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1863
Truckee began in 1863 as Gray's Station on a wagon road
Truckee began in 1863 as Gray's Station, named for Joseph Gray's Roadhouse on the wagon road over the Sierra. By 1866 it was Coburn's Station. The Central Pacific Railroad chose the name Truckee for its station by August 1867, after a Paiute chief who later guided John C. Frémont.
The name
A greeting that travelers took for the chief's name
The first Europeans to cross the Sierra Nevada met the chief's tribe. He rode toward them yelling "Tro-kay!", which is Paiute for 'Everything is all right'. The travelers assumed he was yelling his name.
1868
The tracks reached town in 1868 and still run downtown
The tracks reached the station in 1868, a year after the name was chosen. Truckee grew as a railroad town, and the line still runs into downtown, where Amtrak passenger trains stop on the trip from Chicago to San Francisco.
Skiing
One of the nation's first mechanized ski lifts was here
Truckee reportedly had one of the nation's first mechanized ski lifts, at the site of the Hilltop Lodge. A ski jump built there in the early 1900s was designed by Lars Haugen, a seven-time Olympic ski jumping champion.
The Chinese quarter
Chinese residents were driven out of Truckee in the 1870s
By the middle of the 1870s about a quarter of Truckee's residents were Chinese. In 1876 members of a local league formed to drive them out set fire to two cabins of Chinese woodcutters and shot at the men as they ran out, killing Ah Ling. The first man tried was acquitted in nine minutes. In 1878 the Chinese quarter was burned down.
Day 4, afternoon
It comes after Donner Lake. Then Palisades Tahoe.
More stories from this trip idea
The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Truckee, California, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.