How a 19th-Century Drought Gave Us the L.A. We Know Today
False Hope
Shortly after 1 p.m. on Nov. 5, 1913, the gates above the Cascade at Sylmar were opened, and water from northern California flowed into the San Fernando Valley for the first time. The crowd at the foot of the Cascade broke into loud cheering as cannons fired a salute and a brass band began to play again. Chief Engineer William Mulholland was supposed to present the Owens Valley aqueduct to Los Angeles Mayor Henry Rose, who had a speech prepared. But neither could be heard over the noise. Mulholland pointed to the torrent of water and shouted into the mayor's ear, "There it is, Mr. Mayor. Take it!"
Boisterous Angelenos were celebrating the end of the threat hanging over them — that a terrible thirst would return and choke off their city's amazing growth. Now there would be, they hoped, more than enough water for everyone.
Facing another year of little rain, as a terrible thirst has become real again, Angelenos today know how false that hope was.
A Freak of Nature
Almost none of those who witnessed the first flow from the Owens Valley in 1913 would have had memories of 1876-1877 and the drought that scorched square miles of rangeland, killed thousands of sheep and consumed what was left of pastoral Los Angeles. If Angelenos, worried about drought, had consulted the guide books that pictured Southern California as a semi-tropical paradise, they would have been told:
"And in the way of springs, rivers, creeks and marshes, there is always an abundance of water, the only exception being the great drought a few years ago — a freak of nature which is liable to occur in any country, and which no man can account for or prevent."
But there had been more than one "freak of nature" … in fact, many of them. 1795 had been a drought year, as were the years between 1807 and 1809. Drought returned in 1822-1823, followed by floods in 1825, and three years of little rain from 1827 to 1829 and again in 1844-1846. Travel writer Emma Adams described the "annual panic" in Los Angeles when winter rains were overdue and "all classes of businessmen are at a white heat of anxiety."
1856 was another drought year. "Thousands of cattle died of starvation, and those that survived were unmarketable. The year 1857 was but little improvement on its predecessor," wrote historian J. M. Guinn. Rancheros borrowed at usurious rates to restock their herds, pay taxes and defend their property titles. Rain finally returned in 1859, but in torrents. The winter of 1861-1862 was much worse. The Santa Ana River nearly wiped out Anaheim, and much of Los Angeles County was a shallow lake for weeks.
The summer that followed was unusually hot, but the winter rain had made the range bloom. Herds increased on a sea of grass. There were now more than 70,000 head of cattle on the coastal plain; three-fifths of them belonged to native Californios who might retire their debts with another year or two of good weather. Steers were selling at $7 a head in Los Angeles.
A Great Dying
But hardly any rain fell in the winter of 1862-1863, less than four inches in Los Angeles. "We have had no rain yet," his foreman wrote to rancher Abel Stearns in February 1863, "there is no grass, and the cattle are very poor." Spring brought scorching Santa Ana winds, dust storms and millions of grasshoppers to eat what was left of the withered forage. Only a trace of rain fell in November, and the dying began.
"Thousands and thousands of cattle have died, and are dying, and those that are left … stalk about like spectres," Los Angeles businessman H. D. Barrows told the San Francisco Examiner in 1864. Robert Ashcroft, a cattle buyer, rode the twenty-five miles from Los Angeles to San Pedro and found that the land "was literally covered with the carcasses of dead animals, a regular mass of dead cattle."
By the summer of 1864, the ruin of the rancheros was complete, symbolized by heaps of bones and skeletons bleaching in the sun. Seventy percent of Southern California's herds had died, and the scrawny survivors sold for only a dollar or two. Exorbitant loans fell due, as did taxes on land that was now almost worthless. Fernando Sepúlveda was compelled to sell ranch land for roughly 36 cents an acre. Stearns lost Rancho Los Alamitos to a San Francisco money lender. The Bolsa Chico rancho was auctioned off for $27 in unpaid taxes.
Selling Los Angeles
Rain returned in 1865, but it was too late. Not only had the cattle industry been consumed by the drought, but a way of life also was ending. A recognizably Hispanic culture in Southern California declined without its Californio patrons and their family networks. Their language, customs and religion would be despised by some Anglos in later years and be regarded as quaint by others. Segregated housing, education and employment shut their descendants out of the economic growth that began in 1876 to become an almost permanent boomtime after 1885.
"Never before or since has [Southern California] suffered as it suffered during those dry years," wrote historian Robert Glass Cleland in 1941. "But out of the land's misfortunes came a major economic revolution and a new Southern California." Cleland was right that Southern California's economy had been transformed by drought, but wrong about where the misfortune had fallen.
Selling Los Angeles was the economic revolution that the great drought of 1862-1864 and the lesser drought of 1876-1877 set in motion. Tens of thousands of rancho acres were acquired by investors and broken up into farms and orchards at prices ranging from $5 to $13 an acre. Key to selling the land was selling the idea of Los Angeles. The chamber of commerce brochures and railroad company guides, aimed at farmers and merchants in the Middle West and the East, spoke glowingly of the rich soil, the perfect weather and the abundance of water. They never wrote about drought.
The Owens Valley aqueduct and water from the Colorado River blunted the impact of 20th century droughts. Cattle and sheep range, emptied by thirst, became 50-by-100 foot house lots for the ten million of us who live in Los Angeles County, wondering in the summer of 2022 if there will ever be enough water.
Sources:
Adams, Emma H. Essay. In To and Fro, up and down: In Southern California, Oregon, and Washington Territory, with Sketches in New Mexico, and British Columbia, 268. Cincinnati: Cranston & Stowe, 1888.
Cleland, Robert Glass. Essay. In The Cattle on a Thousand Hills; 174. San Marino, Calif,: The Huntington library, 1941.
Guinn, J. M. Essay. In A History of California and an Extended History of Its Southern Coast Counties Also Containing Biographies of Well-Known Citizens of the Past and Present, 316–17. Los Angeles, Calif,: Historic record Co., 1907.
Stephenson, Terry E. "Forster vs. Pico: A Forgotten California 'Cause Celebre' (Continued)." The Quarterly: Historical Society of Southern California 18, no. 2 (1936): 66. https://doi.org/10.2307/41167884.
Truman, Benjamin Cummings. Essay. In Semi-Tropical California: Its Climate, Healthfulness, Productiveness, and Scenery, 70. San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft, 1874.
