Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Though the mining debris worried the town and farm folk in the valley,
the floods that seemed to arrive year after year worried them more. As
they planted crops and trees with diligence, and laid out homes, schools,
and city halls, floods kept soaking or sweeping away their investments.
The Native Americans had told the region's first visitors that the valley
regularly filled with wall-to-wall water. As Kelley describes it: “During the
annual winter cycle of torrential storms . . . or in the season of the spring
snow melt . . . the Sacramento River and its tributaries rose like a vast tak-
ing in of breath to flow out over their banks onto the wide Valley floor,
there to produce terrifying floods. On that remarkably level expanse the
spreading waters then stilled and ponded to form an immense, quiet in-
land sea a hundred miles long, with its dense flocks of birds rising abruptly
to wheel in the sky and its still masses of tule rushes stretching from the
delta to the Sutter Buttes and beyond. Not until the late spring and sum-
mer months would it drain away downstream.”
Historic floods on the Sacramento River outdid those of even the great
Mississippi in magnitude. The Mississippi takes days to rise, gathering
water slowly from a vast area encompassing half the continent. But snow-
melt and storm water swell the Sacramento with great speed, coming from
Flooding on 4th Street, between L and M Streets, Sacramento, during 1862. (De-
partment of Water Resources)
