Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
h e havoc of the l ood 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 ot en 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 earth-
quake or a devouring i re. (p. 2)
h e 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. h e 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. h ere
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 l ood 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 l ood, marking the beginning of the end of the cattle-based
ranchero society in California. Drought the following year i nished it of .
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 com-
pletely or carried away by the l oodwaters.
Sacramento under Water
In 1861, the nation was in the i rst year of a civil war that would consume
the attention of the northern and southern states. Out West, California
was a l edgling state, only in its twelt h year. h e 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
