Regular service up the rivers, was provided primarily by schooners and launches to Sacramento and Stockton, that would take a week or more to make the trip.
[1][2]: 22 According to the January 11, 1854, Sacramento Daily Union, the first steamboat in California, besides the Sitka, was the Pioneer brought out in pieces from Boston, and put together at the West Point, in Benicia, and launched there in August, 1849, by the "Edward Everett Company".
[3] The first steamboat advertised in the Weekly Alta California, on October 18, 1849, providing transport between San Francisco and Sacramento, and touching at Benicia, was the Mint, a 36-foot iron-hulled vessel.
[2]: 22 [6] In the early frenzy to reach California several steamboats made the voyage around Cape Horn under their own power but not without many dangers and difficulty.
With these exceptions during the first years of the California Gold Rush its first steamboats where from eastern shipyards, knocked down and sent by ship to San Francisco Bay.
[9] Marcucci next converted for the Sacramento run, the El Dorado, a 153-ton side-wheel steamboat that had been rigged as a 3 masted schooner to sail around Cape Horn.
[7]: 81, 83 Later in the 1850s steamboats would reach up the San Joaquin River beyond Stockton as far south as Sycamore Point and to Fort Miller in the spring flood.
[7]: 11, 16, 45, 81, 82 Iron and timber suppliers to California shipyards appeared, supplied in part by the ship breaking yards scavenging the hundreds of hulks in Yerba Buena Cove, and in the river near Sacramento and Stockton.