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bought up cheap land along the Yuba River, where Huie and i are no~v s4anding, and the North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company vas launched. "Hydraulic mining was born and raised here in Califor- nia," Huie is saying. "And no matter what you think of the result, it was a tremendous engineering feat." The key to success was lots and lots of wacer, year-round, in dry seasons as well as wet. Engineers built a network of reser- voirs, lakes, ditches and flumes extending as far as 4o miles to catch every precious drop of rain or Sierra snowmelt. Propelled by gravity along a vertical drop of up to Soo feet, the captured waters converged into a single, powerful stream. Then they were fed into water cannons trained on the gold-bearing hillside. Huie leads me to one. "A single monitor [water cannon] with an eighrinch nozzle like this could direct t6,ooo gallons of water a minute," he says. "It could tear away .t,ooo cubic yards oC earth From the hillside every day." Into the sluices went the result, out came the gold, Che Streets, and the rest was dumped into the Yuba and sent downstream. And what a load the river carried! Tons and tons of earth, rocks, trees, shrubbery, silt and a mucky mixture of mud, sand and gravel known as "slickens." The once-crystal Yuba turned ch«olate brown. So did the Feather River, into which the Yuba emptied, and the Sacramento. The brown waters extended all the way to San Francisco Bay. Who cared? What vas the land for? Wrest what good- ies you could and move on, was the get-rich-quick refrain. During the peak years of hydraulic mining in California, tens of thousands of men found work. By tB75, North Bloomfield had become a thriving settlement, complete with hotels, saloons, groceries and dry goods stores, brew- eries, abank and a livery stable. On the heels of the gold rush, however, had come other settlers. As early as t673, downstream Carmers began to pro- test the great glaciers oC mud and silt that inundated [heir croplands every spring. As much as three Ceet of slickens would cover the rich .wheat fields, destroy the Fruit orchards, bury roads as fast as they were built. The towns of Barysville and Yuba Ciry, at the confluence of the Yuba and Feather rivers, were repeatedly flooded. The bed of the Sacramento River rose t6 feet. The miners brushed aside all complaints with arguments like those heard in em~ronmental cases today. Regulation would be costly and bring ruin to a prosperous industry; comers would be thrown out of work; towns would be desolated. Besides, the mine owners were perfectly within their property rights. After all, didn't they hold water rights to the land, granted by state law and federal In 1875, a flood left thick, gooey mud in homes of Marysville. patents? The rivers themselves belonged to everybody. Finally, in 1875, a particularly disastrous flood struck the Sacramento Valley, sending enough water swirling through Marysville to fill its streets with thick, gooey mud. State engineer William Hammond Hall's report was shocking. Hydraulic mining had dumped millions oC cubic yards of earth, rocks and debris into the Yuba. North Bloomfield Gravel Mining alone had poured in more than zo million cubic yards a year. Lining up with the farmers was the Central Pacific Rail- road (later the Southern Pacific). The politically powerful railroad not only counted on mud-free riverside tracks but was a large landowner throughout the valley. With its backing, the farmers made a federal case of the controver- sy, and in t88z, a New York resident and Marys.~lle prop- erty owner, Edwards Woodtvff, filed suit before Judge Lorenzo Sawyer. Woodruff v. North Bloomfield Grnvtl Mining Company dragged on for nearly two years. Mountains of testimony told stores and of losses to landowners like WoodrulT and legal rights held by mining com- parties, with innumerable visits by the court and witnesses to observe the damage firsthand. In January t83.t, Sawyer, who himself had come to California as a gold- seeker, presented a z55-page decision Hydraulic mining was not illegal, Sawyer wrote, but by dumping its tailings into the river, North Bloomfield not only violated the rights of those downstream but despoiled the landscape and watershed chat were not its to destroy. The company could practice hydraulic mining on its own land but vas required to impound the debris. It could no longer simply dump it into the river. Church bells rang jubilantly in Marysville that night. Hydraulic mining soon went into decline. Hydraulic min- ing's residue, of course, continued to seep into the river, and the California Debris Commission monitored the debris dams for years. The abandoned "diggins" became Malakoff Diggins Srtce Historic Park in tgg6. Abou[ z7,ooo visitors a year dnve down the twisting narrow road to admire the colorful lur- mations. Most are campers and hikers, who peak in the restored general store, which closed in tg.}z and still dis- plays boots and shovels and miners' gear left behind Or they simply marvel at the last of the eight monster svacer cannons that once pulverized the hillside, day and night. "li s an irony, isn't it?" Ken Huie is saying. He has just sho.vn me amile-and-a-half-lung tunnel that drained the mine. "h cost the company about three and a half million dollars to construct all this. And all they got back, according to the best estimates, is three and a half million For all the effort and the damage, they just about broke even," 5 M I T H 5 O N I n n m