In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a p t e r t w e l v e Legacies “Five years,” wrote nineteenth-century humorist Prentice Mulford of the gold rush, “was the longest period any one expected to stay.” The first generation of California farmers, it must be remembered, had not intended to farm at all, but having failed in the mines, they became desperate to succeed on the land. In their haste to adapt to their new surroundings, they committed themselves not only to the market but to community life as well—and with a resolve and a sense of permanence that can only be described as remarkable. The fact that a community of any sort emerged along Putah Creek defies conventional wisdom about rural California, which has emphasized “wheat kings,” “land barons,” and “farm factories.” This was a community, moreover, of considerable stability, as evidenced by the eleven enterprising charter members of the Davisville Almond Growers’ Association, whose fathers were among the first miners-turned-farmers to settle the region. Such persistence was driven by capitalist as well as cultural values. Capitalism, to put it another way, was an integral part of Putah Creek culture. Separating the two or, worse yet, opposing capitalism and culture discounts the power and saliency of human agency in making history —in this case, how a diverse group of displaced forty-niners, their families, and their descendants perceived one another and experienced the events, personalities , and broad range of economic and environmental forces that shaped their lives.1 That said, perhaps the most powerful agent of change and certainly the most persistent was Putah Creek itself. Periodic flooding through the end of the century —most notably in 1885, 1889, and again in 1895—continued to baºe residents . Every time the creek spilled its banks, farmers seemed caught by surprise, with someone invariably saying something to the e¤ect of “the overflow is the most destructive ever known in this section” or “the flood was so sudden and so unexpected that no time was given for preparation.” Particularly conspicuous was the railroad engineer who, in the midst of a fierce downpour, left Davisville on the afternoon of January 5, 1895, driving the northbound Southern Pacific line. Barely a mile from the depot, he encountered, much to his chagrin, the “big lake,” the result of overflow from both Putah Creek and Willow Slough, which once filled the swampy region of the old Jerome C. Davis ranch. With the tracks ahead of him deep under water, the engineer stopped the train and started to return to Davisville, backing up. At a small trestle in the embankment, through which the water was rushing, the roadbed gave way under the weight of the coaches, causing the entire locomotive to topple over the bank on its side. No one was injured too severely, though several people had to be pulled out of the rapidly rising water . The passengers waited on high ground near the tracks until boats sent from Sacramento took them back to Davisville.2 Nor did the Putah canal, constructed by landowners back in the 1870s, provide much in the way of flood control; it simply created another channel whose banks could not contain the fierce torrents of water. This provided a source of endless frustration for the Southern Pacific, which rebuilt its bridge over the canal several times, only to see it wiped out by the next big flood. Tremont residents often could not ford the canal for weeks on end after a bad storm, which meant that to get to Davisville, they had to ride several miles southeast to Dixon across the soggy prairie and then take the train. Their repeated cries for a public bridge fell on deaf ears, as the Solano County Board of Supervisors continued its tradition of refusing to spend even a dime on these outlying residents while gladly taking their tax dollars. As late as 1897, Tremont farmers were still trying to “secede” from their county to escape the clutches of “the Vallejo-Fairfield ring that oppresses us.”3 No one battled Putah Creek longer, harder, and with greater futility than R. S. Carey. At least five times over the course of his life, flooding forced Carey to reconstruct the ten miles of levees designed to protect his 1,500-acre Putah Sink ranch. About one-third of the them bordered the tule margin on the east, while the other two-thirds held back the waters of...

Share