Residents helped reshape Valley

Residents helped reshape Valley's landscape

Dana M. Nichols
Record Staff Writer
Published Sunday, Feb 12, 2006

A hydraulic mining operation near French Corral is seen in this 1860s photo
Credit: Courtesy of The Society of Calif

SAN ANDREAS - Humans have radically reshaped the Central Valley and the neighboring Sierra Nevada foothills in the past 157 years.

Gold Rush miners armed with water cannons washed away entire hills. Silt from that mining flowed down to the Valley where it plugged rivers, filled in parts of San Francisco Bay, and by 1884 triggered the state's first environmental court decision.

In the mountains, miners chopped down entire forests to fuel heating fires, build towns, and timber the shafts of hard-rock mines.

In the Valley, farmers converted oak woodlands and marshes into the world's most productive food basket. State and federal engineers raised mighty dams, changing the course of rivers to slake the thirst of those farms and of huge cities arising on the coast and in southern deserts.

After World War II, population from the coastal cities sprawled inland. The automobile made it possible for hundreds of thousands of newcomers to settle in Valley suburbs and in ranchettes scattered in the hills.

This remaking of the land yielded tremendous wealth from gold, grain, grapes, timber, real estate and hundreds of other products. It also killed some rivers, choked others, decimated or destroyed salmon runs, and doomed millions of people to live in a place with tainted air and water.

Some of the pollution dates back to the Gold Rush. Toxic mercury from then is still concentrating in Delta fish caught and consumed by some Valley residents.

Air pollution is more recent, largely but not entirely tracing to the massive use of motorized vehicles in the past 60 years in a place where mountains sometimes trap stagnant air.

Perhaps the strangest corner of the region is the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, where ocean-going ships tower over rows of corn and tomatoes growing on below-sea-level islands.

"It is completely transformed," said John Thompson, a retired professor of geography at the University of Illinois, Champaign, who earned his doctorate at Stanford and wrote his dissertation on the geography of the Delta.

Until the Gold Rush, the Delta was a sea-level marsh. In some places, it had deposits of peat soil up to 65 feet deep, Thompson said.

Scientists say the soils built up as plants died in the water and sea levels gradually rose over the 6,000 years since the end of the last ice age.

The San Joaquin, the Sacramento and other smaller rivers carved channels through the Delta. During spring floods, the rivers deposited banks of mud that served as a sort of low natural levee for the peat soil marshes.

Farmers arriving after the Gold Rush discovered that they could make the levees higher - first by hand then after 1878 by using powered dredges - thus creating 'islands' of rich peat soil.

Then they started farming

"Land preparation was done by fire, because the tules were pretty tough to break by plow," Thompson said.

Delta dredging builds up levees

As the soil burned, its level inside the islands sank. The sinking continues today. Even without fire, the peat soils oxidize and blow away once they are drained of water.

Now, much of the Delta is 20 or more feet below sea level. Even some neighborhoods on the edge of the Delta in Lathrop and Stockton are below sea level, protected by levees built on the ancient peat soils.

"It's a pretty unstable foundation on which to build, I was going to say a culture," Thompson said. "But in a sense it is a culture."

One legacy of the altered landscape is California's eternal series of lawsuits over water and the environment. The first environmental suit was filed by farmers along the Yuba River whose orchards were buried under hydraulic mining debris.

Judge Lorenzo Sawyer of the California Supreme Court ruled in 1884 that mining companies could not destroy the value of property downstream by discharging mine debris in to the river.

Another major legal and political battle was the struggle over whether to allow San Francisco to dam and inundate Hetch Hetchy, a Sierra valley of which famed naturalist John Muir said "... no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man."

Environmentalists lost that battle but it triggered Muir and others in 1892 to form the Sierra Club, still a major player in environmental matters.

The legal battle over how to balance the conflicting interests of different California cities, industries and interests continues today.

A state court later this year, for example, is expected to approve a plan to restore at least some water to now-dry stretchs of the San Joaquin River below Friant Dam.

That battle dates back to the 1940s when Friant dried up the river, destroying a huge source of salmon harvested by both recreational anglers and commercial fishing operations.

The huge forests of the Sierra Nevada seem to have survived better than the fish in Valley rivers, despite the depredations of the Gold Rush.

"The gold mining and that era probably devastated the woodlands more than anything else has before or since," said Steve Stocking, a retired biology instructor from San Joaquin Delta College and the Mother Lode chairman for the California Native Plant Society. "At that time there were uncontrolled fires because there wasn't anybody to control them."

Today's forests are largely regrowth that has happened since the late 19th century, Stocking said.

That regrowth and the ranching that has kept much of the lower altitude Sierra hills as open space has made it possible for many native species of birds, plants and animals to survive, Stockton said.

"We probably have most of the same suite of animals that we had before," he said.

Contact reporter Dana M. Nichols at (209) 754-9534 or dnichols@recordnet.com

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