Placer Mandarins

The United Auburn Indian Community, made up of Miwok, Maidu and Nisenan people, describes how the hill Nisenan lived from these slopes. Families or whole villages gathered acorns, with the men hunting while women and children collected the nuts knocked from the trees, then ground them into flour in bedrock mortars, swept with soaproot brushes. They gathered buckeye, pine nuts and hazelnuts, ate wild plums, berries and grapes, traded manzanita berries to the valley or made them into a cider-like drink, and took salt from springs near Lincoln, Cool and Latrobe.

The Gold Rush, in the Tribe’s words, brought “an onslaught of fortune-seekers with a rapacious appetite for gold, land, and other instant riches.” The United States took land in trust for the Auburn Band in 1917, ended its federal recognition in 1967, and restored it with the Auburn Indian Restoration Act of 1994.

On the Colfax-Todds Valley Consolidated Tribe’s page, elder Lola Gilbert Prout remembers how her family got by during the Gold Rush: “They picked fruit in the orchards, did lots of hunting, were guides.”

The Central Pacific reached Newcastle on June 1, 1864, and Auburn the next May, and fruit became worth shipping. The miners’ ditches were easily turned into irrigation, and the foothill orchards ripened earlier than other districts’, so their fruit fetched higher prices.

Chinese laborers who had built the railroad found work clearing brush and on the new farms, and some rented land of their own. In 1880 the Placer Herald wrote that six years earlier the granite country around Newcastle had been “considered valuable only for quarries and random mining.” Now land “that was not worth a cent three years ago” was held as high as $100 an acre.

W. J. Wilson opened Newcastle’s first shipping house in the early 1870s. By 1889, with refrigerated rail cars, W. J. Wilson & Son was the largest fruit shipper in California, and 176 railcars left Newcastle that year. In 1900 the town shipped 1,054 carloads.

Japanese farmers worked most of the fruit ranches in this part of Placer, and families bought land in the names of their American-born children. Loomis, Penryn and Newcastle each had a Japantown, and a smaller one grew in Auburn. The Placer Buddhist Church was founded in Penryn in 1902, and Newcastle’s Japanese Association Hall held a Japanese language school from 1916. The families grew stone fruit and pears.

In May 1942 two exclusion orders sent about 1,500 Japanese Americans from western Placer, including Loomis, Roseville and Rocklin, to the Marysville detention camp, also called Arboga. Almost everyone there was moved on to Tule Lake. The Doi family were the first to come back to Newcastle, in January 1945, and within their first month home someone tried to burn them out and put dynamite under their packing shed.