This makes sense to me, Gibb. I appreciate the suggestion about how "Santiana" can be "mapped right on top of "Sacramento"." Somewhere, in my looking at "Sacramento", I recall the suggestion that this is meant to be taken as a highly sarcastic song, even cynical. In fact there was *not* a "lot of gold on the banks of the Sacramento" and a lot of 49'ers crashed and burned out there. The culture not only loved to poke fun at itself, like with "Betsy from Pike", but it was could be very harsh and cynical. I'm thinking that "Banks of the Sacramento" could have arisen a bit later, after the first major onslaught, as sort of a retrospective on the situation, and a way of warning those who still thought they wanted to uproot their lives and head for San Francisco. How much "later" I don't know. But it could have been toward the middle of the 1850's at least. I'm beginning to think that a lot of the "off to California to dig gold" type songs were of this later, more cynical nature, rather than the earlier, naive and high-spirited stuff. There has to be a good explanation why none of them are showing up in print anywhere.