SLO County’s history is filled with stories of capturing water and enduring drought
Reporter Phil Dirkx wrote this brief history of water use in San Luis Obispo County for a Telegram-Tribune special edition on the State Water Project that published April 3, 1990.
Excerpted for length, the stories of the major dams in the county — Salinas, Nacimiento, Whale Rock and Lopez — have been previously covered.
Drought and floods have long been our way of life
Julian Estrada’s cattle and horses were moaning with hunger, starving to death before his eyes.
And he wasn’t the only rancher to hear the pitiful sound. All around San Luis Obispo County, hungry herds of livestock deserted the dry, grassless ranges to crowd around ranch buildings and cry for food.
When Estrada could bear it no longer, he drove hundreds of his cattle and horses to the cliffs near Cambria and sent them plummeting to their deaths in the sea below.
This was [159] years ago during one of this county’s many droughts — the dry years of 1862-64, when nature failed to provide enough rain to make the grass grow.
Estrada’s story appears in the “History of San Luis Obispo County and Environs” by Morrison and Haydon.
But it wasn’t all hardship and suffering.
The authors report the drought was a money-maker for San Luis Obispo entrepreneur J.P. Andrews.
“Andrews bought up hundreds of starving cattle for 10 cents each, killed them, boiled them up and fed them to his hogs, which for lack of beef, he sold at a high price. … He later loaned his profits at big interest to some of those who looked on while their herds died.”
San Luis Obispo County has had its share of dry spells and its share of floods. The constant cycle of poverty and plenty has been a fact of life for all who have lived here — though some have had it easier than others.
The 1860s drought was a hard one but no a specially long one. Archaeologist Robert O. Gibson of Paso Robles said one bad dry spell, about 7,000 years ago, lasted 1,500 years.
Scientist figured out how long it lasted by digging into sedimentary soil and examining such items as pollens that were deposited thousands of years ago.
Gibson said the 1,500-year dry spell must have been tough on the Indians in this county. Archaeologists have found very few remains of Indian villages from that period, he said.
Indians didn’t dig wells or build aqueducts, he said. They settled near streams, springs and seeps from cliffs.
The only way they had to store water was in narrow-necked baskets lined with tar, Gibson said.
But when white people started settling here they quickly built structures to transport and store water.
When the Spaniards founded Mission San Luis Obispo in 1772, they picked a spot near the junction of two creeks — San Luis Obispo and Stenner.
They had a wooden aqueduct built by 1776 to bring water to the mission’s fields from a point several miles up San Luis Obispo Creek.
That creek was still the water source for the city of San Luis Obispo when it franchised its first city water works almost 100 years later.
A flume was built to bring water down the canyon to a small reservoir.
By 1874, sheet-iron pipes were laid in the streets to deliver the water. They must have been unsatisfactory, however, because they were replaced in 1883 with cast-iron pipe fed by a 20-million-gallon capacity reservoir on San Luis Obispo Creek.
But those water works couldn’t prevent business hardships during the drought of 1898 and 1899. Some banks in the county were forced to close because ranchers couldn’t meet their mortgage payments and the dried-up ranches weren’t worth foreclosing on.
Ella Adams of rural San Miguel said she helped her late husband, Frank dig a well on their ranch.
“It was 55 years ago,” she said, “And I was young and in love and foolish.”
You might dig down 5 or 6 feet a day if you were lucky, she said.
A pulley was rigged over the hole and a bucket was let down into the hole on a rope. The digger put the dirt in the bucket and his assistant on the surface pulled it up and dumped it.
That was Ella Adams’ job.
“You got the water later the same way,” she said, “with a rope, usually with a bucket on both ends. You pulled up one bucket and let the other down at the same time.”
The well she and her husband dug was 22 feet deep, she said, but her parent’s ranch had a 75-foot deep well and she knew of hand-dug wells 90 feet deep.
Well-drilling rigs were also available around the turn of the century for people and companies who could afford to hire them.
In 1901, the Sperry Co. hired one to sink a well at its Paso Robles mill. At a depth of 400 feet they hit warm sulfur water that gushed to the surface without any pumps.
