Hydraulic Mining and the First Environmental Law

Look at the hillsides the next time Highway Forty-Nine takes you through the country north of Auburn or through the Nevada City corridor. Notice the ones that look scoured, the slopes that are missing the top layer of earth, the ones where the exposed clay sits in pale gullies. That is not erosion. That is industry. That is what hydraulic mining left behind, and it left those marks because a technology called the monitor, refined from the water cannons hydraulic miners began using in eighteen fifty-three, was essentially a water cannon aimed at an entire mountain.

The monitor worked by directing an enormous flow of water through a nozzle at high pressure, blasting the hillside loose, washing the debris through long sluice boxes where gold settled out. It was efficient. It was also catastrophic. The tailings, called slickens, poured into the Yuba River, the Bear River, and the American River. By the eighteen-seventies, the bed of the Yuba River had risen so dramatically from accumulated mining debris that it flooded farmland it had never reached before. The Central Valley floor was being buried under feet of sand. Sacramento flooded repeatedly, in part because the riverbeds upstream had been raised so high by mining debris that the rivers could no longer contain themselves.

Farmers organized. They filed suit. In eighteen eighty-four, a federal judge named Lorenzo Sawyer issued a ruling in the case of Woodruff against the North Bloomfield Mining and Gravel Company. The Sawyer Decision banned the discharge of hydraulic mining debris into any waterway connected to the Sacramento River system. It was the first federal court order to shut down an entire industry on environmental grounds in United States history.

The mining industry called it the death of gold country. The farmers downstream called it survival.

The hills above Nevada City still bear the scars. Two of the largest sequoia trees in the Sierra foothills are growing in the edges of old hydraulic diggings because their root systems can reach the stripped clay that other trees cannot colonize. The land remembers.