TWO
The 1861–1862 Floods
LESSONS LOST
The great central valley of the state is under water—the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys—a region 250 to 300 miles long and an average of at least twenty miles wide, or probably three to three and a half millions of acres!
WILLIAM BREWER, Up and Down California in 1860–1864
THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA CATACLYSM
THE ROAR OF THE WATER far up the valley woke Father Borgatta during the night. He ran through the driving rain up the hill next to his little church and frantically began to ring the church bell to warn the sleeping village. The villagers—men, women, and children—fled the rising waters on foot, but the tempestuous floodwaters, billowing fifty feet high, crashed through the village, almost catching the fleeing residents attempting to run to safety.
The rains had started innocently enough on Christmas Eve, 1861. But they continued day and night for the next twenty days, culminating in a weeklong downpour that swept this Southern Californian village off the map. The village was located along the Santa Fe Trail between New Mexico and Los Angeles, about five miles northeast of present-day Riverside. Founded in 1845, Agua Mansa (“calm water,” in Spanish) was situated in a peaceful river valley surrounded by lush riparian vegetation: sycamore, willow, and cottonwood trees graced the village, along with the vineyards and orchards planted by the villagers. The flood obliterated all of that in one tragic hour: the traditional adobe houses seemed to dissolve into the brown, churning water; large trees were uprooted and carried away, along with horses, cows, and sheep.
All that remained of this idyllic village were the front steps and two marble pillars of Father Borgatta’s church, bearing testimony to the highest elevation the Santa Ana River reached on that devastating night. Almost a century later, this high-water mark allowed hydrologists, commissioned by San Bernardino County, to calculate the peak flow of this flood: an incredible 330,000 cubic feet per second, the highest ever recorded for the Santa Ana River. The torrent swept away settlements in San Bernardino, Riverside, and Orange counties, and it submerged vast areas that lay downriver.
Ironically, farmers and ranchers had prayed for rain in the years preceding the great floods of 1861–62, because almost two decades leading up to that year had been exceptionally dry. But in December 1861, the farmers’ prayers were answered with a vengeance. A series of monstrous Pacific storms slammed, one after another, into the west coast of North America, beginning in Canada in November and working its way as far south as Mexico, producing the most violent flooding residents ever saw—before or since. Sixty-six inches of rain fell in Los Angeles that year, more than four times the normal amount. Thirty-five inches fell in the 30 days between December 24, 1861, and January 23, 1862.
All across Southern California that wet winter, rivers surged over their banks, spreading muddy water for miles across the arid landscape. Large brown lakes formed on the normally dry plains between Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean, even covering vast areas of the Mojave Desert. In Anaheim, Orange County, flooding of the Santa Ana River created an inland sea four feet deep stretching up to four miles from the river and lasting four weeks. In San Diego, just north of the Mexican border, rainfall was three times the normal amount for the month of January, causing rivers to spill across the surrounding countryside, washing out roads, drowning cattle, and isolating people when travelling by wagon became impossible. All of Mission Valley was under water, and Old Town was evacuated as rising waters filled the town.
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA UNDER WATER
Given how quickly news spreads today in our digital world, it seems incredible that news of Southern California’s floods that awful winter did not reach Northern California until February 1, 1862. But residents there, where most of California’s 500,000 people lived, were contending with devastation and suffering of their own.
Before the floods, California state geologist Josiah Whitney had hired an assistant, William Brewer, to help survey the young state’s natural resources. In 1862, Brewer sent a series of letters to his brother on the East Coast describing the surreal scenes of tragedy that he witnessed during his travels in California that winter and spring. Brewer’s letters documented the unprecedented snowfall in November and early December 1861 that blanketed the Sierra Nevada range. The snow did not last long, however, because the same series of warm storms that wreaked havoc along the West Coast also melted the snow and drenched the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada with 60–102 inches of rain. Nevada City, fifty miles northeast of Sacramento, received a total of more than nine feet of rain for the season (whereas the normal rainfall there is fifty-five inches, or just under five feet).
FIGURE 8. Precipitation in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Stockton, California, from 1850 to 2003. Precipitation during the winter of 1861–62 was three times higher than the historical average. (Redrawn by B. Lynn Ingram based on Mock 2006.)
Brewer commented on his amazement that the two-month rainfall totals in California that year were more than two years of rainfall in his much soggier hometown of Ithaca, New York. San Francisco, Sacramento, and Stockton received almost four times their average rainfall for the months of December to February (see figure 8).
The series of warm storms swelled the rivers in the Sierra Nevada range so that they became raging torrents, sweeping away entire communities and mining settlements in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada—California’s famous “Gold Country.” A January 15, 1862, report from the Nelson Point Correspondence described the scene: “On Friday last, we were visited by the most destructive and devastating flood that has ever been the lot of ‘white’ men to see in this part of the country. Feather River reached the height of 9 feet more than was ever known by the ‘oldest inhabitant,’ carrying away bridges, camps, stores, saloon, restaurant, and much real-estate.” Drowning deaths occurred every day on the Feather, Yuba, and American rivers. In one tragic account, an entire settlement of Chinese miners was drowned by floods on the Yuba River.
FIGURE 9. Map of California showing the approximate areas of flooding in 1861–62. The white regions on the map show the lowest elevations in the state, most of which were under water during the flood. (Map redrawn by B. Lynn Ingram.)
The Central Valley Submerged
In the Sierra Nevada, cold arctic storms dumped ten to fifteen feet of snow that winter, and these were soon followed by atmospheric river storms, which, as will be discussed later in this chapter, poured heavy warm rains on the snow. Unable to penetrate the still-frozen soils, an enormous pulse of water from the rain and melted snow flowed downslope and across the landscape, overwhelming streams and rivers and creating a huge inland sea in California’s enormous Central Valley—a region at least 400 miles long and up to 70 miles wide (see figure 9). This vast, temporary inland sea covered farmlands and towns, drowning people, horses, and cattle, and washing away houses, buildings, barns, fences, and bridges. On January 18, 1862, the following appeared in the Contra Costa Gazette:
The havoc of the flood has been sadly general. Along the river courses, where boats are common, a ready means of escape and safety has been at hand. Not so, however, in the interior. Witness the extensive plains of the Sacramento valley, for example, where for miles and miles in every direction no highlands are to be seen, and where fences, barns, hay and grain as well as farm houses, cattle, hogs and horses have been all inundated and often carried hopelessly away. Very many lives have been lost and an immense amount of property utterly ruined and destroyed. Certainly not less than one-third of the surface of California has been visited as if by a blighting plague, a desolation earthquake or a devouring fire. (p. 2)
The water was so high it completely submerged telegraph poles that had just been installed between San Francisco and New York, causing a complete break in transportation and communications over much of the state for a month. The entire Central Valley was transformed into a lake, submerging thousands of farms, drowning cattle, and rendering roads impassable. On February 9, 1862, Brewer wrote:
Nearly every house and farm over this immense region is gone. There was such a body of water—250 to 300 miles long and 20 to 60 miles wide, the water ice cold and muddy—that the winds made high waves which beat the farm homes in pieces. America has never before seen such desolation by flood as this has been, and seldom has the Old World seen the like. (p. 244)
A great sheet of brown, rippling water extended from the Coast Range to the Sierra Nevada. One-quarter of the state’s estimated 800,000 cattle drowned in the flood, marking the beginning of the end of the cattle-based ranchero society in California. Drought the following year finished it off. One-third of the state’s property was destroyed; seven homes out of every eight were severely damaged; and one home in eight was destroyed completely or carried away by the floodwaters.
Sacramento under Water
In 1861, the nation was in the first year of a civil war that would consume the attention of the northern and southern states. Out West, California was a fledgling state, only in its twelfth year. The Gold Rush that had drawn so many people to the region had been going on for thirteen years. Sacramento, a hundred miles northeast of San Francisco and located at the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers, was in many ways a hub: the young state’s sparkling new capital; an important commercial and agricultural center; and the terminus for stagecoaches, wagon trains, the pony express, and riverboats from San Francisco. The newly installed telegraph connecting California with New York was located in Sacramento.
Of course, floods in Sacramento were not unknown to the residents, yet nothing could have prepared them for the deluges and massive flooding that engulfed the city that winter of 1861–62. Alfred Doten of Milpitas described the scene in his diary:
After the inundations of the memorable winter of ’52–3, a high levee or embankment was built around the city, in order to protect it from all future floods. It answered very well for such fine winters as we have had since then, but this winter it could not fence out the big waters. The raging floods of the American, and Sacramento, attacked the devoted city, both in the rear and in the front. Over the levee came the leaping waters, scornfully laughing at the puny obstructions that the presumptuous hand of man had placed in its way. The alarm bells sounded, and people rushed hither and thither to save what they could, or to note the progress.
Along the street levels, and over the sidewalks, rushed the gliding demon of destruction, submerging street after street, until at last it had complete possession of the doomed city. Still and steadily rose the water over the curbstones, over the doorsteps, and into the houses, stores, and hotels it rushed. Many small wooden buildings floated off down stream, and some of the walls of the brick buildings, becoming gradually undermined by the action of the current, settled and fell. Boats were out everywhere, rescuing those who were in danger. (Van Tilburg Clark 1973, 648)
The floodwaters rose one foot per hour throughout the afternoon, eventually submerging the entire city of Sacramento under ten feet of brown, debris-laden water. The water was so deep and dirty that no one dared to move about the city except by boat (see figure 10). Indeed, the entire Sacramento Valley was submerged from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada to the Coast Ranges, with only some hills and Native American shell mounds peaking up from the water like islands.
California’s new governor, Leland Stanford, was to be inaugurated on January 10, 1862, but floodwaters swept through Sacramento on the day of his inauguration, submerging the city. As citizens fled the city by any means possible, the inauguration ceremony took place at the capital building despite the mounting catastrophe. Governor Stanford traveled from his mansion to the capital building by rowboat. Following the expedited ceremony, with floodwaters rising all around at the rate of one foot per hour, Stanford rowed back to his mansion, where he was forced to steer his boat to a second-story window in order to enter his home.
FIGURE 10. Flood of 1861–62 in Sacramento, California. Lithograph of K Street in Sacramento, near Front Street. (Lithograph courtesy of Bancroft Library Archives, University of California, Berkeley.)
William Brewer was staying in San Francisco at the time and described Sacramento’s plight in a letter to his brother on January 19, 1862:
The rains continue, and since I last wrote the floods have been far worse than before. Sacramento and many other towns and cities have again been overflowed, and after the waters had abated somewhat they are again up. That doomed city is in all probability again under water today.
Sacramento is out of food. Benevolent societies are active, boats have been sent up, and thousands are fleeing to this city. There have been some of the most stupendous charities I have ever seen. An example will suffice. A week ago today news came down by steamer of a worse condition at Sacramento than was anticipated. The news came at nine o’clock at night. Men went to work, and before daylight tons of provisions were ready—eleven thousand pounds of ham were cooked. Before night two steamers, with over thirty tons of cooked and prepared provisions, twenty-two tons of clothing, several thousand dollars in money, and boats with crews, etc., were under way for the devastated city. (pp. 241–42)
Conditions did not improve in the following weeks. California’s legislature, unable to function in the submerged city, finally gave up and moved to San Francisco on January 22 to wait out the floods.
Sacramento remained under water for six months. Brewer visited the city on March 9, 1862, and described the scene:
Such a desolate scene I hope to never see again. Most of the city is still under water, and has been there for three months. A part is out of the water, that is, the streets are above water, but every low place is full—cellars and yards are full, houses and walls wet, everything uncomfortable. No description that I can write will give you any adequate conception of the discomfort and wretchedness this must give rise to. I took a boat and two boys, and we rowed about for an hour or two. Houses, stores, stables, everything, were surrounded by water. Yards were ponds enclosed by dilapidated, muddy, slimy fences; household furniture, chairs, tables, sofas, the fragments of houses, were floating in the muddy waters or lodged in nooks and corners—I saw three sofas floating in different yards. The basements of the better class of houses were half full of water, and through the windows, one could see chairs, tables, bedsteads, etc., afloat. Through the windows of a schoolhouse I saw the benches and desks afloat. Over most of the city boats are still the only way of getting around.
It is with the poorer classes that this is the worst. Many of the one-story houses are entirely uninhabitable; others, where the floors are above the water are, at best, most wretched places in which to live. The new Capital is far out in the water—the Governor’s house stands as in a lake—churches, public buildings, private buildings, everything, are wet or in the water. Not a road leading from the city is passable, business is at a dead standstill, everything looks forlorn and wretched. Many houses have partially toppled over; some have been carried from their foundations, several streets (now avenues of water) are blocked up with houses that have floated in them, dead animals lie about here and there—a dreadful picture. I don’t think the city will ever rise from the shock, I don’t see how it can. (p. 249)
Charitable organizations, such as the Saint Mary’s Sisters of San Francisco, scouted the disaster areas by boat to aid the flood victims, delivering the injured and homeless to their hospital in San Francisco. They also provided refuge for the many orphans whose parents were killed in the deadly floods.
The death and destruction of this flood caused such trauma that the city of Sacramento embarked on a long-term project of raising the downtown district by ten to fifteen feet in the seven years after the flood. Governor Stanford also raised his mansion from two to three stories—leaving empty the ground floor, to avoid damage from any future flooding events.
The San Francisco Bay Area Deluges
Downstream of Sacramento, towns and villages throughout the San Francisco Bay Area were struggling with catastrophes of their own. In Moraga, a small community twenty miles east of the San Francisco Bay, great flooding and destruction washed away meadows and drowned horses and cattle.
The scene was repeated throughout the greater Bay Area: twenty miles northeast of San Francisco, four feet of water covered the entire town of Napa; to the east, the small town of Rio Vista on the Sacramento River was under six feet of water. The entire population of Alamo, at the foot of Mt. Diablo fifty miles east of San Francisco, was forced to flee rising floodwaters. People abandoned their homes in the middle of the night; some found refuge, others drowned. The San Ramon Valley was one sheet of water from hill to hill as far as the eye could see. The destructive force of the floods carried houses, otherwise intact and complete with their contents, away in the rapids, and horses, cattle, and barns were swept downstream for miles.
The heavy rains also triggered landslides and mudslides on California’s steep hillsides. For instance, in Knights Ferry and Mokelumne Hill nearly every building was torn from its foundation and carried off by mud and rock, and a major landslide occurred at the town of Volcano in the Sierra foothills, killing seven people.
The Gold Rush Connection
In an ironic twist of fate, the California Gold Rush, which had drawn so many people to California and heralded modern society in the West, was partly to blame for the extensive damage brought on by the floods in Northern California that winter of 1861–62. Early mining practices used a simple process of panning for gold, but once the accessible gold was cleared from streams draining the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the miners turned to more intensive techniques to increase their yield. The invention of “hydraulic gold mining” allowed mining industries to get at the gold still in the mountain rocks. Giant hoses blasted the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, eroding hillsides and generating large amounts of sediment.
Log dams were built to catch the debris in the streams before it reached major rivers. During the fateful winter of 1861–62, the log dams failed, releasing a huge pulse of sediment—boulders, cobbles, gravel, sands, and mud—into the American, Yuba, and Feather rivers, where some of the worst flood devastation took place in the Sierra. These sediments made their way downstream to the Sacramento River, filling the channel and thereby exacerbating the flooding in Sacramento. The sediment pulse eventually made its way into the Central Valley, delta, and San Francisco Bay.
Geologist G.K. Gilbert calculated that more than 1.5 billion cubic feet of mining debris filled the river systems before the practice of hydraulic mining was outlawed in 1882 in the first federal environmental case in history. Unfortunately, the mining debris continued to aggravate flooding in these rivers for the rest of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, until it was finally flushed out of the system.
Out the Golden Gate
San Francisco Bay and its narrow outlet to the Pacific Ocean at the Golden Gate funnel all the rain and floodwaters from most of Central and Northern California. That wet winter, a steady flow of muddy, debris-laden water twenty feet deep could be observed pouring through the San Francisco Bay and out the Golden Gate for months. The sheer mass of all this freshwater acted as a wedge, pushing back Pacific seawater and preventing it from entering the bay, making the San Francisco Bay more like a freshwater lake. The enormous volumes of mud and silt carried by the turbulent waters into the bay filled shallow marshlands and caused a shoaling of the bay by up to three feet, causing the expansion of marshlands into the estuary and completely wiping out the thriving oyster industry that had developed around the shores of the bay since 1850.
We can only speculate about what was washed down to San Francisco Bay and out the Golden Gate during those epic floods along with the muddy waters: shredded homes, barns, trees, furniture and personal belongings, even the remains of people and animals. All were carried out to the Pacific and a watery grave.
FLOODING BEYOND CALIFORNIA
The 1861–62 floods extended far beyond the borders of California: they were the worst ever in recorded history over much of western North America, including northern Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Moreover, the rain-bearing storms did not stop in the Sierra Nevada but continued eastward into Nevada, Utah, and Arizona.
A normally arid state, Nevada received about twice its typical annual rainfall in the two-month period of December 1861 to January 1862. This excess water transformed the Carson Valley into a large lake. Villages and settlements, located on higher ground along the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, were mostly spared. But at lower elevations, towns and cities suffered. Nevada City was inundated with nine feet of rain in sixty days.
In southern Utah, 1861–62 became known as the “year of the floods” as homes, barns, mills, and forts were washed away, including the adobe home of a Mormon bishop, John D. Lee. In his diary, edited by R. G. Cleland and J. Brooks, Lee had carefully recorded the weather throughout January 1862, noting a solid period of alternating rain and snow with strong winds for most of that month. In early February, as Lee attempted to move his ten wives and his children from their adobe fort that was disintegrating from the heavy rain, strong winds blew down part of the wall into a bedroom, killing two of the children.
Meanwhile, the village of Tonaquint in southwest Utah, situated at the confluence of the Santa Clara and Rio Virgin rivers, was destroyed in January 1862 as the floodwaters chased the villagers from their homes, leaving only mud and debris for miles. Missionaries had first arrived there in 1856 to help the Native Americans build an irrigation system and a dam. Brigham Young had visited Tonaquint in May 1861, just months before the destructive winter floods, and proclaimed that a city of spires, towers, and steeples would be built there. But before Young’s vision could become a reality (the village later became the city of St. George), torrential rains deluged the region, engulfing southern Utah with rising waters. And just ten miles up the Santa Clara River to the northwest of Tonaquint, a group of Swiss Saints had settled in the village of Santa Clara, growing fruit, grapes, and cotton. When the floods struck, the Swiss Saints fled for their lives, their peaceful village utterly destroyed.
In Oregon, two and a half weeks of solid rain caused the worst flooding in that state’s history. Deluges covered huge portions of the lower Willamette Valley where Oregon City is located. In 1861–62, Oregon City was the terminus of the Oregon Trail and the state’s capital, where George Abernathy, an Oregon pioneer and the state’s first elected governor, lived and ran a thriving business until the flood destroyed his home, forcing him (and many others) to leave.
Arizona, too, was affected: floods occurred in the Gila, Verde, Bright Angel, and Colorado river basins between January 19 and 23, 1862, and flooding was severe in Yuma, Arizona.
ADDING MISERY TO SUFFERING
The suffering endured by the thousands of homeless and stranded residents was not over after the rains. In fact, the situation worsened in late January, when unusual arctic conditions descended on the West Coast. The freezing weather struck from the Pacific Northwest to Southern California. In Oregon and Washington, the Columbia and other rivers froze. In California, Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay was ringed with ice, and snow covered the hills surrounding the bay. Six inches of snow fell in Napa, one inch of snow in Sacramento, and snow covered the entire northern Sacramento Valley. Temperatures in San Francisco dropped to 22°F, with frosts killing any remaining crops all the way to the Mexican border. In Red Bluff, 125 miles north of Sacramento, ice and snow covered the region. The freezing conditions were especially difficult for the thousands of homeless flood refugees across the region.
THE LESSONS LOST
Why so many people were caught off-guard by these floods remains puzzling. It appears that the Native American populations, who had lived in the region for thousands of years, had deeper insights into the weather and hydrology, and they recognized the patterns that result in devastating floods. A piece in the Nevada City Democrat on January 11, 1862, reported that Native Americans left Marysville for the Sierra foothills a week before the large flood, predicting higher water than at any time since the region had been settled by European-American pioneers.
The specific weather pattern that the Native Americans of the West recognized as bringing particularly severe flooding is finally understood again today—at least by climatologists. The powerful storms originate in the warm and moist tropical Pacific Ocean, near Hawaii; hence they have been nicknamed “Pineapple Expresses.” Recent research describes these storms as “atmospheric rivers,” and they often result in the worst floods in the West, particularly in California. When they follow on the heels of arctic storms that leave several feet of new snow on the mountains and freeze the soil (creating an impermeable surface), atmospheric rivers pack a strong meteorological punch that can be especially deadly. The warm rains, unable to penetrate the surface, rapidly flow over the surface, causing extreme runoff.
In 1861–62, however, immigrants did not recognize the climatic warning signs. They had never experienced such extreme flooding in the twelve years since the Gold Rush began, though lesser floods were not uncommon in the region.
That year, though many of the western states experienced their worst floods on record, California bore the brunt of the damage. The costs were devastating: one quarter of the state’s economy was destroyed, forcing the state into bankruptcy. The tragic 1861–62 floods may have temporarily served to awaken the residents of California and the West to the possible perils of their region’s climate. They saw nature at its most unpredictable and terrifying, turning in a day or an hour from benign to utterly destructive. But the costs to the state went beyond the loss of life, property, and resources; California’s spirit and confidence were badly shaken.
The message to residents of the lowlands was clear: living in the large valleys of the West is risky, even deadly. These valleys were created over time by the rivers that continue to flow through them, and the broad, flat valley bottoms are called floodplains for good reason: the rivers periodically spill over their banks and spread across the broad expanses.
But this message has been lost in the hurley-burley growth during the century and a half since, as California’s population, agricultural production, and technological innovation soar, transforming the state and its economy beyond all expectation. Development in California and the West proceeds with homes and towns built in exactly the same places that were obliterated 150 years ago. Residents now live in floodplains throughout the American West, despite the known risks to life and property. Perhaps modern westerners are not so different from their forebears, many of whom were pioneers or ’49ers panning for gold. After the great 1861–62 floods, Brewer wrote of Californians: “No people can stand calamity as this people. They are used to it. Everyone is familiar with the history of fortunes quickly made and as quickly lost. It seems here more than elsewhere the natural order of things. I might say, indeed, that the recklessness of the state blunts the keener feelings and takes the edge from this calamity” (pp. 249–50).
Nature in California is at its most magnificent and terrifying, with awesome tectonic forces deep in the earth producing both the steep and rugged beauty of the coast and the vast interior mountain ranges. Massive destruction from high-magnitude earthquakes comes with the territory, as does cataclysmic flooding.
A critical element of living in a place like California is an awareness of these natural disasters, and this requires a deep understanding of the natural patterns and frequencies of these events. We have building codes today for earthquake safety as well as city emergency plans. But are the millions of new westerners really aware of the region’s calamitous climate history? Most have never even heard of the 1861–62 floods, and, as we will explore in the coming chapters, the 1861–62 floods may not have been the worst that nature can regularly dish out to the region. We will explore the evidence for similar, if not larger, floods that have occurred every one to two centuries over the past two millennia in California. But first, we take a look at nature’s flip side with examples of the worst historic droughts of the twentieth century, including the Great Dust Bowl.