Mokelumne City: Gold Rush Rival Swallowed by Floods

In eighteen fifty, near the confluence of the Cosumnes and Mokelumne Rivers, a town rose that intended to rival Stockton as the trade center of the San Joaquin Valley. Mokelumne City platted streets, opened warehouses, and for a few years was the second-largest settlement in the county. Then the floods came.

The great Central Valley deluge of eighteen sixty-two turned the lower river flatlands into an inland sea, and Mokelumne City was simply erased. Its streets, its warehouses, its ambitions all went under the water. No one rebuilt.

Stockton, on higher ground, consolidated its dominance, and Mokelumne City became one of California's earliest ghost towns, remembered mainly by the name of the river that outlasted it.