Californians: An Undeserving Lot

Downtown Sacramento, 1862 (Chron photo)

We've posted before on the Great Flood of 1862, when 300 miles of the Central Valley, including Sacramento, were submerged. Chronicle reporter Carl Nolte writes how the Great Flood was only one of several natural disasters that struck California in the 1860's:

[Cabrillo College professor Sandy] Lydon likes to talk about the great winter of 1861-62, the mother of all natural catastrophes in California. “It rained for 43 straight days,” he said. “Imagine a storm like the one we had just now every day for six weeks without letup, without a single sunny day.”

It had snowed heavily that November and early December, an early winter. But in mid-December, heavy, warm rains came in and melted the snowpack, flooding the entire Central Valley from around Redding to Bakersfield — 300 miles of water, 30 feet deep in some places. Perhaps 4,000 people were killed, and the damage was estimated at $3 billion in today’s money.

The next season was entirely different: a huge drought. Practically no rain at all. The drought was so severe that thousands of cattle died of starvation or thirst. At that time, Southern California was largely pastoral, a practice left from Spanish and Mexican times. That drought ended those days forever and led to a Southern California search for a reliable water supply and the subsequent growth of Los Angeles.

The drought led to wildfires that blackened the sky in the summer and fall of 1865. There were major earthquakes in 1865 and in October 1868. The 1868 quake, on the Hayward Fault, did considerable damage in San Francisco. Mark Twain, then a San Francisco newspaper reporter, covered it.

Later that year there was an outbreak of smallpox in Northern California. So in six years California had a flood, a drought, wildfires, two earthquakes and a plague.

The Californians of the day didn't blame SUV's, fallen power lines, or laboratory leaks for these calamities. Instead they went about their business supplying gold and materials to the Union war effort and completing the Transcontinental Railroad.

Today we have vastly more wealth, technology, and know-how to address our problems, yet do much more complaining and vilifying of our fellows. We are truly an undeserving lot.