Tales of the San Joaquin transcript
- [Narrator] Through the vast Central Valley of California runs a once mighty river known as the San Joaquin, named in the year, 1805, by Spanish explorers, San Joaquin for the father of the Virgin Mary. Back then the river was more than 350 miles long. At one time, the San Joaquin carried a rich trade of steamboat commerce that connected the Valley to cities as far North as San Francisco. Every spring and fall, the river was alive with migrating salmon, the largest salmon run in the Central Valley. But for many, the river's greatest contribution has been the creation of the richest agricultural region the world has ever known, California's Central Valley. In some places that same San Joaquin River has literally disappeared. Join us, as we journey down the river to hear tales of the old San Joaquin. Our journey begins at the source of the San Joaquin River, south of Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The river is born here as melting snow water flows from Banner Peak and the surrounding mountains into Thousand Island Lake. The river runs to the east toward Nevada, then turns to the south through Devil's Postpile National Monument. As the river gathers force, the San Joaquin tumbles over rainbow falls, the tallest waterfall in the High Sierra. Before the river can reach the Central Valley, the San Joaquin encounters a massive roadblock, Friant Dam, owned and operated by the United States Bureau of Reclamation. Construction began during America's Great Depression of the 1930s. When completed, Friant dam began to divert the San Joaquin's water into two side canals. One smaller canal runs to the north while the other much larger 150 miles south into what had been a desert. Depending upon where one sits at the table, the dam provided jobs, made the dessert bloom, controlled flooding, or simply made rich landowners and politicians even richer. For the San Joaquin and those who care about it, the important fact is that the San Joaquin all but dies here at Friant Dam.
- Construction started in 1939 and the first placement of concrete was July 1940 and the last placement was in November of 1942. We have about two point one-three million cubic yards of concrete that was placed within a three-year period.
- [Christopher] How about showing us inside?
- Absolutely. Let's walk this way. I started working for the Bureau out here at the Fresno office in 1988. Prior to that, I was working in Sacramento. So I've been with Reclamation for the past 21 years. It's been quite an experience. I just enjoy the responsibility that the government's given me to be able to handle this reservoir. Okay. We're going to the top of the dam, which is the crest. And then we're going into the drum gate gallery. So the guys have been working here, so you've got to kind of be careful where you step. As you walk down the stairs, hold on to the guardrail. We just enter block 35 of this dam. And as I put my hand on the wall, the water is only 20 feet away from us. As you can see the elevation is three-oh-four, the water's at 574 so we're about 270 feet below the water level right now. From the bottom of the dam to the top of the water's probably about 300 feet. Well, this is Millerton Lake with a capacity of about 520,000 acre feet. One way to look at it, if you had a column on a football field, 100 miles high, that would be the volume of water behind Friant Dam. And we are about to, look at the apparatus that run this reservoir at the spillway. In 1997, for the first time in the project history, the day we started the flood, we had one guy standing here operating the butterfly valve, and he would open or close depending on if we were opening or lowering the gate. And then we had one guy up here where we're about to walk and he would tell us where the gate was located. And the day we started the flood, the gate was sitting right at 578. We had to lower it to 572. We had four guys. One guy was here looking at at the gauge. One guy was opening the butterfly valve. And two guys were on the manual valve.
- [Man] Right here, you can see just how much water's coming right over the top.
- That particular night, the Corps of engineers developed a study. And it said that the event was a 140-year event, which produced that runoff. You can imagine these three gates here were lowered 10 feet and you had a 300 foot wall of water coming over the spillway which gives you the effect of Niagara Falls. Back in the '30s, the decision was made by the State of California and the Federal government to dam the San Joaquin River. And eliminate the salmon at that time. And to take this water and use it for the farmers on the east side of the Valley, knowing willingly that the State was going to give up that species. You know, our position here at Friant Dam is to allocate the water to the East Side farmers, based on the present laws. And if somebody or someone changes those laws, Congress, or lawsuits, and it requires us to put more water down the San Joaquin river, then we'll put more water down San Joaquin River.
- [Narrator] At the next stop on our journey, we encounter the story of a son and his father and discover why any water at all continues to flow below Friant down.
- There's some almonds here.
- [Narrator] Bud Rank lived and farmed alongside the San Joaquin, his entire life.
- I was born in 1921, about half a mile from here. 80 years ago this is my place that I played in the river here and knew every rock in the river and completely different today. This used to be a tree lined river with oak trees and the water level was 15 feet higher. Great place to swim, waterholes and riffles. And this particular area right here, there was, there was a beautiful riffle right in this area here where the salmon would come in the springtime and spawn. You could almost walk across the river on salmon here. We didn't have no lights 'til I was what, 18 years old, no indoor plumbing, no refrigerator, had a wood stove, but it was a good life. It was a great place to live. I mean, this river was much more beautiful with salmon coming up in the spring and then there'll be a small fall run. I believe in 1946 was the last salmon run we had up this river. My dad was born in Missouri and he was a orphan boy. Came to California when he was about 16 years old to live with his brother, worked hard and he loved the outdoors. In about 1938, the Bureau of Reclamation notified all landowners adjacent the river, they were going to, dry the river up, take away their riparian rights and transport all that water, either south of Bakersfield or north. When they started doing what they're going to do this river, it was part of him and other farmers along the river, old timers. And they decided they weren't going to allow this to take place. And they fought it. Nobody had any money. But they knew they had to do something to protect the river.
- [Narrator] It was the middle of the Depression, hard times in the fields of the San Joaquin. To hire the best attorneys they could, Bud Rank's father went door to door, asking for donations, $1 here, $5 there, whatever anyone had to offer.
- It brought the people that farmed along the river together because they were fighting for one cause. And a cause they all believed in, was protect the river, protect the salmon.
- [Narrator] Somehow the farmers found the money to hire the attorneys they needed. Together, the farmers and their attorneys fought the Bureau of Reclamation, for 16 years.
- [Bud] Unfortunately the Supreme Court ruled that the farmers had not got proper permission, on a technicality, to sue. And threw it out of court.
- [Narrator] In the end, the farmers won a partial victory. 10% of the San Joaquin's water would be allowed to flow past the dam, enough to water the fields of the downstream farmers, but not enough to save the river.
- Had a big bearing on his health, my father. Three of the farmers found enough money to take, get a train, and go back to Washington, sit in on the Supreme Court, the hearing on that suit and on the way back, they lost it, on the way back he had a heart attack and lived four or five more years and died as a young man. My dad, I blame part of it on going to the Supreme Court and hearing him getting turned down and thrown out of court and those were tough times. And ended up, they lost most of it, but they still got a live stream here, maintained, which they would have not had if they hadn't taken it to the court. In those days it was easier for government to run over people than it is today. Today we have wildlife people, have our environmentalists that fight to protect things. And we didn't have in those days. It was the individual himself had to fight for our rights. And so I believe these are great times where we have help in trying to protect what we have and enjoy.
- [Narrator] So unique is this rare stretch of the old San Joaquin that local citizens have established the San Joaquin River Parkway and Conservation Trust to protect and even restore as much of the natural landscape as possible.
- Wooo.
- [Narrator] Working in tandem with the Parkway Trust, Bud Rank was able to dedicate a portion of the land that he and his father farmed, as a public park and wildlife preserve.
- Well, we're planting cottonwoods here. We've got about 175 of those going in throughout the entire plain here in four separate areas. These are acorns, valley oaks that were collected by the Central Valley High School students. And they're going to have to weed and follow this for about three years. This will be a forest. You're going to hear all kinds of birds. You're going to peer into the San Joaquin river and you're going to know that they're fish that migrate back and forth and that the tributaries are feeding into a healthier river.
- [Bud] I've really come to appreciate what the Parkway people have done along here. They've bought lands up. They're going to protect the area now and make place for wildlife to live and people that enjoy canoeing and things that, I wish they were around here 50 years ago. This river would've been a live river and, something that all could really be proud of.
- [Narrator] 30 miles below Friant Dam as the remaining San Joaquin is used up. We join a local grape farmer named Walt Shubin as he describes what he likes to call his lifelong love affair with the San Joaquin.
- When you talk about the San Joaquin River, I've enjoyed it for over 50 years now. More like 60 years. Hang on, we're gonna go for a ride. Hang on. Here we go. Wow! Oh! Wow, what a ride. This upper part of the San Joaquin River, can't describe the beauty of it, especially when you're on the water, so peaceful, and you, it's so relaxing and it takes your mind off of everything. People that haven't done it don't know what they're missing.
- [Narrator] Where the river once ran as wide as half a mile, we approach the next stop on our journey. All that remains of the riverboats that once made hundreds of trips up and down the San Joaquin. These fading remnants of a riverside dock, mark the final stop of the last steamboat voyage on the San Joaquin River, displaced by water diversion and the coming of the railroads, more than 50 years before the construction of Friant dam. The date was June 15th and the year was 1911. More than 1000 people from the surrounding farms showed up to witness the last paddle wheel steamboat to make its way upriver. The J R MacDonald, the last of its kind on the San Joaquin river. They might have shared the sentiments of one riverboat pilot by the name of Mark Twain. "The face of the water," he wrote, "became a wonderful book and it had a new story to tell every day." And then with a sudden call of its steam whistle, the J R MacDonald turned down river and steamed into history, at this spot on the San Joaquin River. From here, the fading San Joaquin continues westward into the Central Valley. Only 40 miles below Friant dam, and still more than 200 miles from San Francisco Bay, we approach the next stage of our journey, the place where the river runs dry. Much of the Central Valley receives so little rain that the Central Valley qualifies as a desert. Not even rainfall can save the river. This is the original river channel of the San Joaquin that once provided a home for thousands of spawning salmon. And here we join Douglas DeFlitch, a water specialist with the Friant Water Users Authority, the organization that manages contracts for water diversion at Friant Dam.
- It's economically unfeasible to say that you could let this thing run wild again. You would not only devastate all this land that's produced, you would devastate cities. So in my mind, it's not just a function of, if you put water in it, they will come. It's how can you most efficiently recreate something that has been changed? I mean, that's the difficulty of the whole situation and the difficulty of the term, restoration, is I wish it was just as easy as if you put some dang water down the channel, it'd be fixed, but it's not. Seems so unlikely every time that I see it. I see, you see this flow, right? I mean, you can see the flow, you can see the ripples in the water and then two seconds later, there's no flow anymore.
- [Narrator] These are literally the last drops of the original San Joaquin.
- The question is, how much water do you need to restore the San Joaquin river based on your definition of restore. And I don't know what the definition of restore is for certain people. If you're talking about salmon, those are some of the things that our group is studying right now is trying to figure out what those percentages are. What amount of water is required to create the proper channel form, to create the proper depths, to the create the proper spawning habitat, to get salmon again. And another thing, those are some of the things that are going to come out in some of the studies that we've been trying to do.
- [Narrator] Still dressed for running the river, Walt Shubin has been forced to abandon his canoe and continue on foot.
- This is the mighty San Joaquin and when we used to do this in canoes, this was probably 10 feet deep. And, I look at this and it's unbelievable. We'd be in water now. Just bank to bank water. Well, I kind of grew up on the river I guess. When I was just a youngster, my brother Abe and I would go down the river at Gravelly Ford and this whole thing and farther down is where we would watch the salmon run across the shallow sandbars. And, by the thousands. There were just thousands and thousands of them. I hope in my lifetime that they actually restore the river somewhat. I would like to see it, with water going to the ocean and get our salmon runs restored.
- [Narrator] For the next 20 miles, the San Joaquin is no more than a desert habitat. At the next stop on our journey, we meet Pete Cardella, a retired farmer who understands the importance of water to the Valley of the San Joaquin.
- Without the water, this soil would be nothing but dust. In other words, we're not like the Midwest where they have enough rainfall to raise a crop. Irrigation is number one in this country. Without water, we're dead.
- [Narrator] Pete keeps the past alive with his outdoor museum of antique farm implements-
- High gear.
- [Narrator] Old tractors, sowers, and harvesters.
- This was actually for vineyards is what that was for.
- [Narrator] And he knows their histories well. Pete Cardella farmed this Valley for more than 50 years.
- Yeah, when I was probably 12, 13 years old, why, me and my dad would plant wheat and he would pull that with a little Caterpillar and I would stand up here. This was loaded with sacks of wheat and every time that thing, that hopper would get low, I would have to take the sack and dump it in that hopper, keep that full all the time. Make sure it was full. This machine was probably the most important machine there was because it built all the irrigation canals around here. I would imagine even some of the dams up in the mountains were built with this Fresno scraper and what they did was they pulled it with a mule. And then the guy was standing back here with his two leather straps probably, leading the mule. Whenever he wanted to dump it, he just lift this up. He would grab and flip. And then he pulled it back and he got himself another load.
- [Narrator] And one scraper gave way to many scrapers, and then hundreds. Irrigation ditches and canals crisscrossed the Central Valley. Eventually the landscape that drew people to the Valley of the San Joaquin was transformed by a growing population and the development of a statewide water system.
- Well, they're picking. Everything we do is by hand and these workers are picking and they know which ears to leave behind. You notice they're leaving some behind. The reason they're leaving them behind is because they're small and immature. So they don't, they don't want that. They want they're really good ears. And so that's a judgment call on them. So you'll notice here, we've got some beautiful corn. This is fully matured and it's got that good yellow look, that you're looking for and this corn is ready to eat right now. Right here on this, we have 12 pickers. The rest of them are boxers. Now they're not sorting anything. They're just putting 48 years into a box. This corn is very large and they really have to cram it in there. At the end of the day, they're really tired. We will harvest corn between the 10th of June and the 1st of December. That's a wide period of time and the best workers will have a full-time job during that period and in many cases, they'll transition into other crops and they can put their kids in school and make a home. This'll probably be on a truck within 24 hours. It's generally in transit for two to three days by the time it gets to the supermarket. Right now is our peak time. And we're probably up to about 1800 people and today's pay day. And when we total up the payroll, it's going to exceed a million dollars this week. You notice we have an irrigation system here that's, this is 10-inch aluminum pipe, 10-inch outside diameter. And it has a little door, an opening where the irrigation water can come out and go down each of these rows to provide irrigation water for the corn.
- [Narrator] Without water for irrigation, farmers along the dry stretch of the river could not survive. To replace the water diverted by Friant dam. The Bureau of Reclamation had another idea, build another canal. This one to import water from Northern California, from the Delta where the Sacramento, San Joaquin and other rivers flow together to form a vast inland marsh that connects with San Francisco Bay, and bring that water southward, and the Bureau of Reclamation built their canal. The new canal carries the imported water from the Delta 150 miles south to a reservoir called Mendota Pool. The imported water, destined to meet the needs of farmers like Pete Cardella, is then released northward into a section of the original river channel of the San Joaquin. Because of its contact with San Francisco Bay, the imported water is much saltier than the original San Joaquin. And there's no salmon in it. But if you step back and take a look, you'd think the old San Joaquin had been resurrected. Just around the next bend, lies the small town of Firebaugh, a town, as someone once said not much bigger than your thumb. Even this shadow of the original river carries a rich current of memory.
- This is myself and my brother and my sister, Audrey, down here on the river. And it might be right here with that tree. When we were children, we didn't have a lot of money. My father worked on the farm, but what we did have was the San Joaquin river. So this is my dad and my twins, and the, the babies, the twin sisters, of our family. This is all of us. Father brought us here at every opportunity that he had a day off. And we swam and we picnicked. And we had a- we just had a great time. The beautiful San Joaquin River.
- We used to come right here. And the river was right there.
- Right to this edge.
- And, we throw our, we throw our hook in there and put our feet in there. And there we stayed all day, right here. If this was salmon season, you would see them from right here. They would just be on top of the water, hundreds. It boggles the mind even to this day, like I say, I was a child, but if you didn't see it yourself you would say, no, that's not true, but it was true. We used to just come down here just to sit and bait the hook and sit there all day and have a little snack pack and enjoy ourselves. We have parties down here. We stay till late in the evening or came on Saturday and stayed all day. The town was just part of the river and the river part of the town.
- [Narrator] To preserve their piece of the San Joaquin, in partnership with state and federal governments, local residents have created a Riverside park by taking one simple step.
- We're going along the river, and we're going to other parts of the community try to pick up some trash. Try to clean it up a little bit.
- Broken glass.
- We got it.
- Heavy, huh?
- Yeah.
- This used to be where everybody would come down to change their oil. Only they left their oil. They didn't take it with them. We started cleaning it up and got it pretty well picked up. He enjoys the park as much as anybody, I guess. Times I remember are the family barbecues and picnics at the river. He's got the same one. The times that my grandfather would take me down to run out on the sandbar and try to catch salmon that were going upstream. Are you ready to go home? If you want to get away from the fast pace and the crowds and the traffic, why, this is a pretty good place to be. Hopefully we can make it as enjoyable for the future as it was for the past.
- It kinda takes your troubles away. Gives you something else to think about. And you realize that there's other things going on in the world than wars and famine, and this gives you a peaceful place to come to.
- [Narrator] As we leave the haven of Firebaugh's city park behind, the river channel continues to carry the imported water northward toward San Francisco Bay. But the slender thread of water headed to our left is not the San Joaquin River. Instead it is one more canal. And this one takes the last of the Delta-Mendota water away from the San Joaquin to irrigate farmland farther to the West. The river that once ran the length of the Central Valley now comes to its end for the second time. But just then, 150 miles below Friant Dam, the San Joaquin makes a miraculous recovery. River after river rushes from the High Sierra to contribute its lifeblood to the San Joaquin. The Merced, a wonderful word in Spanish. Merced, it means mercy. The Tuolomne, named for a Native American tribe. The Stanislaus named after a Native American who escaped to freedom from the mission San Jose, and finally the Calaveras, meaning in Spanish, place of the skulls, whose exact meaning remains one of the mysteries of the Central Valley.
- I love pulling in black bass. It's the excitement in catching one because they'll come up to the top and spit the hook out. Make you mad. You gotta go back in the same place, but normally a bass after he, after he spit your hook out, he go right back to where you caught him at. Man, I lost him. I'm mad. I'll get him. He better not be anywhere in this vicinity. Oh, there he go. There he go. He's little. Told you, you might get lucky. Yeah, that's a black bass. He's small. I guess, about a good, what? Seven inches. Yeah, about seven inches. So we keep him alive. So he don't re-bite it. That's what the aerator is on the bucket that we got. And before we get ready to go we throw him back in. Fishing the San Joaquin. Just the peacefulness. It's quiet. And since I got in the bass fishing, you know, I found a perfect spot for it.
- [Narrator] As the San Joaquin nears its meeting place with its cousin to the north, the Sacramento, the river is restrained by a carefully maintained levee system, dredged to create a deep water channel for shipping here in Stockton. The pools of water in the distance? Sewage treatment ponds, a reminder that the river channel of the San Joaquin must be carefully protected, for what flows into the San Joaquin eventually flows into the Delta and potentially into the drinking water for 22 million people as far away as Los Angeles and San Diego. Only as the San Joaquin enters the Sacramento, San Joaquin Delta can the landscape of the original San Joaquin be glimpsed.
- This area here is the perfect home for the salmon. Salmon define this area as much as anything in a totemic way, in that they are dependent upon year-round, cold water streams, one, two, three inches deep, flowing over clean gravel. You think of the river as a tree. I think of it as a Tree of Life. You have a trunk and then you have big limbs. And then you have little limbs, and they have little limbs that turn into twigs. And the twigs turn into twiglets. These are sometimes unnamed little creeks and streams that, you know, five-year-old, six-year-olds like to play in and catch frogs and chase minnows and crawfish around, but those are the primary habitat, breeding habitat of salmon.
- [Narrator] 350 miles from its source in the High Sierra, from the south, the official San Joaquin blends with the Sacramento flowing in from the North, its waters, no longer distinguishable from those that will become San Francisco Bay. As for the future of the San Joaquin, it will be revealed here as well as anywhere else. Water diversion from the San Joaquin and pollution of its waters have played a major role in bringing an end to commercial fishing on the Bay. As the delicate balance between saltwater and freshwater continues to be disrupted, nets that should be full come up empty. Gone are the sardines and shrimp. Most of the migrating salmon. Gone are the large fishing fleets and jobs. And now the last of the herring fishing, the last commercial fishing on San Francisco Bay. And as for the river itself, based on a single paragraph in the Code of California's Department of Fish and Game, two environmental organizations, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Bay Institute, joined forces with 13 other fishing and conservation groups to file a lawsuit against the owner of Friant Dam, the United States Bureau of Reclamation. The Code reads in part, "The owner of any dam shall allow sufficient water to flow through the dam, to keep in good condition any fish that may exist below the dam." If successful, the lawsuit would bring salmon back to the San Joaquin and improve water quality from Friant Dam through the Delta and into San Francisco Bay. What once was, may yet be again, along the mighty San Joaquin River.
- Boy, and it's humming along. Amazing. There's gold, pure gold. That water's worth more money than oil, gold, silver. It's life. No matter how they try to screw up this river, all you have to do is put water back into it and it's beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. This almost makes me want to cry, to see what greed has done to this river. It's a tough fight. Put me in charge, there'd be water in the river right now. I'd go up to Friant, open the gates, turn the water loose. And this is what's frustrating. There's no water in the river, none. But I still think there's hope. As long as we keep fighting, there's a chance, but if we quit fighting, the party's over and we can't let that happen.
- This is not a continuous water flow all the way up to, spawning habitat up by Fresno, Friant area. So if a fish does go through this river system, they're kind of, they're lost. They're going to go up a slough, in a farmer's canal, where they're going to die because there is no spawning habitat for, you know, 100 miles. And so what we're doing with the salmon, we're capturing them and moving them upstream to Friant. Eventually we're going to have a continuous flow for these fish to migrate up to Friant, and then they will spawn on their own. Hopefully we build it and they will come. Don't want to give a lot of stress to the fish since we have an hour-and-a-half ride in the car.
- I just, a couple, yeah. Want me to grab him real quick or you want to- I'll grab him here. Here you go.
- We're actually right at a boundary line. This is the San Joaquin River. The sun is kind of low in the afternoon sky and it's shining off the slow moving surface of the San Joaquin. But we're actually at a place where two different watersheds meet. Everything from here, south in the Valley to the Tehachapis is the Tulare Basin or the Tulare Lake Basin, everything this direction from here up to Stockton is the San Joaquin Valley named because of the San Joaquin River that drains through that part of California. The entire Valley was wild nature. And probably, it was probably almost an impossible concept to imagine taming all of that, or, you know, putting it all under the plow or cultivating all of it. The State is now close to being able to restore salmon populations on the San Joaquin river because of restoration work that's going on, part of the balancing act of, you know, having a river that provides water for irrigation, for agriculture, and which hopefully can still provide adequate water for the fish population, that was originally the main natural resource of this river. Supported the early humans here and supported the early settlers as well. Salmon numbering in the thousands. And now we're down to none in the wild, except that those that are now being brought back in to try to restore those salmon runs.
- Tulare Lake would have been all of the land that's west of us right now, the Lake, basically, if you can imagine, pretty hard to picture this, Tulare Lake and San Francisco Bay, those two are nearly identical in size.
- The biggest Lake in surface area west of the Mississippi River.
- [Woman] Part of the Valley history is part of my family's history as well.
- Now we're in a drought that's probably the toughest drought we've been in, in 30 years.
- Construction started in 1939 and the first placement of concrete was July 1940 and the last placement was in November of 1942. We have about two point one-three million cubic yards of concrete that was placed within a three-year period.
- [Christopher] How about showing us inside?
- Absolutely. Let's walk this way. I started working for the Bureau out here at the Fresno office in 1988. Prior to that, I was working in Sacramento. So I've been with Reclamation for the past 21 years. It's been quite an experience. I just enjoy the responsibility that the government's given me to be able to handle this reservoir. Okay. We're going to the top of the dam, which is the crest. And then we're going into the drum gate gallery. So the guys have been working here, so you've got to kind of be careful where you step. As you walk down the stairs, hold on to the guardrail. We just enter block 35 of this dam. And as I put my hand on the wall, the water is only 20 feet away from us. As you can see the elevation is three-oh-four, the water's at 574 so we're about 270 feet below the water level right now. From the bottom of the dam to the top of the water's probably about 300 feet. Well, this is Millerton Lake with a capacity of about 520,000 acre feet. One way to look at it, if you had a column on a football field, 100 miles high, that would be the volume of water behind Friant Dam. And we are about to, look at the apparatus that run this reservoir at the spillway. In 1997, for the first time in the project history, the day we started the flood, we had one guy standing here operating the butterfly valve, and he would open or close depending on if we were opening or lowering the gate. And then we had one guy up here where we're about to walk and he would tell us where the gate was located. And the day we started the flood, the gate was sitting right at 578. We had to lower it to 572. We had four guys. One guy was here looking at at the gauge. One guy was opening the butterfly valve. And two guys were on the manual valve.
- [Man] Right here, you can see just how much water's coming right over the top.
- That particular night, the Corps of engineers developed a study. And it said that the event was a 140-year event, which produced that runoff. You can imagine these three gates here were lowered 10 feet and you had a 300 foot wall of water coming over the spillway which gives you the effect of Niagara Falls. Back in the '30s, the decision was made by the State of California and the Federal government to dam the San Joaquin River. And eliminate the salmon at that time. And to take this water and use it for the farmers on the east side of the Valley, knowing willingly that the State was going to give up that species. You know, our position here at Friant Dam is to allocate the water to the East Side farmers, based on the present laws. And if somebody or someone changes those laws, Congress, or lawsuits, and it requires us to put more water down the San Joaquin river, then we'll put more water down San Joaquin River.
- [Narrator] At the next stop on our journey, we encounter the story of a son and his father and discover why any water at all continues to flow below Friant down.
- There's some almonds here.
- [Narrator] Bud Rank lived and farmed alongside the San Joaquin, his entire life.
- I was born in 1921, about half a mile from here. 80 years ago this is my place that I played in the river here and knew every rock in the river and completely different today. This used to be a tree lined river with oak trees and the water level was 15 feet higher. Great place to swim, waterholes and riffles. And this particular area right here, there was, there was a beautiful riffle right in this area here where the salmon would come in the springtime and spawn. You could almost walk across the river on salmon here. We didn't have no lights 'til I was what, 18 years old, no indoor plumbing, no refrigerator, had a wood stove, but it was a good life. It was a great place to live. I mean, this river was much more beautiful with salmon coming up in the spring and then there'll be a small fall run. I believe in 1946 was the last salmon run we had up this river. My dad was born in Missouri and he was a orphan boy. Came to California when he was about 16 years old to live with his brother, worked hard and he loved the outdoors. In about 1938, the Bureau of Reclamation notified all landowners adjacent the river, they were going to, dry the river up, take away their riparian rights and transport all that water, either south of Bakersfield or north. When they started doing what they're going to do this river, it was part of him and other farmers along the river, old timers. And they decided they weren't going to allow this to take place. And they fought it. Nobody had any money. But they knew they had to do something to protect the river.
- [Narrator] It was the middle of the Depression, hard times in the fields of the San Joaquin. To hire the best attorneys they could, Bud Rank's father went door to door, asking for donations, $1 here, $5 there, whatever anyone had to offer.
- It brought the people that farmed along the river together because they were fighting for one cause. And a cause they all believed in, was protect the river, protect the salmon.
- [Narrator] Somehow the farmers found the money to hire the attorneys they needed. Together, the farmers and their attorneys fought the Bureau of Reclamation, for 16 years.
- [Bud] Unfortunately the Supreme Court ruled that the farmers had not got proper permission, on a technicality, to sue. And threw it out of court.
- [Narrator] In the end, the farmers won a partial victory. 10% of the San Joaquin's water would be allowed to flow past the dam, enough to water the fields of the downstream farmers, but not enough to save the river.
- Had a big bearing on his health, my father. Three of the farmers found enough money to take, get a train, and go back to Washington, sit in on the Supreme Court, the hearing on that suit and on the way back, they lost it, on the way back he had a heart attack and lived four or five more years and died as a young man. My dad, I blame part of it on going to the Supreme Court and hearing him getting turned down and thrown out of court and those were tough times. And ended up, they lost most of it, but they still got a live stream here, maintained, which they would have not had if they hadn't taken it to the court. In those days it was easier for government to run over people than it is today. Today we have wildlife people, have our environmentalists that fight to protect things. And we didn't have in those days. It was the individual himself had to fight for our rights. And so I believe these are great times where we have help in trying to protect what we have and enjoy.
- [Narrator] So unique is this rare stretch of the old San Joaquin that local citizens have established the San Joaquin River Parkway and Conservation Trust to protect and even restore as much of the natural landscape as possible.
- Wooo.
- [Narrator] Working in tandem with the Parkway Trust, Bud Rank was able to dedicate a portion of the land that he and his father farmed, as a public park and wildlife preserve.
- Well, we're planting cottonwoods here. We've got about 175 of those going in throughout the entire plain here in four separate areas. These are acorns, valley oaks that were collected by the Central Valley High School students. And they're going to have to weed and follow this for about three years. This will be a forest. You're going to hear all kinds of birds. You're going to peer into the San Joaquin river and you're going to know that they're fish that migrate back and forth and that the tributaries are feeding into a healthier river.
- [Bud] I've really come to appreciate what the Parkway people have done along here. They've bought lands up. They're going to protect the area now and make place for wildlife to live and people that enjoy canoeing and things that, I wish they were around here 50 years ago. This river would've been a live river and, something that all could really be proud of.
- [Narrator] 30 miles below Friant Dam as the remaining San Joaquin is used up. We join a local grape farmer named Walt Shubin as he describes what he likes to call his lifelong love affair with the San Joaquin.
- When you talk about the San Joaquin River, I've enjoyed it for over 50 years now. More like 60 years. Hang on, we're gonna go for a ride. Hang on. Here we go. Wow! Oh! Wow, what a ride. This upper part of the San Joaquin River, can't describe the beauty of it, especially when you're on the water, so peaceful, and you, it's so relaxing and it takes your mind off of everything. People that haven't done it don't know what they're missing.
- [Narrator] Where the river once ran as wide as half a mile, we approach the next stop on our journey. All that remains of the riverboats that once made hundreds of trips up and down the San Joaquin. These fading remnants of a riverside dock, mark the final stop of the last steamboat voyage on the San Joaquin River, displaced by water diversion and the coming of the railroads, more than 50 years before the construction of Friant dam. The date was June 15th and the year was 1911. More than 1000 people from the surrounding farms showed up to witness the last paddle wheel steamboat to make its way upriver. The J R MacDonald, the last of its kind on the San Joaquin river. They might have shared the sentiments of one riverboat pilot by the name of Mark Twain. "The face of the water," he wrote, "became a wonderful book and it had a new story to tell every day." And then with a sudden call of its steam whistle, the J R MacDonald turned down river and steamed into history, at this spot on the San Joaquin River. From here, the fading San Joaquin continues westward into the Central Valley. Only 40 miles below Friant dam, and still more than 200 miles from San Francisco Bay, we approach the next stage of our journey, the place where the river runs dry. Much of the Central Valley receives so little rain that the Central Valley qualifies as a desert. Not even rainfall can save the river. This is the original river channel of the San Joaquin that once provided a home for thousands of spawning salmon. And here we join Douglas DeFlitch, a water specialist with the Friant Water Users Authority, the organization that manages contracts for water diversion at Friant Dam.
- It's economically unfeasible to say that you could let this thing run wild again. You would not only devastate all this land that's produced, you would devastate cities. So in my mind, it's not just a function of, if you put water in it, they will come. It's how can you most efficiently recreate something that has been changed? I mean, that's the difficulty of the whole situation and the difficulty of the term, restoration, is I wish it was just as easy as if you put some dang water down the channel, it'd be fixed, but it's not. Seems so unlikely every time that I see it. I see, you see this flow, right? I mean, you can see the flow, you can see the ripples in the water and then two seconds later, there's no flow anymore.
- [Narrator] These are literally the last drops of the original San Joaquin.
- The question is, how much water do you need to restore the San Joaquin river based on your definition of restore. And I don't know what the definition of restore is for certain people. If you're talking about salmon, those are some of the things that our group is studying right now is trying to figure out what those percentages are. What amount of water is required to create the proper channel form, to create the proper depths, to the create the proper spawning habitat, to get salmon again. And another thing, those are some of the things that are going to come out in some of the studies that we've been trying to do.
- [Narrator] Still dressed for running the river, Walt Shubin has been forced to abandon his canoe and continue on foot.
- This is the mighty San Joaquin and when we used to do this in canoes, this was probably 10 feet deep. And, I look at this and it's unbelievable. We'd be in water now. Just bank to bank water. Well, I kind of grew up on the river I guess. When I was just a youngster, my brother Abe and I would go down the river at Gravelly Ford and this whole thing and farther down is where we would watch the salmon run across the shallow sandbars. And, by the thousands. There were just thousands and thousands of them. I hope in my lifetime that they actually restore the river somewhat. I would like to see it, with water going to the ocean and get our salmon runs restored.
- [Narrator] For the next 20 miles, the San Joaquin is no more than a desert habitat. At the next stop on our journey, we meet Pete Cardella, a retired farmer who understands the importance of water to the Valley of the San Joaquin.
- Without the water, this soil would be nothing but dust. In other words, we're not like the Midwest where they have enough rainfall to raise a crop. Irrigation is number one in this country. Without water, we're dead.
- [Narrator] Pete keeps the past alive with his outdoor museum of antique farm implements-
- High gear.
- [Narrator] Old tractors, sowers, and harvesters.
- This was actually for vineyards is what that was for.
- [Narrator] And he knows their histories well. Pete Cardella farmed this Valley for more than 50 years.
- Yeah, when I was probably 12, 13 years old, why, me and my dad would plant wheat and he would pull that with a little Caterpillar and I would stand up here. This was loaded with sacks of wheat and every time that thing, that hopper would get low, I would have to take the sack and dump it in that hopper, keep that full all the time. Make sure it was full. This machine was probably the most important machine there was because it built all the irrigation canals around here. I would imagine even some of the dams up in the mountains were built with this Fresno scraper and what they did was they pulled it with a mule. And then the guy was standing back here with his two leather straps probably, leading the mule. Whenever he wanted to dump it, he just lift this up. He would grab and flip. And then he pulled it back and he got himself another load.
- [Narrator] And one scraper gave way to many scrapers, and then hundreds. Irrigation ditches and canals crisscrossed the Central Valley. Eventually the landscape that drew people to the Valley of the San Joaquin was transformed by a growing population and the development of a statewide water system.
- Well, they're picking. Everything we do is by hand and these workers are picking and they know which ears to leave behind. You notice they're leaving some behind. The reason they're leaving them behind is because they're small and immature. So they don't, they don't want that. They want they're really good ears. And so that's a judgment call on them. So you'll notice here, we've got some beautiful corn. This is fully matured and it's got that good yellow look, that you're looking for and this corn is ready to eat right now. Right here on this, we have 12 pickers. The rest of them are boxers. Now they're not sorting anything. They're just putting 48 years into a box. This corn is very large and they really have to cram it in there. At the end of the day, they're really tired. We will harvest corn between the 10th of June and the 1st of December. That's a wide period of time and the best workers will have a full-time job during that period and in many cases, they'll transition into other crops and they can put their kids in school and make a home. This'll probably be on a truck within 24 hours. It's generally in transit for two to three days by the time it gets to the supermarket. Right now is our peak time. And we're probably up to about 1800 people and today's pay day. And when we total up the payroll, it's going to exceed a million dollars this week. You notice we have an irrigation system here that's, this is 10-inch aluminum pipe, 10-inch outside diameter. And it has a little door, an opening where the irrigation water can come out and go down each of these rows to provide irrigation water for the corn.
- [Narrator] Without water for irrigation, farmers along the dry stretch of the river could not survive. To replace the water diverted by Friant dam. The Bureau of Reclamation had another idea, build another canal. This one to import water from Northern California, from the Delta where the Sacramento, San Joaquin and other rivers flow together to form a vast inland marsh that connects with San Francisco Bay, and bring that water southward, and the Bureau of Reclamation built their canal. The new canal carries the imported water from the Delta 150 miles south to a reservoir called Mendota Pool. The imported water, destined to meet the needs of farmers like Pete Cardella, is then released northward into a section of the original river channel of the San Joaquin. Because of its contact with San Francisco Bay, the imported water is much saltier than the original San Joaquin. And there's no salmon in it. But if you step back and take a look, you'd think the old San Joaquin had been resurrected. Just around the next bend, lies the small town of Firebaugh, a town, as someone once said not much bigger than your thumb. Even this shadow of the original river carries a rich current of memory.
- This is myself and my brother and my sister, Audrey, down here on the river. And it might be right here with that tree. When we were children, we didn't have a lot of money. My father worked on the farm, but what we did have was the San Joaquin river. So this is my dad and my twins, and the, the babies, the twin sisters, of our family. This is all of us. Father brought us here at every opportunity that he had a day off. And we swam and we picnicked. And we had a- we just had a great time. The beautiful San Joaquin River.
- We used to come right here. And the river was right there.
- Right to this edge.
- And, we throw our, we throw our hook in there and put our feet in there. And there we stayed all day, right here. If this was salmon season, you would see them from right here. They would just be on top of the water, hundreds. It boggles the mind even to this day, like I say, I was a child, but if you didn't see it yourself you would say, no, that's not true, but it was true. We used to just come down here just to sit and bait the hook and sit there all day and have a little snack pack and enjoy ourselves. We have parties down here. We stay till late in the evening or came on Saturday and stayed all day. The town was just part of the river and the river part of the town.
- [Narrator] To preserve their piece of the San Joaquin, in partnership with state and federal governments, local residents have created a Riverside park by taking one simple step.
- We're going along the river, and we're going to other parts of the community try to pick up some trash. Try to clean it up a little bit.
- Broken glass.
- We got it.
- Heavy, huh?
- Yeah.
- This used to be where everybody would come down to change their oil. Only they left their oil. They didn't take it with them. We started cleaning it up and got it pretty well picked up. He enjoys the park as much as anybody, I guess. Times I remember are the family barbecues and picnics at the river. He's got the same one. The times that my grandfather would take me down to run out on the sandbar and try to catch salmon that were going upstream. Are you ready to go home? If you want to get away from the fast pace and the crowds and the traffic, why, this is a pretty good place to be. Hopefully we can make it as enjoyable for the future as it was for the past.
- It kinda takes your troubles away. Gives you something else to think about. And you realize that there's other things going on in the world than wars and famine, and this gives you a peaceful place to come to.
- [Narrator] As we leave the haven of Firebaugh's city park behind, the river channel continues to carry the imported water northward toward San Francisco Bay. But the slender thread of water headed to our left is not the San Joaquin River. Instead it is one more canal. And this one takes the last of the Delta-Mendota water away from the San Joaquin to irrigate farmland farther to the West. The river that once ran the length of the Central Valley now comes to its end for the second time. But just then, 150 miles below Friant Dam, the San Joaquin makes a miraculous recovery. River after river rushes from the High Sierra to contribute its lifeblood to the San Joaquin. The Merced, a wonderful word in Spanish. Merced, it means mercy. The Tuolomne, named for a Native American tribe. The Stanislaus named after a Native American who escaped to freedom from the mission San Jose, and finally the Calaveras, meaning in Spanish, place of the skulls, whose exact meaning remains one of the mysteries of the Central Valley.
- I love pulling in black bass. It's the excitement in catching one because they'll come up to the top and spit the hook out. Make you mad. You gotta go back in the same place, but normally a bass after he, after he spit your hook out, he go right back to where you caught him at. Man, I lost him. I'm mad. I'll get him. He better not be anywhere in this vicinity. Oh, there he go. There he go. He's little. Told you, you might get lucky. Yeah, that's a black bass. He's small. I guess, about a good, what? Seven inches. Yeah, about seven inches. So we keep him alive. So he don't re-bite it. That's what the aerator is on the bucket that we got. And before we get ready to go we throw him back in. Fishing the San Joaquin. Just the peacefulness. It's quiet. And since I got in the bass fishing, you know, I found a perfect spot for it.
- [Narrator] As the San Joaquin nears its meeting place with its cousin to the north, the Sacramento, the river is restrained by a carefully maintained levee system, dredged to create a deep water channel for shipping here in Stockton. The pools of water in the distance? Sewage treatment ponds, a reminder that the river channel of the San Joaquin must be carefully protected, for what flows into the San Joaquin eventually flows into the Delta and potentially into the drinking water for 22 million people as far away as Los Angeles and San Diego. Only as the San Joaquin enters the Sacramento, San Joaquin Delta can the landscape of the original San Joaquin be glimpsed.
- This area here is the perfect home for the salmon. Salmon define this area as much as anything in a totemic way, in that they are dependent upon year-round, cold water streams, one, two, three inches deep, flowing over clean gravel. You think of the river as a tree. I think of it as a Tree of Life. You have a trunk and then you have big limbs. And then you have little limbs, and they have little limbs that turn into twigs. And the twigs turn into twiglets. These are sometimes unnamed little creeks and streams that, you know, five-year-old, six-year-olds like to play in and catch frogs and chase minnows and crawfish around, but those are the primary habitat, breeding habitat of salmon.
- [Narrator] 350 miles from its source in the High Sierra, from the south, the official San Joaquin blends with the Sacramento flowing in from the North, its waters, no longer distinguishable from those that will become San Francisco Bay. As for the future of the San Joaquin, it will be revealed here as well as anywhere else. Water diversion from the San Joaquin and pollution of its waters have played a major role in bringing an end to commercial fishing on the Bay. As the delicate balance between saltwater and freshwater continues to be disrupted, nets that should be full come up empty. Gone are the sardines and shrimp. Most of the migrating salmon. Gone are the large fishing fleets and jobs. And now the last of the herring fishing, the last commercial fishing on San Francisco Bay. And as for the river itself, based on a single paragraph in the Code of California's Department of Fish and Game, two environmental organizations, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Bay Institute, joined forces with 13 other fishing and conservation groups to file a lawsuit against the owner of Friant Dam, the United States Bureau of Reclamation. The Code reads in part, "The owner of any dam shall allow sufficient water to flow through the dam, to keep in good condition any fish that may exist below the dam." If successful, the lawsuit would bring salmon back to the San Joaquin and improve water quality from Friant Dam through the Delta and into San Francisco Bay. What once was, may yet be again, along the mighty San Joaquin River.
- Boy, and it's humming along. Amazing. There's gold, pure gold. That water's worth more money than oil, gold, silver. It's life. No matter how they try to screw up this river, all you have to do is put water back into it and it's beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. This almost makes me want to cry, to see what greed has done to this river. It's a tough fight. Put me in charge, there'd be water in the river right now. I'd go up to Friant, open the gates, turn the water loose. And this is what's frustrating. There's no water in the river, none. But I still think there's hope. As long as we keep fighting, there's a chance, but if we quit fighting, the party's over and we can't let that happen.
- This is not a continuous water flow all the way up to, spawning habitat up by Fresno, Friant area. So if a fish does go through this river system, they're kind of, they're lost. They're going to go up a slough, in a farmer's canal, where they're going to die because there is no spawning habitat for, you know, 100 miles. And so what we're doing with the salmon, we're capturing them and moving them upstream to Friant. Eventually we're going to have a continuous flow for these fish to migrate up to Friant, and then they will spawn on their own. Hopefully we build it and they will come. Don't want to give a lot of stress to the fish since we have an hour-and-a-half ride in the car.
- I just, a couple, yeah. Want me to grab him real quick or you want to- I'll grab him here. Here you go.
- We're actually right at a boundary line. This is the San Joaquin River. The sun is kind of low in the afternoon sky and it's shining off the slow moving surface of the San Joaquin. But we're actually at a place where two different watersheds meet. Everything from here, south in the Valley to the Tehachapis is the Tulare Basin or the Tulare Lake Basin, everything this direction from here up to Stockton is the San Joaquin Valley named because of the San Joaquin River that drains through that part of California. The entire Valley was wild nature. And probably, it was probably almost an impossible concept to imagine taming all of that, or, you know, putting it all under the plow or cultivating all of it. The State is now close to being able to restore salmon populations on the San Joaquin river because of restoration work that's going on, part of the balancing act of, you know, having a river that provides water for irrigation, for agriculture, and which hopefully can still provide adequate water for the fish population, that was originally the main natural resource of this river. Supported the early humans here and supported the early settlers as well. Salmon numbering in the thousands. And now we're down to none in the wild, except that those that are now being brought back in to try to restore those salmon runs.
- Tulare Lake would have been all of the land that's west of us right now, the Lake, basically, if you can imagine, pretty hard to picture this, Tulare Lake and San Francisco Bay, those two are nearly identical in size.
- The biggest Lake in surface area west of the Mississippi River.
- [Woman] Part of the Valley history is part of my family's history as well.
- Now we're in a drought that's probably the toughest drought we've been in, in 30 years.