California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown

10. Building a River

205 10 BUILDINGARIVER OFALLTHESTRANGEIRONIES of the California experience, two of the most striking are physical: Southern California holds one of the world’s great metropolises , and the Central Valley has become the most agriculturally productive place on earth. Sit down with a map of the United States and data about the natural climate of each region, and you will mark off large sections of the southwestern corner as wasteland, good for growing neither plants nor people. The Southern California coast receives little rainfall—it is far drier than any place in the eastern half of the United States—and much of the Central Valley receives even less, so little as to be classed a desert.1 Long before Pat Brown was born, Californians began examining such natural arrangements and thinking they should be changed. California’s farmers and city dwellers wanted more water, and in the early decades of the twentieth century they began to reach across extraordinary distances to fetch it. Farmers in the Imperial Valley, in the deserts southeast of Los Angeles , tapped the waters of the Colorado River through a canal that dipped down into Mexico and then ran back north into California.Twice, Los Angeles built aqueducts across the desert to draw from rivers more than 200 miles away: first the Owens, in the Sierra Nevada, and then the Colorado. San Francisco reached almost as far, damming Hetch Hetchy Canyon in Yosemite National Park and channeling the waters 155 miles to the city.The suburbs on the east side of San Francisco Bay appropriated their own river, 206 BUILDING the Mokelumne, and built their own aqueduct. In the 1930s, with the Great Depression constricting state finances, the federal government took control of a massive state scheme called the Central Valley Project. Dams blocked a series of rivers in the north, principally the Sacramento near Mount Shasta, and diverted the water into long canals toward what soon became irrigated farms. Yet even those projects did not sate California’s thirst. In the years after World War II, farmers in the Central Valley and dreamers in Southern California continued to search for more water, looking for additional rivers to dam and rechannel. They thought of taming the Feather, wildly tumbling out of the Sierra Nevada in the north. They eyed the Eel, along the coast near Eureka. In the most outsized vision of all, they contemplated tapping the Columbia, pouring into the ocean at Oregon’s northern border, as far from Los Angeles as St. Louis is from the Atlantic Ocean. As Brown fled his troubles at the Democratic National Convention in summer 1960, it was this environment into which he was ready to leap, a political world in which more water was never enough. ——— In the early years of his career, Brown had largely ignored his state’s great water disputes. Big-city lawyers had little contact with the troubles of farmers , and San Francisco’s water supply had been secured decades earlier, in Brown’s youth, when the city dammed Hetch Hetchy. In law school Brown took a course in water law, but the next two decades gave him few opportunities to put his learning to use.2 That changed when he ran for attorney general. Campaigning statewide for the first time, stopping at ranches and farms and small towns, he encountered as never before the worries of rural California. The biggest of these was water. For decades, farmers in the Central Valley had been pumping so much water out of the ground that the land was literally sinking , huge patches of earth bellying down toward bedrock as the water beneath was sucked away. If irrigated farming was to continue—and in the Central Valley that was understood as a given—more water would be needed from somewhere.3 In fall 1950, in the days and weeks after he won the attorney general’s race, Brown sensed that water might dominate his future, and he began carrying around a primer. Stuffed into the briefcases he invariably lugged was the new edition of the California Law Review, the entire soporific issue de- BUILDINGARIVER 207 voted to the topic and filled with articles that were as useful as they were dry: “Background of California Water and Power Problems,” “Developing a New Philosophy of Water Rights,” “The Central Valley Project and the Farmers.”4 Such knowledge was put to use quickly, for almost as soon as...