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C H A P T E R I City of a Thousand Rivers The Emergence of an Urban Ecosystem, 1884 -1914 A TERRIBLE A N D G R A N D O L D RIVER In the winter of 1884, the Los Angeles Express complained that the usually trickling Los Angeles River had turned into a "terrible and grand old river." ' By early February, three months of rain had so moistened the ground that it could absorb little more. The Express wondered on 7 February if the rain would ever stop, but the downpours continued almost without pause for another month. Water began to gather, forming ponds and then lakes, and then it spread across the countryside. South of the town of Los Angeles, where the coastal plain stretches twenty miles to the Pacific Ocean, the river ran several miles wide, and people could row their boats seven miles between the communities of Compton and Artesia . After catfish and carp were netted outside a blacksmith shop in the town of Norwalk, one wag put out a sign saying No Fishing. Houses and crops washed away. People and livestock drowned, and the cascading water smashed buildings, bridges, barns, and fences. Many old-timers recalled it as the greatest flood in memory.' The terrible and grand old river, however, provoked comparatively little response from people at the time. With the exception of some damage done to the few cultivated or inhabited lands, the currents spread harmlessly for miles over the plain, deposited their silt loads, and soaked into the ground or flowed out to the sea, leaving little destruction in their wake. Aside from attempts by the town of Los Angeles to build protec- 12 Chapter I tive levees and scattered efforts by property owners to wall off their lands from the streams, people took felv steps to prevent future recurrences of the event. The precautions they did take were for the most part smallscale , localized, and private. Some people even counted the floods a blessing. As Norwalk's James Hay noted, the fertile alluvial sediment turned "black alkali" into "some mighty good ground." F. A. Coffman of Rivera remembered, "We really believed it did good instead of damage ." In a chronically thirsty land, people welcomed water-however it came. Frequently, flood was how they got ~ t . Inundations of similarly epic proportions had visited southern California throughout the century , most recently in 1862, 1867-1868, and 1881, and they would do so agam in 1886, 1889, 1890, and 1891. The terrible and grand old river of 1884 was merely one in a series of nineteenth-century deluges that were dramatic, inconvenient, and occasionally destructive but caused little change to where and how people lived. The same cannot be said of the flood of 1914. In that deluge, crops and homes washed away; ships mired in the silt that the swollen rivers delivered to the harbor; and virtually every bridge in the county was ruined . The region was marooned for days, cut off from con~munication with places outside the area. As water spread over the land, one newspaper proclaimed Los Angeles "the city of a thousand rivers." Despite their similarities, the two deluges could not have differed more in their effects. The 1914 flood did considerably more property damage and caused a greater public stir, as citizens immediately called for comprehensive flood control and set up an agency to meet such demands.' Remarkably , however, the 1914 flood that did so much damage and elicited such a swift public response was estimated to be the smaller of the two floods by 30 p e r ~ e n t . ~ The smaller flood provoked such a determined response because it struck a radically different ecosystem. Of course, the landscape in 1884 was by no means pristine. Livestock had grazed the native grasses nearly to extinction, and invasive European plant species had taken root; farmers had plowed fields and dug irrigation ditches; and dirt roads and steel rails connected the region's scattered settlements. But much of the old hydrology remained intact. Streams still carried sediment out of the mountains and still overflowed their beds during storms. Thickets slowed and deflected the torrents, spreading them over the flatlands to sink in or work their way to the sea, depositing their silt as they proceeded . Ocean tides carried away the silt that made its way to the mouths of the rivers. Between 1884 and 1914, however, explosive urbanization [3.147.42.168] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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