Putah Creek: Water, Land, Wheat, and Community in the Sacramento Valley in the 1850s

Abstract

On 17 February 1854, George Washington Pierce and his wife, Eunice, arrived at the Ranch on Putah Creek in southern Yolo County in the lower Sacramento Valley to begin work as hands. It would be the third time in less than twenty years that the two had, in effect, started over. As young adults, both had migrated in 1835 from the East?he from upstate New York, she from Connecticut?to the fringes of the Midwest in Southport (later Kenosha), Wisconsin. They married in 1846, started a family, and seemed destined to live out their lives in this community of wheat farmers. Three years of severe drought, however, brought widespread crop failure by 1851. Many of their neighbors had already been swept westward by the intense excitement of the Gold Rush, and in April 1852, the Pierces followed them, leaving their son, George Jr., behind with relatives. After a four-month overland journey, they arrived in the Sierra foothills only to find that surface deposits had been depleted by the 100,000 forty-niners who had gotten there ahead of them. Too ashamed to return home, the Pierces turned to what they knew best. When Charles Greene, an old friend from Kenosha and now man? ager of the Big Ranch, offered them work, they jumped at the chance to start afresh.1