High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The history of Sacramento, California, began with its founding by Samuel Brannan and John Augustus Sutter, Jr. in 1848 around an embarcadero that his father, John Sutter, Senior constructed at the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers a few years prior. Before the arrival of Europeans, the Nisenan branch of the Native American Maidu inhabited the Sacramento Valley area. The Spanish were the first to explore the area, and Sacramento fell into the Alta California province of New Spain when the conquistadors claimed Central America and the American Southwest for the Spanish Empire. The area was deemed unfit for colonization by a number of explorers, and as a result remained relatively untouched by the Europeans who claimed the region. When John Sutter arrived in the provincial colonial capital of Monterey in 1839, governor Juan Bautista Alvarado provided Sutter with the land he asked for and Sutter established New Helvetia, which he controlled absolutely with a private army and relative autonomy from the newly independent Mexican government.