The Port of Stockton: The Inland Sea Route
Near Stockton, California
Stockton sits eighty miles from the Pacific Ocean, and it has a deep-water port. This is not an accident of geography; it is a consequence of labor. Chinese workers in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties dredged the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta channels to depths that allowed ocean-going vessels to reach this far inland, connecting a city in the center of California's agricultural interior to the freight routes of the Pacific Basin. The work of dredging those channels, who did it, under what conditions, for what wages, is not memorialized at the port.
Charles Weber founded Stockton in eighteen forty-nine, using the natural navigability of the delta as his primary asset. The settlement he planted at the junction of a deep tidal slough and the main delta channel became the supply point for the Mother Lode mining districts in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Everything the miners needed, flour, tools, lumber, whiskey, came through Stockton by water. What the miners sent back, gold, came back through Stockton by water.
The port remains active. It handles agricultural exports and bulk cargo; the San Joaquin Valley's harvests leave the continent through here, bound for markets across the Pacific. Stockton is one of only two inland deep-water ports in California. Sacramento is the other. The geographical anomaly that made both possible, the delta's tidal reach deep into the valley's interior, is the feature that structured the entire economy of the central San Joaquin.
The labor that made the delta navigable, the Chinese workers who dredged and diked and channeled, is largely absent from the port's public history. The ships that pass over those channels are the lasting monument to work that has no other marker.
