After the Gold Rush: Tarnished Dreams in the Sacramento Valley

5 “To Begin Again”

c h a p t e r f i v e “To Begin Again” In the winter of 1861–62, a flood of enormous, almost biblical proportions hit the Sacramento Valley. It began in early December, when a series of warm, tropical rains melted several feet of snow that had accumulated in the Sierra Nevada. Rampaging rivers poured out of their channels, filling much of the valley in less than three days. On the morning of December 9, the American River burst though its levee at Thirty-first Street in Sacramento, submerging the city in a “sea of water” by sunset. As the floodwaters were receding, an even fiercer storm hit, on January 10, spreading devastation throughout the valley. Cattle died by the tens of thousands, cities and towns, most notably Sacramento and Marysville, were buried deep in water and mud, farms and ranches were destroyed, and hundreds of people were swept away to their deaths by high waters. “This is a fearful calamity,” wrote one newspaper, that only “an Angry God” could have precipitated . To this day, the “double flood” of 1861–62 remains the most massive in the state’s history and one of its worst natural disasters.1 Putah Creek was hit especially hard. From east to west, the waters of the Sacramento River spread well beyond the Tule and approached the Davis ranch, drowning the region in a torrent twelve miles wide and eight to eleven feet deep. From there to near the west rim of the valley, Putah Creek created a lake so deep and so vast that sloops were seen sailing across it. Putah Sink, where the two overflows overlapped, was completely under water. “There is nothing to indicate the locality of the ranches but a windmill,” observed one stunned swamplander. Hundreds of miles of fences, many dozens of farms, and countless stock were wiped out. Like others in the Sacramento Valley, Putah Creek farmers found it diªcult to comprehend what had happened. In addition to the sheer suddenness and magnitude of events, they had been lulled into a false sense of security because no serious flooding from either the creek or the river had occurred since 1854—many no doubt crediting their makeshift levees for keeping them dry during the intervening years. But in one fell swoop, as the Sacramento Daily Union put it, “all this has been washed away by the relentless flooding, and [the farmers] are left to begin again in the world, if they have the courage to undertake another improvement on the land.”2 For most Putah Creek settlers, this was at least the third time since their arrival in California that they had been “left to begin again.” Failure in the goldfields, the uncertainties of land tenure, the vagaries of the grain market, and now the sheer force of nature tested their resilience to the utmost, as the Union well understood. But it took more than courage to begin again. Farmers were no strangers to disaster—ecological, economic, or otherwise—but few had experienced anything like the great flood of 1861–62. Its impact had an influence on their lives almost as powerful as the gold rush itself. The most widespread response at first was simply to act as though it had never happened. Neither stoic nor heroic, many farmers chose, however consciously, to try to put the fury of the flood behind them as quickly as possible; they had come too far to do otherwise. While gloomy prophets in northern California newspapers predicted the demise 74 Disaster and Persistence “The Climate of California on a Rampage.” Sacramento Valley flood refugees, humans and livestock alike, depicted during the flood of February 1878, in a woodcut by Charles Nahl in the Pacific Rural Press, March 2, 1878. By all accounts, the flood of 1861–62 was an even greater calamity. Department of Special Collections, University of California Library, Davis. of agriculture in the Sacramento Valley, farmers plowed forward, head down, convincing themselves that the day of disaster had passed. But nature would neither cooperate nor be tamed, a lesson that farmers never fully learned. The flood, moreover, did not wash away the daunting problems that had confronted them during the previous decade. The struggle to survive, much less prosper, would be mighty indeed—as revealed, with special clarity, in the experiences of George W. Pierce and the fate of the Big Ranch...