It Will Come to Pass

In the mid-nineteenth century, the settlers who travelled west to California’s Central Valley quickly discovered that they had arrived at a place with annual floods from winter rains and spring snowmelt. Some years were more sodden than others. Nonetheless, the determined newcomers cut down trees, planted crops, built houses, and hoped for the best. After all, there was a frenzied rush for gold going on nearby, and the railways were coming. Everyone would get rich.

Attitudes should have shifted in early 1862, when the Sacramento and American Rivers crested over their banks after weeks of rain. A tremendous flood covered the Central Valley, and the city of Sacramento, the state’s capital, found itself under three metres of water. The new governor, Leland Stanford, had to travel to his inauguration by rowboat and return to his mansion through a second-storey window.