San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘It rains like fury’: Great Flood of 1862 left state devastated
Stockton officials on Jan. 11, 1862, received a telegram from high in the Sierra Nevada, with each word more alarming than the last.
“It rains like fury. Hell is afloat. Look out for water!”
The line went dead after that. But residents of the Central Valley city didn’t have long to panic. By the next morning, the San Joaquin River had risen several feet and broken levees, turning Stockton into a city of canals, not streets.
The Great Flood of 1862, seemingly lost in time, is the answer to the question: What was the most destructive flood in California history? Even as floodwaters rise throughout the state,prompting President Biden to declare a state of emergency on Monday, the event has created only a fraction of the impact of the 19th-century deluge.
News reports from the time describe a surreal scene: Entire towns were destroyed, and farmland and plains turned into lakes as far as the eye could see. Almost everyone in the state was impacted by the flood, from victims who lost their homes to state employees who, in the chaos and confusion, didn’t get paid for more than a year.
There was no breaking news coverage in The Chronicle; the newspaper didn’t exist until three years after the disaster. But coverage from the Daily Alta and Marysville Appeal, along with retrospectives in The Chronicle, paint a detailed picture.
San Francisco began flooding in December 1861, when steady rains drenched the city. The first week of January dumped 12 more inches of rain in S.F., and one local newspaper made Biblical comparisons.
“The Storm King reigns rampant in our vicinity, and his rain comes in such plentitudinous dispensations as to invite comparison between our present excess and the celebrated flood which dates from the great forty days’ storm of old,” the Daily Alta reported.
Citizens watched Market Street become a river, as Mission Creek overflowed into Brannan Street, and basements on the lower elevations of Nob Hill filled with 10 feet of water.
But city residents quickly realized they had it relatively good, as reports arrived from the rest of California. The unusually warm atmospheric river dumped water while also melting snow, giving Central Valley and Sierra foothills towns a double whammy. The mining town of Red Dog in Nevada County received 11 inches of rain in a 48-hour period ending Jan. 11, 1862, and more than 190 inches between July 1, 1861, and June 30, 1862.
Sacramento levees broke on Jan. 9, 1862, sending several feet of water into city streets. More than two feet of water swirled through the state capitol, and drenched cash reserves in the basement treasury. Newspapers reported some Sacramento-area houses built near rising rivers were set adrift, with lamp lights on the second floor indicating residents were still inside.
Gov. Leland Stanford reportedly traveled the six blocks from the governor’s mansion to the State Capitol building by rowboat for his Jan. 10, 1862, inauguration ceremony.
Rural areas were hit the hardest. The Marysville Appeal reported citizens climbing up on the highest structure — a church steeple — and realizing they were surrounded by a lake.
“From the spire of the Presbyterian church the water could be seen reaching 12 miles westward to the Buttes (and) three miles eastward to the rising land connected with the foothills,” the Appeal reported.
Newspapers later reported that the “lake” of yellow rippling water stretched 20 miles wide and 250 miles long.
As the storms waned later that week, San Franciscans sent 50 tons of food and clothing to Sacramento on two riverboat steamships. They reported seeing centuries-old oak trees with trunks 10 feet in diameter uprooted and floating in the river. Cattle, sometimes as many as a dozen, were seen floating on piles of driftwood.
The American River seemed to do the most damage. Near Folsom, it was reportedly 60 feet above its low-water level.
“Sacramentans, huddled
in trees, on high ground, on rooftops, looked upon a city that had been fantastically transformed into a sort of frontier Venice,” The Chronicle would report on the 50th anniversary.
With the state government under water, the damage wouldn’t be tallied for years. The state moved legislative meetings to San Francisco for the rest of the session. Officials would later estimate that more than 4,000 Californians — 1% of the state’s population — were killed in the flood. A quarter of the state’s cattle drowned. And there was more than $100 million in damage; the equivalent of several billion in 2023 dollars.
For nearly a century, the Great Flood was referenced frequently, equal to the 1906 earthquake and fire in terms of California natural disaster lore. But now it’s mostly a footnote,
brought up as a benchmark whenever statewide flooding emergencies arrive.
Historic records suggest the Great Flood of 1862 deserves more respect. Perhaps the eeriest report came in a late-January edition of the Daily Alta, in which a passenger aboard the riverboat Chrysopolis, heading from Sutterville (just south of Sacramento) to Benicia, reported seeing no dry land, except the mountains in the distance.
“On both sides of the river as far as the eye could reach was a wide sea of muddy water, intersected here and there by clumps of bushes, lines of fences, lines of treetops, or backs of cattle peeping up through the flood.”