Rocklin is a city in Placer County, California, about 22 miles (35 km) from Sacramento, and just about 6.1 miles (9.8 km) northeast of Roseville in the Sacramento metropolitan area. Besides Roseville, it shares borders bearing in mind Granite Bay, Loomis and Lincoln. As of the 2010 census, Rocklin’s population was 56,974. The California Department of Finance placed the 2019 population at 68,823.

Before the California Gold Rush, the Nisenan Maidu occupied both unshakable villages and the stage summer shelters along the rivers and streams that miners sifted, sluiced, dredged and dammed to sever the gold. Explorer Jedediah Smith and a large party of American fur trappers crossed the Sacramento Valley in April 1827. The group motto many Maidu villages along the river banks. Deprived of usual foodstuffs, homesites and hunting grounds by the emigrants, the Nisenan were along with the antiquated California Indian tribes to disappear.

During the 1850s, miners sluiced streams and rivers, including Secret Ravine, which runs through Rocklin. The piles of dredger tailings are nevertheless obvious today, between Roseville and Loomis southeast of Interstate 80. Secret Ravine, at the Place now at the intersection of Ruhkala Road and Pacific Street, was later mined for granite, some of which was used as the base course of the California Capitol Building; the olden recorded use of the stone was for Fort Mason at San Francisco in 1855. The granite was hauled out by oxcarts since the initiation of the railroad many years later.

In 1860, the U.S. Census counted 440 residents in the area of Secret Ravine, of whom more or less 16% had been born in Ireland and the majority of whom worked as miners. The Place was referred to as Secret Ravine or the “granite quarries at the grow less of the tracks” as late as 1864.