannan to oppose each other, though both are pioneers,

Sam Brannan can also be a merchant. The Gold Rush changed their fates, with Sutter becoming poor and Brannan becoming the first millionaire, although they both died shadows of their former selves.

If there is 1 person on the tour

The tour guide will give the visitor Captain Sutter or Sam Brannan and the tour guide should be the other person. Though normally the tour guide is not a part of the game

111 except to stand in as the city or the bank, in this instance they should become part of the game so the visitor can have a fun, interactive, and entertaining tour.

How to use the ‘bet yer britches’ cards with fewer people on the tour

When there are fewer people on the tour, the tour guides will adjust the card’s outcomes.

Either the guide will represent a character not present or there might need to be adjustments to the archetypes, rather than a specific person. For example, using a card from the sample tour, this is how the tour guide can adjust the consequences when there are less people on the tour and the reason behind these adjustments.

Eagle Theatre ‘bet yer britches’ card:

It’s a riot! Squatters fight speculators over the land! You’re shot, Hardin Bigelow! Cash it in! James McClatchy, pay your bail! Pioneers, pay Mayor Bigelow’s funeral expenses.

Adjustments: Bigelow and McClatchy would not be on the tour if you only have four people, so those two outcomes need to be adjusted. The tour guide can mention that Bigelow was shot and how McClatchy was arrested as talking points then have the tour guest pay on their behalf. Hardin Bigelow was shot during the riots and eventually died in San Francisco. Pioneers pay tour guide for Bigelow’s funeral. With people on both sides of the riots, and some people were arrested including Bee editor James McClatchy, dreamers will pay his bail. James

McClatchy is in the dreamer’s archetype. With the ‘core four’- John Sutter and

Sam Brannan will pay the tour guide for Bigelow’s funeral and Ned Wakeman

112 will pay the tour guide for McClatchy’s bail. Margret Frink as a merchant does not have to pay anything.

Tour guides will become familiar with the ‘bet yer britches’ cards and will know which archetype all characters belong to so they can make adjustments on the tour. Previously in this document, there is a list of all the characters and the corresponding archetype they belong to. Also, the tour stop and ‘bet yer britches’ sheets have all the ‘bet yer britches’ cards for each stop and how to make adjustments with four or less people on the tour.

Both sections are reference material for tour guides to become more familiar with.

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Effective Interpretive Principles for Tour Guides

While tour guides lead tours, they are also interpreters. They are the ones providing history to the tour guests, they are explaining the events, and provide insight into how these events affected the average citizens. So, what is interpretation? The

National Association for Interpretation (NAI) defines interpretation and interpreters in the following manner:

Thus, the interpreter is the link between the public and the resource they are showing. The interpreter is the one applying the interpretation to the resource and making it come to life for the audience. This definition of interpretation and of interpreters allows anyone at any site to become the guardians of interpretation and to make connections with the visitor or audience. While the Gold Fever! Game is a great interpretive tool, guides still need to be effective in communicating this information and creating connections from the present to the past.

132 National Association for Interpretation, “What is Interpretation?,” http://www.interpnet.com/NAI/interp/About/About_Interpretation/What_is_Interpretation_/nai/_About/wh at_is_interp.aspx?hkey=b5ddeff3-03a8-4000-bf73-433c37c8a7af (accessed September 1, 2019).

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The following section includes information about interpretive principles for historic interpretation. The first set of interpretive principles is from Freeman Tilden’s

Interpreting Our Heritage. Tilden is regarded as the father of interpretation and he developed these principles in his book Interpreting Our Heritage. Below are his six principles of interpretation as follows:

1. Any interpretation that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile. 2. Information, as such, is not interpretation. Interpretation is revelation based upon information. But they are entirely different things. However, all interpretation includes information. 3. Interpretation is an art, which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical, or architectural. Any art in some degree is teachable. 4 The chief aim of interpretation is not instruction but provocation. 5. Interpretation should aim to present a whole rather than a part and must address itself to the whole man rather than any phase. 6. Interpretation addressed to children (say, up to the age of twelve) should not be a dilution of the presentations to adults but should follow a fundamentally different approach. To be at its best it will require a separate program.133

These principles of interpretation are important to remember while leading your tour. Tour guides are the ones connecting the visitor to the past. They must provide insight and understanding to the history that is being discussed. It is through these lenses of interpretation that visitors are able to connect to the history and find it relevant to their own life experiences. The use of a game component on the Gold Fever! Game provides the visitor with an interactive experience rather than just a passive static tour. The tour guide is the one who is facilitating that experience and providing information for the

133 Freeman Tilden, Interpreting our Heritage, 4th ed. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007) 34-35.

115 visitor to make the connections. As an interpreter the tour guide is the bridge between the visitor and the history.

In addition to Tilden’s book, tour guides should review Dale Jones’ article about

“Theater 101 for Historical Interpretation” once they have created a character. Building off of Tilden’s principles, Jones looks at different theater techniques to help interpreters develop their character and effectively interpret history. As first-person interpreters, tour guides can use these techniques to develop their character and their tour. Jones’ main principle is using “HIPP’ which stands for Heart, Imagination, Planning and

Physicality134. By using the four principles, Jones asserts that interpreters are “ready to present the best image, and the museum’s best image, to the public”135. Jones examines principles and expands upon each of the “HIPP” providing techniques interpreters can use to present to the public. This article can be useful to create an effective character and how to effectively convey the information through that character.

134 Dale Jones, “Theatre 101 for Historical Interpretation” https://nemanet.org/files/5414/4605/5810/Theater_101_for_Historical_Interpretation.pdf (accessed April 1, 2020). 135 Ibid.

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How to develop a character

When developing a character, first determine whether you want to represent a real person or the persona of an archetype. For example, a tour guide can be Sam Brannan or a miner.

Next ask yourself the following questions about your character:

What is your name?

When and where were you born?

When did you arrive in California? How did you get to California?

What are your motivations for coming to Sacramento?

What is your occupation?

Are you rich, working class, or poor?

Did your economic status change while in Sacramento?

What was your social status when you arrived in Sacramento? Did that change during your time here?

How long did you live in Sacramento?

Where did you go if you left Sacramento?

Why is your character leading this group around Sacramento?

To answer some of these questions you will need to do research to learn more about your characters persona.

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When developing a character, think of the character’s background prior to arriving in Sacramento and your character’s motivations for staying in Sacramento. This will help to develop a distinctive tour since you are portraying that person while leading the tour guests around the city. For example, if your character is Sam Brannan your motivation is to profit off the Gold Rush. You wish to settle the land closest to the river since it is the most central place to have supplies ready when eager 49ers come rushing in. Therefore, Brannan’s reason for leading this tour around is to attract potential investors to the city and sell more lots. Have a list of all the current tour guide’s personas.

This will help you to see who is already being represented on the tours. The Tour

Manager is a good resource to find a character. To do research on your character, the Old

City Cemetery, and the Center for Sacramento History are excellent starting places. If you are having trouble finding information about a particular person, ask the Tour

Manager, the Education staff, or other tour guides for help. Over by the education staff’s desk, there is a library that tour guides are able to use and to check out books to help with research. Also, the docents or Living History volunteers are good sources for information and ideas for characters as they often volunteer at other local historic sites and many have done their own research on their own personas.

Websites for Research

The Old City Cemetery https://www.historicoldcitycemetery.org/

The Center for Sacramento History http://www.centerforsacramentohistory.org/

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Historic Attire Basics

Once you pick your character, you can choose your historic attire. Your attire is an extension of your character. Your audience is more apt to believe your character narrative and ideally be more willing to accept the notion of imaginary time travel if the tour guide looks the part. Thus, the historic attire or costume for your character is a critical component of the tour. Tour guides are extremely visible in the historic district.

Your character’s outfit will reflect their station and status in early Sacramento. If you are rich and a prominent person in the city you will have better attire and more accessories. If you are working class, your outfit will reflect this. You might wear an apron if you are a woman or only have a shirt or vest rather than a coat if you are a man. Below is a simple list of typical clothing items for both men and women. Not everyone will have each of these items.

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Men Women

 Undershirt  Undershirt/ camisole

 Shirt  Drawers

 Pants  Petticoat (this one goes next to the

 Vest skin)

 Coat  Hoop/ corded petticoat (to push skirt

 Braces (suspenders) out)

 Hat  Dress or skirt and blouse

 Shawl or cape

 Bonnet/ hat

 Parasol

 Gloves

 Pocket or basket (to hold items)

These are the basic clothing items. When deciding on a costume, it is best to borrow items from the clothing closet located in the Living History Center. This is a good place to test out different looks before possibly investing in your own pieces. You can also look for items at thrift stores.

For men, these items would be simple dress pants, vest, and shirts. If you find shirts without a collar these are the closest to being period appropriate. Collars can also be removed. Jackets can be a little more difficult. Look for a coat with tails or a long frock coat. Men can also look for top hats or bowler hats.

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For women, the dresses and skirts can be more difficult to find in contemporary stores since they were longer and wider to fit a hoop skirt from the 19th century. Tops are easier to find. Look for shirts with a high collar, ruffles or a drop shoulder. Capes and shawls can often be found at thrift stores. Crochet or knit shawls are period appropriate.

Think outside the box, for example, you can make a cape from repurposed holiday tree skirts. The plaid and plain ones work best, especially for working class characters but ones with faux fur and silk materials will work for wealthier people. Hats for women can also be found at thrift stores. There are ways to make bonnets out of straw hats and for later periods there are wider styled hats that you might be able to find. Fascinators can also be repurposed into period appropriate hats. Any item that you find at thrift stores may have to be altered to fit into the correct period. YouTube and Pinterest are great places to look for inspirations. When doing research on your character, look for images of the person to recreate their outfit. There are also several books in the Museum’s small library about historic attire which can help in creating your costume.

If you are interested in purchasing items, several websites have costumes of good quality. Historical Emporium has good men’s and women’s clothing for a variety of periods. Recollections is a good resource for women’s clothing with its wide selection of dresses, accessories, shoes, and undergarments. Victorian Trading Company has a selection of accessories and sometimes they have clothing items. You can also find clothing on Esty and Amazon, but you have to be careful with the item that you are choosing, because they are not as authentic as the other historic attire sites. Most Esty and

Amazon items are more of a Halloween costume than reenactment historic attire.

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Crafty guides can find patterns in the costume closet to rent to make their own costume. In addition, Living History will often have workshops to make hats, aprons and other clothing items. If you need help with costuming, ask the Education Coordinator who is in charge of the clothing closet. Other tour guides might have advice or know where to get certain items.

Websites for Historic Attire

Below you will find a list of websites where you can purchase historic attire. Along with these websites, there are also books in the library in the museum about historic attire.

Historical Emporium- from https://www.historicalemporium.com

Recollections https://recollections.biz/

Victorian Trading Company https://www.victoriantradingco.com/

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Online Sources

Historical Emporium; available online from https://www.historicalemporium.com;

accessed April 1, 2020.

Recollections; available online from https://recollections.biz/; accessed April 1, 2020.

The Old City Cemetery; available online from https://www.historicoldcitycemetery.org/;

accessed April 1, 2020.

The Center for Sacramento History; available online from

http://www.centerforsacramentohistory.org/; accessed April 1, 2020.

Victorian Trading Company. Available online from https://www.victoriantradingco.com/;

accessed April 1, 2020.

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