Engineering Nature: Water, Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise

CHAPTER ONE: Lessons of Valuable Experience: What California Learned from India

CHAPTER 1 Lessons of Valuable Experience WHAT CALIFORNIA LEARNED FROM INDIA The American government chartered or subsidized many of the nation’s early enterprises, including interstate railroads.Yet it showed little support for irrigation development in California, even when agriculture began to surpass mining as the state’s predominant industry in the 1870s. Individuals and private companies built ditches and canals to carry water to their dry fields. Such unregulated private development, while dynamic for the mining industry, produced chaotic results for irrigation. California’s water laws allowed irrigators to monopolize water to the detriment of other users.The shortage of capital and labor as well as battles among miners, farmers, and ranchers also hindered irrigators’ projects. With agriculture booming, irrigators started to cry out for government aid. To establish the scientific and technical feasibility of irrigation, public officials examined private irrigation works in California’s Great (Central) Valley and discussed ways to aid farmers and irrigators. State leaders then conducted comparative inquiries into the activities of other countries, particularly India, and returned home to think about ways to apply what they had learned abroad. The Private Canal Company and the Federal Survey in California Between the 1850s and 1870s, the mining industry spurred the state’s rapid population growth and created a dynamic, barely regulated economy that in turn further fueled the expansion of mining. Weak government oversight , however, negatively affected the growth of irrigation.The example of the San Joaquin and King’s River Canal Company illustrates the attempts to involve the government in private irrigation projects in the early 1870s. Al- 18 LESSONS OF VALUABLE EXPERIENCE though the canal companydid not acquire government subsidies, it sparked policy makers’ interest in irrigation in California. The first federal survey of the Great Valley, led by Barton S. Alexander and California engineer and scientist George Davidson, initiated discussion about the role of public institutions in resource development but failed to reconcile the state’s haphazard water laws and irrigation systems. An open society and economy characterized California from the state’s inception. The gold rush gave entrepreneurs the capital and engineers the technical experience to assemble a modern infrastructure within three decades . The discovery of silver in Nevada’s Comstock Lode in 1859 transformed San Francisco from a frontier outpost into a growing international port. Merchants sent gold, dredges, drills, and men to distant places, while the city welcomed vessels with Hawaiian sugar and goods from China and Japan. William C. Ralston’s Bank of California, the San Jose–San Francisco Railroad, and municipal fire departments, wharf commissions, and newspaper agencies settled in. A rail and water network connected San Francisco to the rest of the country a decade later. But the gold rush did not create a political framework for the development of California’s natural resources . Gold attracted settlers but also unlocked the state for unbridled exploitation. Anglo-Saxon settlers rapidly extinguished Indian claims and Mexican land titles, chased competitors off the newly claimed land, and blasted away at California’s mountains. Placer (surface) mining, which required few major water diversions and kept waterways relatively intact, dominated the Sierra Nevada’s gold industry for the first few years after 1848. Hydraulic mining, a more capitalintensive and destructive method of unearthing ancient veins of gold, replaced placer mining by the late 1850s. Hydraulic mining required a system of canals and water storage for continuous operation. Miners used pressurized hoses to blast hillsides and then transported the rock debris by flume for processing downstream. Between the 1850s and 1870s, engineers constructed large rock-fill dams, such as the one-hundred-foot-high English Dam and ninety-six-foot-high Bowman Dam in the northern Sierra, to supply water to the mines. By 1867, more than five hundred miles of canals and ditches channeled water from Northern California’s Sacramento, Bear, Feather, and Yuba Rivers to miners.1 Despite the rapid proliferation of mines, the state neither supervised nor regulated the industry. “The policyof the state should be to legislate as little as possible on the mines,” noted the California Senate Committee on Mines in 1856, echoing the general sentiment.2 Corporations did not even have to secure ordinary business licenses to tear down mountainsides. Instead, hy- 19 LESSONS OF VALUABLE EXPERIENCE draulic mining companies shaped government policy to theirown interests. The state, for example, exempted white miners from taxes and adopted the Foreign MinersTax in an attempt to...