Cycles of Drought and Flood

“And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and when the wet years returned, they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Alongside its promise of idyllic weather, California delivers cycles of floods and droughts. Our climate history demonstrates stretches of drought interspersed with heavy—and sometimes catastrophic—rains.

As our state struggles through a five-year drought and an El Nino winter, we find ourselves in the seemingly paradoxical period of simultaneous flooding and drought. And, as B. Lynn Ingram and Frances Malamud-Roam write in The West without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us about Tomorrow, “Climatologists now speak in terms of even deeper droughts, and larger and more frequent floods, for the future.”

Two images in the California Historical Society’s collection exemplify these two climatic events.

Turk Island Salt Works, Alvarado

Turk Island Salt Works, Alvarado (Alameda Co.), ca. 1883. California Historical Society, CHS2013.1387.

Oil Wells on Court Street from Bixel

Oil Wells on Court Street from Bixel. Anton Wagner (Photographer), 1933, gelatin silver print, California Historical Society, CHS2012.833.

By Shelly Kale

“This lovely place, cuckoo land, is corrupted with an odd community giddiness. . . . Nowhere else do eccentrics flourish in such close abundance. Nowhere do spiritual or economic panaceas grow so lushly. Nowhere is undisciplined gullibility so widespread.”(1)

So the cultural milieu of Los Angeles appeared to the editors of Life in 1930 as a new decade began—one defined nationwide by the harsh economic realities of the Great Depression. On the streets of metropolitan Los Angeles, however, a different outsider perspective was emerging.

Two Women atop Jeffrey Pine on Sentinel Dome

Two Women atop Jeffrey Pine on Sentinel Dome. 

California Historical Society, CHS2013.1460

League of American Wheelmen Century Run

L.A.W. (League of American Wheelmen) Century Run, 6-1-1890. California Historical Society, CHS2009.187.