From the 1850s to the 1910s water, land, and development were critical issues facing California. Each was thorny in itself. To compound the challenge presented by each, they were all linked closely together. Water resources had to be released from monopolistic control and then managed so as to avoid flooding and yet provide irrigation for farmland. Moreover, in order to be fully harnessed, those resources had to be transported long distances to facilitate the development of rural areas.
California’s water, like the state’s landform itself (see Chapter 1), has come from the Pacific, making possible the creation of an agrarian Eldorado. For millennia westerly winds have blown moisture-bearing clouds from the Gulf of Alaska and the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands over the West Coast’s landmass, supplying rainfall for the loam-rich Santa Clara and Central valleys. Aquifers, too, were filled by seepage from this precipitation. Pacific tides coursing inland from San Francisco Bay daily raised and lowered Sacramento River flows in the delta by as much as 2 to 3 feet.
Miners, farmers, developers, shippers, and settlers squabbled over control of the region’s precious water resources during the latter half of the nineteenth century and beyond. River water rights, particularly in the upper reaches of the Central Valley, were especially contested. Until the American takeover of California, the Spanish system of “prior appropriation” governed the use of river water. Accordingly, regardless of where one’s property was located, an owner could claim exclusive right to the use of a watercourse, and the sale of that claim, if he were the first party to divert and use a given stream or river. After statehood in 1850, American settlers largely rejected prior appropriation, insisting instead on the old English common law doctrine of “riparian rights.” This meant that only those parties whose property bordered a stream or river could claim use of that water source. The rivalry between prior appropriation and riparian claimants was muddled and intensified greatly in the 1850s when the state legislature recognized the legitimacy of both approaches. One result of the ensuing confusion was that by 1870 only 60,000 acres of the state’s farmland was being irrigated. This was but a fraction of the available irrigable soil.
A major court case arose out of the struggle for control of water flowing down the Kern River into the fertile, semi-arid San Joaquin Valley. Two titans in the business world, Miller & Lux Land and Cattle Company and the Kern County Land Company, vied for water rights to the Kern. Miller & Lux invoked riparian doctrine based on its ownership of a 50-mile-long parcel hugging the Kern. Its rival, led by James B. Haggin and Lloyd Tevis, asserted prior appropriation to justify its diversion of water upriver to land far from the Kern. In the landmark case of Lux v. Haggin (1886), the state supreme court held that the downriver riparian rights of Miller & Lux trumped the prior appropriation claim of Haggin’s firm (and by implication any similar future claims based on the old Hispanic doctrine). Irrigation of farmland distant from a watercourse suffered a major setback.
Farmers not possessing riparian lands, however, won a major victory with the California legislature’s passage of the Wright Irrigation Act in 1887. This path-breaking measure provided the public’s right to establish irrigation districts, exercise eminent domain (usurp
Private water rights and seize publicly useful irrigation works), and impose taxes and sell bonds to finance irrigation projects. Fifty such districts had been established by 1911. The growth of California agriculture was no longer restricted by monopolizing business interests bent on controlling the state’s valuable water resources.
Beyond irrigation, farmers and towns faced the challenge of floods. The flooding issue, especially in the soil-rich Sacramento Valley, derived from the gold rush period. Hydraulic mining (see Chapter 4), in which workers used high-pressure hoses to loosen ore from rock walls and hillsides, silted northern California rivers, rendering some impossible to navigate in parts. Worse, the muddy gravel washed into the Sacramento River from its tributaries - the Feather, the Bear, and especially the Yuba - at times caused horrific floods in Sacramento and throughout the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta. Humans and livestock both were victims of the liquid torrents that buried entire houses and other buildings while submerging valuable farmland and destroying crops. According to an 1891 Congressional report authored by scientists and engineers, 39,000 acres of California farmland had recently been buried in flood-carried mine tailings, resulting in nearly $3 million in losses. The longer that hydraulic mining continued, the greater the threat of deluge became because hillside debris settled along river bottoms, raising beds ever closer to their embankments.
Valley farmers erected levees (elevated embankments) and tried repeatedly to make hydraulic mining illegal. The “each man for himself” ethos of the times resulted in a patchwork of insufficiently high levees aimed at protecting one farmer’s acreage while redirecting floodwaters toward another farmer’s fields across the raging Sacramento. At times growers hired armed guards to defend their levees against sabotage by cross-river farmers whose lands would be swamped by the redirected river flows caused by the levees. Often, the imperiled cross-river farmers succeeded in overpowering such guards and destroying the problematic earthen bulwarks. The notion that growers on both sides of the Sacramento had a shared interest in a systemic, community-wide solution would take decades more to evolve. Not until the twentieth century did Central Valley growers benefit from the use of modern water storage facilities, aqueducts, and flood channels.
Southward, in the Los Angeles Basin (extending from Ventura County in the north to Riverside and Orange counties in the south) and California’s Colorado Desert, the water issue also loomed of critical importance. Without water availability, economic growth could not take place.
George Chaffey, a self-taught engineer and entrepreneurial genius from Canada, was instrumental in building a water and electrical infrastructure in southern California. Because of his projects deserts would bloom and cities would be lit. His business involvements exemplified California’s transpacific connections with Australia in irrigation-related matters.
Leaving Canada, Chaffey came to Riverside, where he and his brother opened a land-development business. The brothers bought 2,500 acres in Cucamonga, which they subdivided and brought water to via cement pipes. Buyers of each of the 10-acre parcels became shareholders in the brothers’ Etiwanda Water Company. Within months fellow Canadians bought lots from the Chaffeys, establishing the colony of Etiwanda, the most innovative agricultural settlement west of the Rockies. Etiwanda was forward-looking not only because of irrigation and its cooperative stock feature, but also because it received electricity. George
Chaffey hit on the idea of harnessing the water power of streams descending from the San Gabriel Mountains to Cucamonga. Installing a hydroelectric generator near his irrigation works, he directed the resulting current by wire to his Etiwanda home. The result was electricity to light the house and power an arc light atop its roof. His home, thus, became the first in the Far West to be illuminated by electricity. Soon afterward, Chaffey installed a telephone line linking Etiwanda to San Bernardino. The brothers next duplicated their Etiwanda infrastructure in the nearby town of Ontario. Other towns close by, including Pomona, Pasadena, and Redlands, adopted various features of the Ontario model.
As these innovations suggest, George Chaffey developed infrastructures to improve living conditions in rural and urban areas. His signal contribution to urban life was his founding in 1884 of the Los Angeles Electric Company, which succeeded in making Los Angeles the first electrically lit city in the United States. By then Chaffey’s achievements were drawing international attention.
A delegation of Australian officials visited Ontario, California, and concluded that the town’s irrigation, electrification, schools, library, and churches offered a model to be replicated in the rural, arid parts of their colony. Intent on investigating how well his Ontario model might work in Australia, George Chaffey sailed across the Pacific from San Francisco to Sydney in 1886. By design or chance, he spent the next 11 years there, establishing irrigation settlements in Mildura and Renmark. Returning to California in 1897, Chaffey had learned from his Australian venture that whites could survive in extremely hot and arid climates (a notion that ran contrary to public thinking at that time) and government participation in irrigation and town-development projects could prove beneficial.
Equipped with this knowledge, Chaffey next undertook the challenging tasks of water engineering and town-building in California’s Colorado Desert, a pocket of 600,000 acres of immensely fertile land located in the southeast corner of the state. Under his guidance, the Alamo Canal was built, which served as an overflow channel carrying Colorado River water from a point slightly below the Mexican border northward into the United States. In 1901, via this canal, the Colorado Desert (renamed by Chaffey as the Imperial Valley) underwent development. Within eight months, 2,000 settlers moved into the newly irrigated region, with more coming afterward. There, as elsewhere in the state, engineering genius tapped nature’s bounty to spark economic growth.
World History
