Red Bluff: Steamboat Port and the Erasure of Chinatown

Red Bluff, California takes its name from the reddish sandstone bluffs that rise above the Sacramento River's west bank at the point where paddle-wheel steamers once reached the limit of reliable navigation. By the early eighteen fifties, those steamers from Sacramento City were offloading supplies here for the Trinity goldfields to the west, and Red Bluff quickly became one of the most important inland ports in northern California. The town was named the seat of Tehama County in eighteen fifty-six and spent the next two decades thriving on wool, livestock, lumber, and river trade.

Among the settlers who arrived in those early years were Chinese immigrants, most of them from Guangdong Province, who had come to California for the Gold Rush and moved into interior towns to work as merchants, launderers, cooks, and laborers. Red Bluff's Chinatown was established by eighteen fifty-two and grew steadily through the decades that followed, clustered along what is now known as Historic Chinatown Alley on Rio Street near the riverfront.

The end came in February of eighteen eighty-six, as a wave of anti-Chinese violence swept through California and Oregon. In Red Bluff, members of an Anti-Coolie League marched on Chinatown and went door to door ordering residents to leave within ten days. The Chinese community, facing the threat of violence and with no legal protection forthcoming from local authorities, departed. Their neighborhood was subsequently burned.

Red Bluff was not unusual. In the eighteen eighties alone, Chinese communities were expelled from more than thirty California towns. The pattern had already produced the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty-two, the first law in American history to bar a specific nationality from immigration. In Red Bluff today a historical marker on Rio Street acknowledges the Chinese pioneers who built the town's early economy and the organized violence that drove them out. The Sacramento River rolls past it without comment.