After the Gold Rush: Tarnished Dreams in the Sacramento Valley

2 Seduced

c h a p t e r t w o Seduced Expectations were high when preparations began for the first crop on the Big Ranch in November 1851, just one month after Champion I. Hutchinson had purchased his half-interest in Rancho Laguna de Santos Callé. The land near the creek looked lush and the remaining grassland ideal for livestock. Hutchinson and his two partners, Charles Greene and William Cozzens, proceeded from past experience. The first task at hand was to enclose the land to be cultivated to keep out grazing stock. The available timber along the creek was not strong enough to be cut into planks but could be chopped up to make brush fences. By March, a field of 1,374 acres was ready, 800 of which were plowed. When Hutchinson’s buyer, Joseph Haines of Sacramento, rode out to the Big Ranch that June to witness the harvest for himself, he predicted that the huge barley crop, at 4 cents per pound, would bring in no less than $90,000. Yields were simply astounding— fifty-three bushels an acre on average and as high as sixty-six in some locations— four to five times the norm back home in the Midwest. News of these “immense crops,” not only on the Big Ranch but also on farms up and down the creek, traveled fast. “The lands of Putah,” proclaimed a reporter from the Sacramento Daily Union, revealed “the magnificent results of agriculture under the bold and energetic patronage of its farmers.”1 To Hutchinson and his new neighbors, the results were more than magnificent ; they were downright seductive. Putah Creek looked like home to these transplanted midwesterners, only better—much better. It had all the “natural advantages ” to which they were accustomed—abundant grasslands for grazing, flatness for easy plowing, and rich riparian forests that provided fencing, housing materials, and the promise of fertile soil—plus no rain during the summer that could damage the harvest, no winter blizzards, no Indian problem, and no shortage of hungry miners and urban residents already accustomed to paying high prices for food. New technology, moreover, just coming on the market allowed farmers to produce on a scale heretofore unimaginable to them. They also seemed to have the place almost entirely to themselves.2 It looked for all the world as if these farmers had been given a second chance to strike it rich in California. The natural environment of the Sacramento Valley was indeed exceptionally rich, but much more volatile and much less familiar than it had first appeared to these “Westerners” in the Far West. Bounded on the west by the Coast Range, on the north by the Klamath Mountains, on the east by the southern Cascades and the northern Sierra Nevada, and on the south by the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, the valley was essentially one vast floodplain, 150 miles long and 10 to 50 miles wide. (It forms the northern third of California’s 400-mile-long Central Valley .) Down its center, the deep-flowing Sacramento River dominated the scene. Fed by the American, Feather, Yuba, and other rivers cascading down from the high Sierra (which boast the nation’s deepest snowpack), the Sacramento’s normal flow was large—about 5,000 cubic feet per second—but in flood could swell to an astounding 600,000 cubic feet per second. Rarely a winter went by when the river did not pour out of its channel and create a vast inland sea over much of the valley floor. How deep and how disruptive that sea became varied tremendously from winter to winter. During the summer, moreover, the flow seemed positively benign. Mischievous and deceptive, the Sacramento River seemed almost to laugh at humans, as when, for example, it lured Joseph B. Chiles and Jerome C. Davis to build their ferry and dairy one year and then wiped them out the next, using only a fraction of its power. Three distinctive features characterized the valley floor. Natural levees ten to thirty feet high arose along the riverbanks, built up over the centuries from the heavy silt deposited by the overflows. On the slopes of those levees, riparian vegetation , up to five miles deep, grew so thick and lush that ecologists prefer jungle rather than the standard forest to describe it. On the lowlands beyond the levees, the overflow left behind sloughs, swamps, and marshes—including “the Tule” (or “the tules”), the dense expanse of large bulrushes, fifteen...