Truckee is an incorporated town in Nevada County, California, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the population was 16,180, reflecting an buildup of 2,316 from the 13,864 counted in the 2000 Census and having the 316th highest population in California and 2114th in the United States.

Truckee’s existence began in 1863 as Gray’s Station, named for Joseph Gray’s Roadhouse on the trans-Sierra wagon road. A blacksmith named Samuel S. Coburn was there around from the beginning, and by 1866 the Place was known as Coburn’s Station. The Central Pacific Railroad selected Truckee as the herald of its railroad station by August 1867, even even though the tracks would not reach the station until a year superior in 1868. It was renamed Truckee after a Paiute chief, whose assumed Paiute publicize was Tru-ki-zo. He was the daddy of Chief Winnemucca and grandfather of Sarah Winnemucca. The first Europeans who came to irritated the Sierra Nevada encountered his tribe. The kind chief rode toward them yelling, “Tro-kay!”, which is Paiute for ‘Everything is everything right’. The unaware travelers assumed he was yelling his name. Chief Truckee well ahead served as a guide for John C. Frémont.

The Truckee River flows from Lake Tahoe for approximately 100 miles (160 km) northeast to the link up of the arid Great Basin of Nevada and Utah and into Pyramid Lake. This water source formed a natural, seasonal route for Native Americans. Although no particular tribe is considered to have inhabited Truckee year-round, the Washoe people occupied a large territory approaching centered in the avant-garde day Carson City area, but Shoshone and Paiute Tribes were also present (the Paiute Tribe Reservation now encompasses Pyramid Lake). These peoples are considered to be the primary source of Native American travelers in the area. Hobart Mills, just north of Truckee on Highway 89, has a large, horizontal, circular petroglyph of the type common to travel routes in Nevada. The date of that petroglyph, as without difficulty as several etched into granite slabs upon the top west of Truckee, are not entirely upon. But those artifacts, as with ease as the abundance of arrowheads throughout the Truckee region, attest to a minimum of hundreds of years of Native American presence. It is reachable that, like the Shoshone, Ute people and earlier Fremont tribes of Utah and Eastern Nevada, the easy to do to Native American populations fluctuated on height of the course of millennia appropriately of weather cycles, food source, and possibly complaint or war. Some historians date the pre-Fremont culture of Eastern Nevada to as early as 10,000 B.C. and it’s likely that the Eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountains adjacent to Truckee, since it faces the Great Basin, had Native Americans of a hunter-gatherer culture visit at least as to the front as 3,000 B.C. These people were probably of a purely nomadic activity since datable housing structures when those found in Nevada and Utah are not present. Like most of the liberal history of the West, as the European settlers’ population increased, the Native American population decreased. The Gold Rush of 1849 caused a surge in fortune-seeking settlers (although Truckee itself wasn’t contracted until later). It is not known exactly once the last original Native Americans passed through Truckee, but there is Washoe people oral chronicles of the Donner Party tragedy of the winter of 1846–47.

The Donner Party ordeal is arguably Truckee’s most well-known historical event. In 1846, a action of settlers from Illinois, originally known as the Donner-Reed Party but now usually referred to as the Donner Party, became snowbound in early slip as a repercussion of several trail mishaps, poor decision-making, and an to the fore onset of winter that year. Choosing multiple get older to accept shortcuts to save distance compared to the standard Oregon Trail, coupled similar to infighting, a disastrous crossing of the Utah salt flats, and the try to use the pass near the Truckee River (now Donner Pass) all caused delays in their journey.