California: From a mining state to a farming state

In 1884, the economy of California abruptly changed its prime focus from extraction, specifically gold mining, to agriculture. How did this happen? The farmers won a lawsuit.

On Jan. 7, 1884, Judge Lorenzo Sawyer of the Federal Circuit Court (the precursor to today's 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals) issued the court's opinion in Woodruff v. North Bloomfield Gravel Mining. That, all by itself, was the sole basis for the change. Simple. But it was neither simple, nor easy, to get there.

The subject of the case was the mining practices of the defendants. The named defendant, North Bloomfield Gravel, was one of several large companies that carried out the tertiary phase of gold mining in California, called "hydraulicking." They used jets of water, ejected at high pressure from nozzles attached to large pipes, to wash entire banks of gold-bearing earth and rock off of hillsides in the Sierra foothills, and on to the only place where they could go, the natural streams and rivers below. Among the other debris were rocks the size of boulders.

Hydraulicking started small; in 1855, the miners used ordinary rubber or canvas hoses. The damage caused downstream was minimal. But by 1884, at North Bloomfield's "diggins," hugely powerful "Monitor" rigs were blasting away, night and day, some producing 185,000 cubic feet of water at a velocity of 150 feet per second. That amount of water will fill an Olympic swimming pool more than twice.

Downstream, this created a disastrous mess.

Downstream were the farmers and ranchers. The named plaintiff was a farmer whose land lay in the court's area of focus, the Yuba-Sacramento River watershed.

In the North Bloomfield opinion, Judge Sawyer produced several vivid descriptions of the havoc that existed downstream. A reasonable conclusion from this language is that he went to the area and looked for himself.

What did he see? The opinion focused on the Yuba River and its tributaries near Marysville. The Yuba, along with the Feather and the American Rivers and other lesser streams, fed the water that runs off the western Sierra Nevada foothills, into the Sacramento River, and thence to the San Francisco Bay and to the ocean.

What Judge Sawyer saw was appalling. The Yuba River was simply filled to overflowing with debris from hydraulic mining. In many places, the river, which the downstream landowners had sought to control with levees, was so choked by mining debris that the riverbed rose high above the surrounding lands, and the levees lifted it higher yet. Levee breaks were frequent and devastating. And vast. Some of the debris ended up a hundred miles downstream.

Judge Sawyer also described the ill effects of the debris flow on the Sacramento River, both in terms of the effect on its riparian lands, and on the ability of watercraft to carry traffic on it. This was an additional factor weighing against the mine operator defendants. It was also the basis for the federal court's assumption of jurisdiction, the maintenance of navigable waters being a clear federal interest. It is notable that the federal government had a meaningful hand in the result of this case, and in the contents of the opinion. The facts regarding navigability, and to a lesser degree, the effect of hydraulicking on riparian lands, were principally supported by a report of the Army Corps of Engineers.

These facts presented a classic dilemma for a judge: the reconciliation, if possible, of directly competing interests. A binary choice, a zero-sum game: How to let the miners process their gold-bearing soils, while allowing the farmers to raise their crops and the shippers to move their cargoes and passengers.

Judge Sawyer strove hard to resolve this dilemma. In the opinion, he carefully reviewed the legal defenses brought forward by the miners, since the factors weighing in the farmers' behalf were evident from the beginning. He found that there was no explicit statutory authorization for hydraulicking, and any such authorization implied by local customs and usages was insufficient.

The judge acknowledged that the court's decision would have huge consequences for the parties, and for those similarly situated. He described, in detail, the efforts made by the court to find a solution through examination of alternative methodologies and the retention of experts, all to no avail.

So he bit the bullet and issued a permanent injunction against the practice of dumping the debris from hydraulic mining in waterways throughout California. In effect, over time, this ended hydraulic mining.

Without doubt there were huge pressures on the judge and his colleague who concurred in the opinion. Tons of money were riding on it, as we would say today.

How did he get away with it? Two factors seem to have been at work: First, Lorenzo Sawyer was already a greatly respected jurist when the North Bloomfield opinion was issued. Further, and of great importance, Sawyer was a federal judge with a lifetime appointment to the bench.

Lorenzo Sawyer's judicial career had included a six-year stint on the California Supreme Court, the last two as chief justice. Then in 1870 President Ulysses S, Grant appointed him to the Court of Appeals that eventually became the 9th Circuit.

Perhaps even more important in 1884 was what he had done more recently. In 1880, he presided over the trial of the defendants in the so-called "Mussel Slough Massacre," a deadly dust-up among settlers and agents of the railroad in the Central Valley. In the aftermath of what was practically a warlike skirmish, Sawyer's trial was seen as properly run, and if it did not restore peace to the area, it didn't serve to make things worse.

In the same year came In re Tiburcio Parrott. Sawyer was joined in this case, which involved an effort to overturn a provision of the newly ratified Second California Constitution, by District Judge Ogden Hoffman. Hoffman was a jurist whose prestige was almost equal to Sawyer's. They set aside the anti-Chinese employment prohibitions in the Constitution. Each judge published his own opinion, although they concurred in the result.

In short Lorenzo Sawyer was a household word in the field of law in California, and tenure-protected by his lifetime appointment to the Court of Appeals.

The North Bloomfield decision (ever after called the "Sawyer Decision,") did not go into effect easily. The mining company simply ignored the injunction for a while, until Judge Sawyer enforced it with fines that truly were crushing.

The effects of hydraulicking may be seen even today. Just north of California Route 20 and west of Nevada City is the Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park, which includes the old North Bloomfield works. There one may, to paraphrase what Judge Sawyer wrote, "appreciate ... by actual observation" the devastating effect that hydraulicking had on the mountainsides themselves. A search engine may bring you pictures of the destruction, but the magnitude can best be seen by actual observation. Simple extrapolation from the Malakoff damage will confirm Judge Sawyer's descriptions of the downstream effects.

The other effect? Again, turn to a search engine and find a ranking of U.S. states by value of annual agricultural production. As recently as 2019, the number one state was... but you have probably already guessed that. 