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is the county seat of Tehama County, California. As of the 2000 census, the incorporated city had a total population of 13,147, but it is currently (January 2007) estimated at 26,000 due to recent annexations.
Red Bluff is about 30 miles (48 km) south of Redding, 40 miles (64 km) northwest of Chico, and 125 miles (201 km) north of Sacramento. It is the third largest city in the Shasta Cascades.
The Nomlaki 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 died in a malaria epidemic in the early 1830s.
The earliest Europeans known to have visited this area were the Spanish explorer Luis Argello in 1821, followed by Jedediah Smith in 1828. 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 William B. Ide built another at the "Adobe" Ferry, one mile (1.6 km) north. 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.
In 1851 Captain Ellbridge G. Reed built and started a hotel near where the creek now known as Reeds Creek enters the Sacramento River and conducted it with great success for years. Being at the head of navigation, Red Bluff soon forged ahead, and during the early mining excitements in the northern mines was a great staging town, and did an immense amount of transhipping and teaming of goods. It languished later on with the subsidence of activity in the mines, reviving again in the early 1870s on the advent of the railroad. In 1854 Red Bluff had a population of 1,000 people. In 1860 it had twice as many. On the organization of the county in 1856, there was a strong attempt to locate the county seat at Tehama, but in March, 1857, Red Bluff was chosen.