By Nancy Vogel
Bee Staff Writer
Published Jan. 18, 1998

High-pressure jets of water tear a hillside apart at the North Bloomfield Mine in Nevada County. Bee file photo

Water revealed gold to men, washed it, blasted it free and, in the end, eclipsed it.

Today, water wrung from the sky by the Sierra Nevada is worth more to California than the gold that forty-niners pried from its mountains.

But it was the pursuit of gold that gave Californians the imagination, skill, drive and hubris to make the most of that water -- to launch what is perhaps the most extensive hydraulic network in the world.

California's system of dams and canals -- kick-started in 1849 -- makes possible what writer Carey McWilliams called "this highly improbable state." It overcomes a climate that yields little rain from April to November. It allows an otherwise absurd pattern of settlement that puts two-thirds of the demand for water where two-thirds of the water is not.

"No state has gained more than California from the artificial application of water," wrote Elwood Mead, a turn-of-the-century irrigation expert, "or has more at stake in the extension of its use."

And nobody learned more quickly than the gold-hungry miners of the Sierra how to put water where they wanted it.

James Marshall first fished gold flakes out of the trough of a water wheel harnessing the American River.

From then on, miners used water to do their work. At first, crouched in rivers, they sloshed water in metal pans. Soon they were shoveling gravel into wooden sluice boxes and washing away all but the gold.

Within two years, gold seekers were damming rivers and pushing them aside in order to sift the river bottom. Early dams of stone, dirt and sacks of sand foreshadowed the day when every Sierra river but one would be plugged by concrete.

By 1853, with the advent of hydraulic mining, men were turning rivers against the mountains. They used cannonlike pipes firing water 120 mph to liquefy entire hillsides.

"All these new forms of mining shared a common need: water," wrote University of Iowa historian Malcolm J. Rohrbough in a new book called "Days of Gold, The California Gold Rush and the American Nation."

Rohrbough said that mining and water became synonymous. "Providing water to miners on a large and small scale in the bars and camps became an auxiliary economic enterprise almost as significant as mining itself," he wrote.

Men formed companies to build ditches and flumes -- some suspended on trestles 200 feet above canyons -- in order to sell water.

"In Nevada, Placer and El Dorado, in Amador, Calaveras, Stanislaus and Tuolumne counties, water grew into big business," says a history of the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. by Charles M. Coleman. "Millions of dollars were spent for storage reservoirs and conduits to meet the miners' demand for more and more of the indispensable flow."

At the peak, an estimated 8,000 miles of waterways -- enough to stretch nearly a third of the way around the globe -- dipped and climbed over the Sierra goldfields.

"The world probably does not present elsewhere an example of canal building where so many large works (are) constructed through such rugged country," states a report from the state engineer to the Legislature in 1880.

The mining industry didn't last, but its hydraulic legacy did -- physically, legally and philosophically.

In 1884, Valley farmers whose land lay smothered under cobble won a court order that stopped the dumping of mining debris into rivers. Within a few years, hydraulic mining was nearly dead.

Irrigation and power companies took over the waterworks. Canals and flumes were used not to wash gold, but to generate electricity and irrigate new foothill fruit orchards.

"When surface mining waned and hydraulic mining received its death sentence by the federal courts' permanent injunction ... the great aqueduct systems stood ready and waiting for the oncoming hydroelectric industry," writes Coleman in his history of PG&E.

Though rebuilt many times, some of the canals and flumes still run full.

"The main artery to bring water into the Grass Valley and Nevada City area is the Cascade Canal. Its original construction was about 1860," said Terry Mayfield, water operations manager for the Nevada Irrigation District.

"We're still in awe today," he said. "The water system developed by the miners in the early years is absolutely an engineering phenomenon. It's flabbergasting what they accomplished with very few tools and supposedly very little knowledge."

More pervasive has been the Gold Rush impact on water rights. Modern California water law comes to us directly from gold panners who, without courts or law to settle their disputes, tried to keep peace themselves.

They established a code -- "first in time, first in right" -- that allowed people to draw water from a stream after they posted a notice stating how much, in "miner's inches," they intended to take. When rivers and creeks ran dry, the men who had been taking water the longest took their share before junior diverters.

The miners' crude notices were formalized in 1913, when anyone who wanted to draw water from a stream had to file a permit with the state.

It wasn't long after the gold was played out that the rest of the state came to see gold of another sort in snowy Sierra peaks.

The influx of hundreds of thousands of miners had built great demand for food, and agriculture took hold in the Central Valley. By the late 1870s, California's dry-land wheat crop was worth $40 million a year -- more than twice the value of gold production at the time, according to David J. Larson, a geography professor at California State University, Hayward. And it was becoming clear that local water supplies could not match the dreams of growth harbored by California's biggest cities.

By the turn of the century, men were accustomed to harnessing Sierra streams. Now they did it to irrigate the Valley and build out cities.

"A lot of that hydraulicking was based on creating reservoirs so you've got these huge bodies of water you can call on to blast away these hillsides," said Norris Hundley, author of a history of California water titled "The Great Thirst." Hundley said it is "only one step away from that to move the water to cities and crops."

Los Angeles and San Francisco each tapped Sierra streams; San Francisco flooded Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park and Los Angeles siphoned the water of the Owens Valley.

Those long-distance urban water enterprises led the way to even bigger projects.

The federal government, starting in the 1930s, built the most ambitious effort to overcome California's arid clime. Its Central Valley Project, the biggest water project in the nation, moves water 500 miles and irrigates more than 4,300 square miles of farmland along the way.

The state followed with its own colossus. The 22-dam State Water Project, approved by voters in 1960, pumps Feather River water 2,000 feet over the Tehachapi Mountains to Los Angeles. Nowhere is more water lifted higher.

California never lost the title it first earned in the Gold Rush as one of the world's most sophisticated manipulators of water. The Sierra, whose yield of water is worth more than a billion dollars a year, is still the fountain of that dynasty.

"The Gold Rush is when we literally discovered that we could move mountains and we did it with water," said Jeffrey Mount, chairman of the geology department at the University of California, Davis. "It was the beginning of hubris. The mining era opened up the realm of possibility."