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The thin ribbon of the Carmel River is just thirty-six miles long and no wider in most places than a child can throw a stone. It is the primary water supply for the ever-burgeoning presence of tourists, agriculture, and industry on California's Monterey Peninsula. It is also one of the top ten endangered rivers in North America. The river's story, which dramatically unfolds in this book, is an epic tale of exploitation, development, and often unwitting degradation reaching back to the first appearance of Europeans on the pristine peninsula. emRiver in Ruin/em is a precise weaving of water history-local and larger-and a natural, social, and environmental narrative of the Carmel River. Ray A. March traces the river's misuse from 1879 and details how ever more successful promotions of Monterey demanded more and more water, leading to one dam after another. As a result the river was disastrously depleted, cluttered with concrete rubble, and inhospitable to the fish prized by visitors and residents alike. March's book is a cautionary tale about squandering precious water resources-about the ultimate cost of a ruined river and the slim but urgent hope of bringing it back to life.

It is mid-December 1602. Idled in a thick coastal fog, the three Spanish ships wait for favorable weather to continue their journey northward. The ships and their crews have been at sea more than eight months with only an exploratory stop at San Diego. The men are sick with scurvy. Many have died. One ship is the Santo Tomas, a multideck commercial galleon of immense size. The second ship is the smaller frigate Tres Reyes, a square-rigged warship. The third is the San Diego, the fleetʹs flagship. Sebastian Vizcaino, a fifty-nine-year-old explorer and leader of the small fleet, is aboard

On September 8, 1999, lightning struck Californiaʹs central coast and the inland Santa Lucia Mountains of Los Padres National Forest that form the watershed for the Carmel River. In shearing white, jagged electrical charges, the lightning pierced anything in its path, including the earthʹs achingly dry, thin crust of duff. Hot tributaries darted out from white-heat sources in the sky and painted their way through the blue darkness before angling faintly off at the horizon or heading straight downward, parallel to the mother bolt. The lightning blew the sky wide open and illuminated everything for an eternal instant, and everyone

ʺRight here. This is where weʹll build the hotel,ʺ ordered Charles Crocker, as he jammed his walking cane into the soil that would become the foundation ground for the Hotel Del Monte and the future of the Monterey Peninsula. It was 1879. Crocker was immensely rich and powerful when he arrived in Monterey with his plans to turn it into a grand-scale tourist resort. Crocker was one of the Big Four, the notorious railroad developers of the Gilded Age and builders of the western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Like his three partners—Collis Potter Huntington, Leland Stanford, and Mark

Who, other than possibly Charles Crocker, back in 1880, ever dreamed that by the middle of the twentieth century the Monterey Peninsula would be so utterly and completely dependent on a singular source of water of such modest means as the Carmel River? The answer to that question is that Crockerʹs successors knew what the future held as long as they controlled the river. S. F. B. Morse, often considered a visionary by his followers, knew because his Del Monte Properties Company owned vast water rights to the Carmel River and much of the land along its banks. Owners of

On Monday, August 8, 1921, Anne Nash and Dorothy Bassett, with all their belongings in tow, boarded a southbound train for Monterey. The two hospital occupational therapy instructors from Oakland were moving to Carmel. Dorothyʹs mother was already living there, and her brother Willard arrived later to start a newspaper called the Carmel Cymbal. When the two women arrived in Monterey, they stopped to check on their baggage and missed the connecting stage, so they started walking over the hill to Carmel. Luck was with them and they hitched a ride to the lot in the Fourth Addition that they

The golf coursesʹ reliance on water from the Carmel River only exacerbated what would be an ongoing problem of meeting the water requirements of a continually escalating population. Eventually it became apparent to Cal-Am that the building of the Los Padres Dam in 1949 was not a permanent solution to solving the increasing water demands of the Monterey Peninsula. In the thinking of the time, the obvious solution to providing water—not only to the burgeoning golf courses but also to a residential and transient demand—was to build still another dam on the river. And in 1970, thatʹs what

As Crocker lay dying in his room at the Hotel Del Monte, construction of a second, larger reservoir was underway in the confines of Del Monte Forest. In August 1888, about one hundred Chinese workers were again called on to perform the labor of excavation, burning brush, cutting down pine trees, hauling them off, dynamiting the stumps that remained, and driving a ten-horse plow. By October their numbers had increased to a staggering seventeen hundred when the midday train carrying another three hundred Chinese workers arrived in Monterey. The main work camp was pitched at the north end of the

When Crocker first coveted its waters in 1880, the Carmel River was a simple, peaceful stream. It started high in the Santa Lucia Mountains as seepage that could be mistaken for leftover rainwater. It was so narrow it required no effort to step across it. As the river spilled out of the mountains and into its watershed, it gradually grew in size, but even then, it was a modest river. Only during the winters when heavy rains came did it become exceptional in its size and character, rushing over its banks and filling its floodplain. In times when few people