Flood areas of the December 1861-January 1862 California Megastorm, USGS diagram, public domain courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

My family had plans last Friday to visit friends in the Sierra Nevada foothills.  That’s on the east side of California’s Central Valley. I canceled the trip, much to my patient husband’s chagrin. The problem?  We live across the Coast Range mountains, on the western side of said valley. With the state’s reservoirs overflowing, the Oroville Dam in jeopardy, and torrents of rain in the forecast, the Central Valley was in danger of becoming an inland sea.

Here’s some background for my friends from other states: California has a love/hate relationship with water.  We’ve had a couple decades of not enough, until this year when we got way too much all at once.

I can hear the environmental alarm bells going off: “This is terrible. Our climate will never return to normal.”  (Folks have been blaming climate change since at least mid-January.)

But how do we know what normal is?  That’s where a sense of history can really help. Let’s dive in, shall we?

The written history of California begins in 1769, when the King of Spain sent troops and Catholic missionaries to establish his claim to the coastal areas from San Diego to just north of San Francisco. That’s a saga for other posts.  All we need to know for now is that after control fell to Mexico in the 1820s, unrest among the California citizens led to a short revolt.  California joined the U.S., and it became a state in 1850.

Floods of 1850 and 1862

View of Sacramento City as it appeared during the great inundation in January 1850 / / drawn from nature by Geo. W. Casilear & Henry Bainbridge ; lith. of Sarony, New York. Public domain via Library of Congress.

That very year, there was a major flood in Sacramento, the boomtown that sprang up near Sutter’s fort.  An artist captured images of people paddling down the streets in canoes.

That was an unforgettable experience, though it certainly wasn’t the only flood of the era.  When the state legislature planned a grand capitol building in Sacramento, they made sure to put the foundation way uphill from the river. It was a good thing, too.

Construction began in 1861.  That December, it started to rain, conjuring up images of Noah.  The Sacramento River escaped its banks and flooded the city again, a dozen feet deep in places.  Flooded conditions persisted through January.  Tired of getting its feet wet, the legislature evacuated to San Francisco.  (Wikipedia has a long article about the Great Flood of 1862.)

The whole valley resembled a shallow lake from the Sierras to the Coast, though some higher spots stayed dry.  The new capitol site, for example, was untouched, so the work continued when weather permitted. But now Sacramento had another project, too.  The residents were determined to prevent a rerun of that unpleasant episode.

Sunken courtyard in Old Sacramento, corner of I and 2nd Streets. Photo c. 2016 by Carolyn VanGorkom

Their solution?  They built a wall –  a lot of walls, actually. These rose 12 feet straight up from the edge of each street, on both sides.  Rocks and dirt filled in to create raised roadbeds.  New wood sidewalks connected the streets to the second floor of buildings.  First floors became basements. The construction was so solid that even today you can walk those same streets in Old Town Sacramento and sip iced tea in a sunken courtyard, a relic from the street’s old elevation.

History of floods

But that’s all recent history compared to the ancient experience of California’s native peoples. In fact, newspaper records from 1862 mention that local tribes had evacuated to the foothills long before the river flooded.  Their oral traditions had taught them the warning signs; this weather pattern was nothing new to them!

So was the great flood of 1862 the last one on record?  Hardly.  In ensuing decades, engineers built a network of dams  and reservoirs for flood control and water supply.  They built levees to reclaim lowlands. But even those aren’t foolproof. I remember in January 1997, massive rainfall and melting snow combined with failed levees to recreate scenes from 1862 in Sacramento’s surrounding farmlands.

Meteorologists blame El Niño and La Niña weather patterns for much of California’s flood-and-drought cycles. They blame Atmospheric Rivers for this year’s flooding, as well as the Great Flood of 1862. But one thing we can be sure of: it has happened before, and it most certainly will again.

In spite of the fickle weather, California remains a beautiful place to live, so we learn to roll with it: conserving water during drought, canceling travel when flood threatens. Speaking of which, I’m very glad we didn’t go anywhere last Friday. Two different friends of mine, traveling on I-5 (a major artery through the state), were detoured and delayed for hours by flooding.  There’s more intense rain predicted for tomorrow.

Safe travels, everyone, and man the life boats!