drowning of big meadows: Nature's managers in progressive-Era California, The

Environmental History, Jan 1999 by Teisch, Jessica

By 1911, a visitor to Big Meadows noted that Prattville was "almost a deserted village and everything is going rapidly on preparatory to changing the meadows into a reservoir. The hotel at Bunnell's has been partly demolished . . . and the next step will be to place a stick of dynamite under what is left." Despite earlier promises by GWP that Prattville would be spared the flood, the remains of the town were left seventy-five feet under water when the reservoir began to fill. The town, its cemetery, and Indian burial grounds were relocated on higher ground just west of their original sites. Dr. Davis recalled that "when the lake came up it washed all the pits down and in the bottom we found thousands of beads and American money.... I would come to the lake every day and see what had washed out of the bank." The visible presence of a town, ranches, and Maidu settlements did not stand in GWP's way.lz

The Drowning of Big Meadows: The Issue of Resistance Why did Big Meadows exhibit so little resistance to GWP's "harmonious project," particularly when compared to the strong opposition to the Hetch Hetchy and Owens Valley projects? Addressing why Big Meadows failed to capture the attention of the nation hinges partly on exploring the diverse interests of GWP agents, local inhabitants who aided the company's enterprise, ranchers, and Maidu Indians. This study does not provide a detailed account of community dynamics. Rather, it shows that in contrast to its municipal counterparts, Big Meadows lacked organized resistance to the business and state interests which decided its fate. Armed with its vision of nature and the "public good," GWP brought together massive legal and financial resources. Most importantly, local, state, and federal governments influenced the ways that struggles over livelihood, nature, and private property played out in California.

National political attention and acts of organized resistance were part and parcel of public development. As Guy Earl completed Big Meadows dam, the Hetch Hetchy and Owens Valley projects were in their infancies, delayed by state and federal courts. From the perspective of local residents, Big Meadows had no such luck. An examination of local newspapers and court cases from 189o to 192o reveals that systematic local opposition to Lake Almanor never materialized. With their strong hold on state politics, GWP's San Francisco financiers, Mortimer and Herbert Fleishhacker, along with New York's Edwin Hawley, naturalized their Feather River project into that perceived as best serving the public-large Sacramento Valley agricultural and San Francisco Bay area industrial customers. The company's well-organized business interests outweighed the diffuse interests of small, rural communities and thus created an opposition to the social and economic welfare of Big Meadows. Resistance to the dam by farmers, ranchers, and town residents did not cohere into a set of consistent arguments that could effectively challenge the company's powerful ideology about technological progress.