Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [217]
In the 1850s, when the California gold rush was at full flood, the Great Central Valley traversed by the miners on the way to the mother lode was an American Serengeti—a blond grassland in the summertime, a vast flourishing marsh during the winter and spring. The wildlife, even after a century and a half of Spanish settlement, was unbelievable: millions of wintering ducks, geese and cranes, at least a million antelope and tule elk, thousands of grizzly bears.
The winter of 1861 and 1862 was the beginning of the end for this scene of wild splendor. Relatively few of the Forty-niners found enough gold to pay their fare back home, let alone retire in the style of which they dreamed. California in the 1850s was full of broken men, searching for whatever day labor they could find. Many of them, having given up on returning home, decided to make a try at farming or ranching in the Central Valley. Most of the pioneers who followed the miners in wagon trains had farming on their minds, too, and by the 1860s the Central Valley was already a vista of cows. Because of the rainless summers, no important crop except wheat could be raised without irrigation, which was an alien form of agriculture to Americans. But the valley’s chronic scarcity of moisture was suddenly reversed in 1861 and 1862. A series of vast drenching Pacific storms bashed the state for weeks on end; in January of 1862, San Francisco recorded twenty-seven inches of rain, half again what it usually gets in a year. The floods would have been bad anyway, but their destructiveness was greatly intensified by the incredible amount of spoil—whole sides of mountains—which hydraulic mining had sent down the rivers to the lowlands. The beds of the valley rivers were raised several feet, and could not begin to contain the torrential runoff; downtown Sacramento was under seven feet of water. The 1862 flood marks the beginning of the valley’s obsession with bringing the rivers under control. Meanwhile, farther south, in the San Joaquin Valley, Henry Miller was using the same flood to acquire hundreds of thousands of acres of ephemerally drowned lands under the Swamp and Overflow Act. Miller’s acquisitive nature, combined with the serendipity (in his case) of the flood, made him enough money to construct a large dam, and he soon had his hundreds of thousands of acres under irrigation. Before he died, he was likely the richest farmer in the United States.
When the valley ranchers saw how rich one could become through irrigation farming, they began to switch from cows and dryland wheat to crops. Few had Miller’s ambition or wealth, however, and even when organized into irrigation districts they couldn’t duplicate his dam, so they irrigated with primitive sluiceways cut from the rivers, much as did the farmers along the Nile. As for the state and federal governments, they wanted nothing to do with publicly financed irrigation projects, which were widely regarded as socialistic.
Everything changed with the invention, shortly after World War I, of the centrifugal pump. Suddenly able to draw hundreds of gallons per minute out of the valley’s shallow aquifer, the irrigation farmers no longer had to worry about building expensive canals, about cleaning them of silt; they no longer had to dream of regulating the rivers with dams to ensure summer flows. By the mid-1920s, thanks to irrigation pumping, California had surpassed Iowa as the richest agricultural state in the country; the Central Valley was the largest semicontinuous expanse of irrigated farmland in the world. The aquifer, which had collected over many thousands of years, was prodigious; before pumping began, it may have held three-quarters of a billion acre-feet. With the expansion of irrigation farming from a few thousand to millions of acres, however, the water table