It was the middle of June, and it had not rained for weeks, but when a dam broke on the middle fork of the Yuba River, a wave of muddy water carrying boulders and debris was heading straight for Marysville-Yuba City. So what did Marysville residents do? They gathered, of course, on the D Street Bridge in hopes of being an eye witness to the coming destruction.
Yes. It was foolish. No. Nobody on the bridge died that day.
It was June 18, 1883. It had been eight years since the 1875 flood of Marysville, in which the muddy waters of the Yuba and Feather rivers spilled over and broke through the north levee at F Street and filled the city like a bowl, drowning a 10-year-old boy. The flood had electrified the city, and changed minds there about hydraulic mining, a process which involved using large volumes of high pressure water to wash away entire mountainsides in search of gold. After this flood, Marysville, which had always looked upon the mining activity as its keystone economy, joined with farmers in the region to fight the hydraulic miners, whose practice was choking the rivers with debris, destroying productive farmland, threatening the city with continual flooding, and ending steamship traffic from San Francisco to Marysville on the Feather River. The coalition would ultimately kill hydraulic mining and usher in one of the first environmental laws in the nation, but that had not yet been achieved when English Dam, constructed on the middle fork of the Yuba River in Sierra County to impound water used in the hydraulic mining process, mysteriously failed, releasing a wall of water 100 feet high down the narrow Yuba River canyon.
Like many things in our region’s history, this was the first dam failure in California.
The English Dam was originally constructed as a “crib dam,” with logs, by the Milton Mining and Water Co. in 1857 about 55 river miles from Marysville. It was later raised and strengthened with rock fill. According to Marysville levee expert W.T. Ellis, the dam was 131 feet high and stretched 400 feet across the river. The reservoir behind the dam stretched for two and one half miles. Water from the dam was sent by flume downriver to a hydraulic mining site at French Corral. Not long before the failure of the dam, the miners had constructed the “Ridge Telephone Line,” purportedly the world’s first long distance telephone line, to communicate from point to point to point in their operation.
According to a September, 1949 article in the California Historical Society, watchman George Davis witnessed the beginnings of the dam’s failure, and said, “…it started by carrying off the wooden upper portion, and then gradually crumbled down the rest, stones and all, till nothing was left but the site. The water was an hour and a half running out, and the mammoth sink was left dry.”
N.C. Miller, ditch superintendent, picked up the telephone and sent calls to stations along the line. According to an account by Don Baumgart, Miller sent the following warning: “The English Dam broke this morning at 5 a.m. Warn everyone along the Middle Yuba River!”
Three miles below the dam, the water took out its first house and barn. The flood raged down the canyon washing away buildings, bridges, and mining flumes, and it killed at least six people along the way.
About 11 a.m., the flood reached Smartsville. “Water came down the river in a solid wave or wall, bearing on its crest a compact mass of logs and other driftwood, forming a floating bridge which seemed solid enough to enable a man to cross on it. Forty head of cattle were caught by the flood and were swept away.”
Word was sent to Marysville to expect the flood by 2 p.m. According to the California Historical Society, “At the county seat of Yuba County many citizens assembled on the Yuba (D Street) Bridge to witness the coming of the spate. Bets were made as to its probable height, and ‘the whole matter was regarded rather as a thing for jesting than for alarm.’ At about three o’clock the waters began rising gradually, till they reached a peak above normal of two feet eight inches.”
Ellis wrote, “I remember that at the D Street bridge the water was almost as thick as syrup, carrying a mass of mining debris; brush, trees, logs and other debris came down in great quantities and the bridge itself was jammed with citizens ‘watching the show.’”
“Alarm turned to disappointment,” according to the California Historical Society, “and the crowd, not seeing the seething roaring wave it had expected, went home.”
What kept the crowd at Marysville from enjoying a big thrill—or experiencing potential death? The bulk of the floodwaters broke through a levee on the south side of the Yuba River about seven miles east of Marysville, flooding the Linda district.
The failure of the English Dam—or, as the mine operators claimed, the dynamiting of the dam—and resulting flood is likely to have greatly influenced the thinking of Judge Lorenzo Sawyer when writing for the majority in a federal appeals court case permanently enjoining the mining companies from depositing the debris from their operations into the Yuba River. That decision was rendered in the year following the English Dam break.