Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
is still functional today. Between 1860 and 1930, Californians diked and
drained 97 percent of the delta's freshwater marshes, isolating them from
tidal influence. By 1918, 700,000 acres of the valley had been “reclaimed.”
Large acreages of wetlands around San Francisco Bay were similarly with-
drawn from the reach of the tides and developed. Early Californians had
converted over 80 percent of San Francisco Bay's original tidal marsh to
farms and pastures by 1920.
Reclamation and flood-control efforts occurred on many different
scales throughout the lowlands of the watershed. People built levees, weirs,
dams, and other structures wherever they felt like it. At times, some enter-
prising individual might propose a more coordinated approach to control-
ling the flow of water through the landscape, organized by river or basin or
county. But politics was not to overcome the individualistic free-enterprise
tendencies of those times until the 1940s, when the Sacramento River
Flood Control Project finally put the needs of many before those of the
individual.
As nineteenth-century Californians planted more crops and built more
homes, towns, and cities, their impacts on the waters of rivers and bays
intensified. Upstream, people began diverting water to irrigate their farms
and orchards. Downstream, they set to work developing the shores of the
world's greatest natural harbor and using the bay for business, fishing,
transportation, naval activities, waste disposal, and coastal commerce.
On the agricultural front, enterprising farmers built the first two “big
ditches” in the 1850s, importing water from the Merced River to the San
Joaquin flatlands, and from Cache Creek to the Capay Valley near the
town of Woodland. In the decades that followed, an irrigation boom
brought water to several hundred thousand acres of land. By 1890, one
million acres of semiarid land were wetted by ditches, pipes, sprinklers,
and hoses. The large-scale diversion of water for agriculture, and subtrac-
tion of natural flows to the bay, had begun in earnest. Later, it would trans-
form the Central Valley into the breadbasket of the world.
On the urban waterfront, the town of Sacramento grew up at the heart
of the Central Valley. Downstream, the first three Central Bay cities to
incorporate—San Francisco, Oakland, and Alameda—rapidly added fish-
ing piers, breakwaters, ferry docks, and waterfront warehouses. Ship-
building and naval support, soon to fire the engines of the Bay Area econ-
omy, got an early start in the North Bay at Mare Island Naval Yard with
