River City and Valley Life: An Environmental History of the Sacramento Region

5. The Perils of Agriculture in Sacramento’s Untamed Hinterland

103 In the decade after the gold rush, few areas in the Sacramento Valley seemed less hospitable to prospective farmers than Putah Sink. This grizzly-infested, swamp-ridden region of several thousand acres in Yolo County, twelve miles west of the city of Sacramento, had discouraged all previous settlement, from Patwin Indians, to Spanish and Mexican rancheros, to Anglo explorers. As late as 1862, a federal surveyor deemed the land “unfit for cultivation” for its “impenetrable thickets of underbrush.”1 Yet, between 1855 and 1860, a new state law sparked a small-scale land rush on Putah Sink. More than one hundred settlers purchased “swamp and overflowed land” in tracts of up to 320 acres, determined to reclaim the land for grain and stock farming. They called themselves “swamplanders” to distinguish themselves from, in their minds, less-hardy “drylanders.” Ignorant of the region’s volatile environment yet seduced by its “natural advantages,” confident in their ability to tame nature yet lacking due respect for its power, swamplanders were utterly unaware of the enormity of what lay ahead of them.2 The historical outcome of the struggles of this first generation of Anglo settlers —not just in Putah Sink but throughout much of the Sacramento Valley—will surprise few readers of this volume. These farmers helped transform the landscape into one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. They began by supplying miners in the gold country and residents of the booming cities of Sacramento and San Francisco with their grain and beef. As wheat production skyrocketed toward the end of the 1860s, they helped California earn its reputation as the “granary of the world.” And as the state’s great wheat bonanza began to wane in the late 1880s, many of them (or their sons) participated in the Golden State’s extraordinary transformation to the production of specialty crops. Increasingly, the CHAPTER 5 The Perils of Agriculture in Sacramento’s Untamed Hinterland David Vaught 104 david vaught city of Sacramento became not just the state’s seat of government but the economic capital of this immensely rich farm belt. By the early twentieth century, enormous quantities of grain and rice, fruit, produce, and meat, dairy products, and nuts rolled into the urban marketplace by water, road, and rail to be stored, processed, refined, and packaged in the city’s silos, warehouses, canneries, stockyards, and tanneries. Sacramento, one might argue, became the “nature’s metropolis” of the region.3 The historical process of the growth of agriculture in the Sacramento Valley remains less well known, however. A fresh starting point might best be achieved here through an intensive, if suggestive, case study—which brings us back to the swamplanders of Putah Sink. Their struggle to reclaim the region would be mighty indeed. More than a few—roughly 30 percent of the original purchasers—would battle the forces of nature for decades to come with a resolve and, indeed, a vengeance that can only be described as remarkable—as revealed with special clarity in the trials and tribulations of one of these early settlers in particular, Ransom S. Carey.4 The vast majority of Putah Sink swamplanders migrated to California from the Midwest; Carey came from Missouri, in 1852. Swept westward, in the prime of figUre 5.1. Map of Putah Sink and vicinity, northern California, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Drawn by Ethel Vaught. the perils of agriculture in untamed hinterland 105 their lives, by the intense excitement of the gold rush, they had come not to farm but to seek riches in the diggings. Those unfortunate to arrive after 1850 found that surface deposits had been depleted by the one hundred thousand forty-niners who had gotten there before them. The late arrivals brought with them a belief that had long been a staple of rural America—that hard work and right values would be rewarded by success. That faith left them with a sense of personal failure in the gold fields. Too ashamed to return home, they turned to what they knew best—farming—and with the same intensity of expectation that had brought them to California in the first place. The pressure to succeed after the gold rush both motivated and haunted them for the rest of their lives. Admitting failure again would simply not be an option.5 Their experience proved tantalizing from the outset. With much of the land...