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Story of Water in Sacramento Is Incredibly Complex, and Constantly Evolving

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Story of Water in Sacramento Is Incredibly Complex, and Constantly Evolving Sacramento’s Story of Water by Chris Lopez of Grow Water www.GrowWater.org Sacramento lies at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers, and is the capital city of the state of California. The current population of Sacramento County is around 1.5 million who consume between 110- 270 gallons of water per person per day. Historical rainfall averages between 17 ½ - 19 inches of rain per year, which falls primarily between the months of October through April. This is a stark difference in precipitation when compared to the nearby Sierra foothills, which receive between 30-65 inches of rain per year as well as varying degrees of snowfall, which does not occur at the lower elevations of the Sacramento Valley. The Sacramento River, and its watershed, is California’s most precious resource. “The future of California is joined at the hip with the Sacramento River” says University of California geologist, Dr. Jeff Mount. The Sacramento River has always been a “river of life” and never more so than right now. Located in central northern California, the Sacramento River is the largest river system and basin in the state. The 27,000 square mile watershed includes the eastern slopes of the Coast Ranges, Mount Shasta, and the western slopes of the southernmost region of the Cascades and the northern portion of the Sierra Nevada. The Sacramento River, stretching from the Oregon border to the Bay-Delta, carries 31% of the state’s total runoff water. Primary tributaries to the Sacramento River include the Pit, McCloud, Feather, and American rivers. The Sacramento River Watershed provides drinking water for two-thirds of the State including Southern California, supplies farmers and ranchers with the lifeblood of California’s agricultural industry, and is a vital organ for hundreds of wildlife species, including four separate runs of Chinook salmon. The Spanish explorer Gabriel Moraga named the Sacramento Valley and the Sacramento River. A Spanish writer with the Moraga expedition wrote: "Canopies of oaks and cottonwoods, many festooned with grapevines, overhung both sides of the blue current. Birds chattered in the trees and big fish darted through the pellucid depths. The air was like champagne, and we (the Spaniards) drank deep of it, drank in the beauty around us. “Es como el sagrado sacramento! (It's like the Blessed Sacrament.)” The valley and the river were then christened after the "Most Holy Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ," referring to the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist. The city itself was developed around a wharf, called the Embarcadero, on the confluence of the American River and Sacramento Rivers that John Sutter had developed prior to his retirement in 1849 as a result of gold discoveries at Sutter's Mill in Coloma. John Sutter, Sr. had replaced himself with his son, John Sutter, Jr., who noticed growth of trade at the Embarcadero and considered it a viable economic opportunity; the port was used increasingly as a point of debarkation for prospecting Argonauts heading eastwards. Sacramento Valley Watershed The Sacramento Valley has always faced water management challenges and likely will for years to come. The valley’s semiarid climate, its ambitious, evolving economy and development, and its continually growing population have combined to make shortages and conflicting demands the norm, and the remnants of the areas floodplains, and vernal pools are being developed at ever increasing rates. Over the past two centuries California has, in general, tried to adapt to these challenges through major changes in water management. California has, in fact, been called “the most hydrologically altered landmass on the planet.” That is a bold statement, but is nonetheless the absolute truth. The hallmark of the Sacramento valley’s native waterscape and ecology was its remarkable biological diversity and abundance. The Sacramento and American rivers were ideal for colonization by anadromous salmon and steelhead. Each year, millions of adult salmon and steelhead spawned in California’s rivers and streams, carrying with them enormous volumes of ocean nutrients that enriched the state’s inland ecosystems. The Great Central Valley, with its extensive lowland floodplains and riparian forests, was home to vast herds of tule elk, antelopes, black bears, grizzly bears, deer, and wildcats to small rodents such as gophers, wood rats, and squirrels. The river banks sheltered large numbers of beavers and river otters. Waterfowl included ducks, geese, cranes, herons, pelicans, and swans. The uplands, away from the marshland and where the foothills of the Sierras begin (and where Fair Oaks now lies), teemed with quail, mourning doves, flickers, woodpeckers, roadrunners, hawks, owls, eagles, turkey vultures, and even condors. At least 26 species of fish lived in the American River alone, most notable of which were the salmon, sturgeon, chub, tule perch, sucker, and trout. Seasonal wetlands supported massive bird migrations. The San Francisco Bay, at twice its current size, was one of the most productive estuaries in the lower 48 states. Upstream, the Sacramento– San Joaquin Delta was a 700,000-acre mosaic of tidal freshwater marsh, tidal channels, floodplains, and natural levees. The biological productivity of the inland waters of California, when linked to the productivity of the Pacific Ocean, supported a large population of Native Californians with diverse and complex cultures. Before the arrival of Europeans, California had more than 300,000 inhabitants who spoke between 80 and 100 languages, making it among the most densely populated regions of North America (Anderson 2005; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009). This diverse human landscape, as well as the natural waterscape of California itself, would change irrevocably—first with Spanish and Mexican settlements and later (more dramatically) with the discovery of gold and the economic transformation that ensued. The original inhabitants of the Sacramento area were the Nisenan, or plains Maidu, who occupied the land for at least 7,000 years. Recent evidence may date back much longer, but evidence is inconclusive as of this writing. With the arrival of the Hispanics, Europeans and other explorers beginning in the late 1500s, and the following waves of non-native peoples, came diseases, destruction of traditional food sources, slavery and genocide. By about 1890, the population of Nisenan, as with most California Indians, had been nearly decimated. The few survivors worked on farms and in mines and clung to remnants of their culture.Though they have no written record of their past, archeological studies show that the Nisenan lived in villages near the banks of the American River, which they called Kum Sayo, (“Roundhouse River.”) Forty archaeological sites have been recorded on the banks of the American River from its mouth to the junction of the middle and south forks, now inundated by Folsom Lake. These sites vary from large villages to bedrock mortar sites. A permanent village called Yolimhu was located on the south side of the American River, just south of where modern Folsom is located. For thousands of years, the Nisenan learned to live with the variable nature of the Sacramento and American Rivers as they drained the Sierras. They knew and harvested the seasonal plentitude of the wildlife and were able to move their camps to avoid the extremes of the summer heat or winter floods in the valley. Through time, the location of the river would shift and villages would be moved to new areas near the water. The Spanish settled Alta California in 1769, conscripting thousands of Native Californians into labor, dividing the lands into missions, pueblos, and ranchos and establishing California’s first system of water rights. Most diversions were small and for use on lands adjacent to the river or stream from which the water was diverted. Substantial alteration of California’s hydrologic systems would await American takeover. Early water management was largely undertaken by uncoordinated individual, corporate, and local actions, with little federal or state intervention. John Marshall’s discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 and the ensuing Gold Rush brought evermore irreversible changes to the area. What began as simple panning for gold carried downstream by California’s rivers quickly evolved into industrial-scale extraction. As the easy gold was sluiced, sifted, and panned out, the gold miners found that they had to move water from the rivers to the gold itself. These “hydraulic miners” diverted water from streams high in the gold country, carrying it (sometimes for many miles) through wooden flumes, dropping it through penstocks to generate hydraulic pressure, and then using the pressurized water to blast away hillsides containing ore. The miners then washed the debris through sluices to separate the gold from its surrounding sediment. By 1880, the gold country had 20,000 miners and more than 6,000 miles of ditches, flumes, and canals. The industry generated more than $5.5 billion in wealth (in current dollars), roughly one-quarter of one year of California’s agricultural production today (Hundley 2001). The hydraulic mining of the Sierra Nevada was the first large-scale effort to industrialize California’s water resources, with profound consequences for the economy, the environment, and the laws that govern water use (Isenberg 2005). The Gold Rush also produced California’s first significant experiments with local and collective flood management. Hydraulic mining generated more than a million acre-feet of debris that washed downriver during winter and spring torrents, entering the Sacramento Valley and eventually moving as a wave through the Delta and into San Francisco Bay (Gilbert 1917). The debris choked the river channels, reducing their capacity to carry flows and forcing water and sediment onto the lowland floodplains. These floodplains, which included the newly established capitol of Sacramento, were prone to seasonal inundation even under normal conditions.
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