Tehama Wildlife Area - Tehama County

   The Wild Life Area 46,862 acres of oak woodland, grassland and chaparral. There are also rugged canyons throughout the area. This area is a winter range for black-tailed deer. Wild pigs and turkeys are also found here in Tehama County.

   The Nomlaki (Central Wintun) and Southern Yana people originally inhabited the area along the banks of the Sacramento River where Red Bluff was built. Most of the native population of the area are thought to have died in a malaria epidemic or smallpox epidemic brought by trappers in the early 1830s, shortly before white settlers arrived in the 1840s.

   While the Spanish army officer Gabriel Moraga explored the southern Sacramento Valley in 1808, it was not until the 1821 expedition of Luís Antonio Argüello that Europeans recorded a visit to the Red Bluff area.

   On April 10, 1828, Jedediah Smith passed through on the way to Oregon. In 1843 Peter Lassen, John Bidwell, and John Burheim came in pursuit of horse thieves; Lassen then applied for a Mexican land grant. The first house where Red Bluff now is was an adobe put up late in 1849 by John Myers, who conducted it for a short time as a hotel.

 In the following spring Mr. Cooper erected a small adobe there, and A.M. Dibble built another at the "Adobe" Ferry, one mile (1.6 km) north. This adobe has been incorrectly associated with William B. Ide, whose home was south of Red Bluff. Settlement began in 1850 when Sashel Woods and Charles L. Wilson began laying out a town called Leodocia. It was known by that name and Covertsburg until 1854, when maps showed the community as Red Bluffs.