Lake Clementine was created when the North Fork Dam, on the American River, was completed in 1939 by the Army Corps of Engineers as a debris dam.
From the arrival of the first wave of new entrepeneurs in the 1850’s, Californians have not been happy with the room layout. The resources never seemed to be in the right place where they were needed. For the gold miners it was the development of dams, flumes and canals to get water for their hydraulic mining sites. When people found out they could be successful in rearranging Californian’s resource furniture, a new mindset was created. No longer would California have to settle for utilizing resources in place, mobility and transformation began to become central to the California vision.
This new vision of how California would move forward in prosperity was a contrast to the old Spanish and Mexican land grants. In the early settlement period, settlement entrepreneurs would pick up huge acreage in land grants from the Mexican government. Some of these grants were larger than some states. Between 1784 and 1846, it was not uncommon to have a ‘ranchos’ of 10,000 to 40,000 acres. The enormous size was an acknowledgement that a farm or ranch needed vast amounts of land to be sustainable. With out the ability to move resources around, most ranching operations in California, similar to the Indian tribes, amounted to subsistence operations.
Gold may have brought hoards of people to California, but it was the weather, the land and the resources that made them stay. The 19th and 20th century saw local communities and the state tackle big projects to rearrange California to make it more livable and profitable for the new population. What could not be accomplished with local dollars was repurposed and package as a national interest to acquire Federal funding.
A hybrid of private and Federal money was the construction of the transcontinental railroad. The Federal government paid $16,000 per mile for track laid on flat ground and that amount jumped to $48,000 for mountainous routes. Congress continued to incentivize opening California and the west with railroad lines by allocating them 400′ right of way and ownership of alternating acreage along the rail line. Between 1863 and 1869 the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroad laid 1,776 miles of track, blasted 15 tunnels through the Sierra Nevada mountain range and had been awarded over $391 million dollars in land based on 1880 dollars.
As the San Francisco population grew, the need for a dependable and clean source of water arose. It is astounding to people, sometimes even living in San Francisco, that the city gets its water from a dam on the other side of the state. O’Shaughnessy dam creates Hetcth Hetchy reservoir in a valley equal in beauty to that of Yosemite. Hetch Hetchy was proposed at the turn of the 20th century but was not approved until 1913 and finally finished in 1923. Today, Hetch Hetchy, plus a few other reservoirs, serves 2.4 million people in four bay area counties. There are 11 reservoirs, 280 miles of pipe lines, 60 miles of tunnels and 5 pumping stations to move the water across the San Joaquin valley. The fight against O’Shaughnessy Dam was valiantly led by John Muir. But even his written eloquence was no match for the desire Californian’s have to move parts of the resource puzzle around.
The city of Sacramento found itself with too much water in the 19th century with regular flooding of the Sacramento River. The flooding was exacerbated by the silting of the river bottoms from hydraulic mining in the Sierras. The city of Sacramento was able to enlist the Army Corp of Engineers to design a weir system to let high water flow into the Yolo flood bypass. The Sacramento weir and Yolo bypass were completed in 1916 and comprise 59,000 acres, up to 10 miles in width and a spanning 40 miles down to the delta. This bypass, relatively simple by design, has allowed Sacramento to flourish with development and saved untold millions of dollars from flooding.
Close to Sacramento was the vast maze of water channels created by the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers known as the delta. This expansive tule marsh was reclaimed by private land owners, reclamation boards, state and Federal agencies. Today the reclaimed delta encompasses 1,100 square miles, includes 70 islands with 500,000 acres of farm land and over 700 miles of levees. The Sacramento – San Joaquin delta also serves as the conduit for State Water Project and Central Valley Project water to move south. At the southern end of the delta, the Clifton Court Forebay collects water to be pumped south for agricultural, commercial and residential consumption.
Of course, the grand daddies of all redecorating projects in California, collectively, are the Federal and state water projects. Started in the 1930’s and finishing up in the 1960’s, the combined water projects move water from northern California to the San Joaquin Valley and southern California. Combined the Federal Central Valley Project and State Water Project have 57 reservoirs, 20+ pumping plants and over 700 miles of canals and pipe lines. The northern California water serves 27 million people and irrigates close to 4 million acres of farm land.
And what did California get for all the government money poured into the water projects? Wealth. These projects made the west side of the San Joaquin valley bloom with agricultural products. While the valley grows crops, southern California grows houses. Water imported from northern California has allowed suburban and commercial development to continue when growth would have been restricted because of the lack of water.
I know you are screaming at me right now, “Where is the acknowledgement of all the environmental problems and costs that has accompanied the development of California?” The environmental problems are many and the costs high. A situation that has been exacerbated by resource redecorating in California has been the air quality in the San Joaquin Valley. With some of the worst air quality in the nation, the San Joaquin Valley is fighting to reduce air-borne contamination. The primary contributors to poor air quality in the valley are diesel and gasoline vehicles. The two main thorough fares connecting southern to northern California, Hiway 99 and Interstate 5, are the main culprits to poor air quality in the bowl know as the San Joaquin Valley. These two great transportation corridors, funded by state and Federal money, are part of resource rearranging that keeps California connected.
A visual reminder that California is not done with big projects are the renewable energy sites. From wind farms to solar panel arrays, more land and money is being dedicated to creating and moving electricity around the state and to rely less on imported energy. The next, even larger project is high-speed rail. The proposed high-speed rail project would link southern and northern California with 800 miles of track, 24 stations and trains traveling 220 mph to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco in under 3 hours.
When you consider that California, if it were an independent country, would continually rank in the top 10 of ‘Gross Domestic Product’ in the world, why shouldn’t California have a modern transportation system like England, France, Spain, Japan and other countries.
When you compare the resources spent on water projects to the development of high-speed, you can see that it is not out of line. The development of a high-speed rail system falls within the reasoning and rational of the development of other public works projects: San Francisco’s Hetch Hetchy, Sacramento’s levy and bypass systems, Federal Central Valley Projet and the State Water Project.
All of these projects increased the standard of living and increased the wealth in the region by rearranging parts of California’s abundant resource furniture. Equal in value to water, crops, houses and gold is the human talent pool known as California residents. When you review all that California has accomplished in a very short period of history, a high-speed rail system seems like the next logical step to keep the California living room a place where the world wants to come, live, invest and create wealth.
