When we designed the mural (1996 & ’97) I was the information source on this old creek. But I got the main thing wrong: A creek didn’t flow in the places where the Wiggle goes.

I hereby recant (as I’m fond of doing) in great detail (as I’m also fond of doing).

I thought that the Wiggle follows an old creek bed. Half right! Only the part from Duboce to Market Street actually does. Sort of. The other part, north and west of Duboce Park, was so sandy that nothing flowed on the surface except during storms. Sand soaks up a lot of water.

The 1876 Humphreys map shows a guess at the original course, ignoring the diversion it suffered in the late 1700s. See! Maps lie. The green rectangle labeled HOSPITAL became Duboce Park.

Luckily for my half that was right, an actual creek did emerge at the base of the southernmost dune, right at Duboce Avenue (about where Sanchez is).

Here’s a rundown of what I now know about that creek.

Location

It flowed from a spring that emitted water absorbed by the dunefield. From there it flowed strongly across what is now Market Street at about Church Street. It went down 15th Street at the base of a cliff (since removed) near Dolores Street. Then it went over to 14th and entered a freshwater marsh, which in turn flowed into the tidal waterway called Mission Creek at 14th and Folsom, about where Rainbow Grocery is today.

The Creek’s Past

Before I address the tricky matter of its name, here’s the creek’s prehistory: Going back 10,000 years, the bedrock valley that’s below the sand was an actual creekbed flowing all the way from Golden Gate Park down to the Mission District. It was the ice age and the dunefield hadn’t formed, yet. Starting about 5,000 years ago, a “village” called Chutchui was along the creek. It was actually more of a campsite used during summers by Yelamu Ohlone indians.

The creek’s brief history: The strength of the spring was Captain Anza’s cue to locate the Mission just south of the dunes. They needed enough water to irrigate crops and orchards. The creek was channeled almost immediately.

According to research by Christopher Richard, an irrigation ditch was dug to divert the creek southward from the source. The couple hundred residents of Chutchui were conscripted as the first labor for the Franciscan padres who founded Mission Dolores. Indians were called “diggers” but probably not for their new pastime as ditchdiggers. More likely, it’s because they made baskets from rhizomes dug out of the creek banks.

The Creek Today

The January 1941 flood on Market Street. This was 31 years before the Muni Metro and 60 or so years before the vent was installed that acts as a drain into the station today.

Today, the creek flows in the ground, through fill soils and in the sewers. In storms, the creek returns. When the sewers fill, the water flows along the gutters. At least twice a decade, a bigger storm fills the whole street with water. A tunnel entrance at Duboce and a vent at Church and Market allow it into the subway—something designers may regret some day. The Muni Metro, at both the Van Ness and Church stations, closes for a few hours while the water gets pumped out again.

The Creek’s Future

Eventually, the pavement will wash away and the creek will return. Simple as that. Whether the creek is restored by design or by the caprices of extreme weather is up to us.

Help Name the Creek!

The case for ‘Dolores Creek’

The creek remains unnamed. Anza called it Dolores Spring (Ojo de Agua de los Dolores) because the day (in 1776) was the Feast of Sorrows (dolores). His geographer, Father Font, called the creek Dolores Creek (Arroyo Dolores) in his journal from the same expedition. We could simply use this name, except it would be confusing: Within months of Anza and Font, Father Palou (a geographic ignoramus) applied the name to another creek flowing where 18th Street is—and it stuck. Using ‘Dolores Creek’ would require also renaming the 18th Street creek.

The case for ‘San Souci Creek’

In the winter of 1861 to ’62, the largest storms ever recorded caused deep pools of water to collect in the dunefield. One covered 25 acres, in the Panhandle Park (which didn’t yet exist). When the sand gave way, slurry gushed furiously along the creek’s original bed. The deluge was so strong that it crushed Francois Pioche’s mansion to matchsticks. He was one of SF’s top financiers and his ill-fated L’Hermitage “guest cottage” was one of the few houses nearby at that time.

The popular (but incorrect) notion was that the floodwaters had come from a different over-filled lake: Sans (or San) Souci Lake was where the low part of Divisadero Street is now. It lapped the doorsills of the San Souci Roadhouse at what is now Fulton and Divisadero. As a result of this storied flood, the creek valley became known as Sans (or San) Souci Valley until at least 1920. The valley extended to the Panhandle and Lone Mountain. It was graded for roads and developed starting in the 1870s.

Perhaps the creek should be called San Souci Creek, as I did on my early Thinkwalks flyers. I like that name because sans souci means carefree in French.

It was often spelled to match the San in ‘San Francisco’. Since someone saw fit to drop an ‘s’, I hope to drop an ‘e’ and make Carefree Valley into Carfree Valley someday! I predict spelling-wars if the creek is named San Souci.

The case for ‘Chutchui Creek’

When I pose the question of naming to folks on my walking tours, the consensus is often to name it for the Yelamu campsite. Sadly, I have little information about its location(s) and less about how we came to know the name.

Have another name for the creek?

Please contribute your comments and suggestions below!

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know about my effort to create a detailed historical survey of the record-setting storm of 1862, which began in December 1861, lasting so long it was called the Noachian Deluge by many alive at the time; it was more than forty days and forty nights, you see.

I’ve been drawing together volunteers to find and transcribe contemporary news accounts. It’s painstaking work. (Wanna help?) Wonderful Thinkwalks volunteers Caesar Napolitano, Barbara Cannella, Jessica Krakow and Kerry McGuire have made it go smoothly—when there’s material available. Some of it has to be sought in hidden places in old archival storage, microfilm and so forth, and that’s assuming we can tell it exists. Some of it isn’t even cataloged.

But things may be getting easier, at least regarding a few old newspapers. The CDNC has been plugging away at the thousands of pages of news that was written since the dawn of California. The images on their site are most useful to my research, as the OCR (text recognition) digitized version is almost impossible to breeze through, having dozens of mistakes per line. But the fact that they did do OCR means relevant articles might be found with a simple keyword search—sometimes.

Access to major, i.e., prolific, papers requires a lot of work. First they’re found, then scanned, then divided into pages, then articles, then read as text, with not a lot of human time available to get past the numerous automated glitches. Then they are posted on the site. Access to mining camp papers (there were many, as the population of California was largely occupied in mining at that time), small town papers, weeklies, and other great sources will progress very slowly.

I spoke with Andrea Vanek at the project’s Berkeley office and she says grant funding, which may run out at as soon as this summer, has allowed them to digitize half a dozen papers in California for certain years only. The total so far is a few hundred thousand pages. When you consider a SF Call Sunday Edition from 1910 had more than a hundred pages, that means only a small dent has been made in the tens of thousands of news publications that have been printed in our state.

For our target time period, the CDNC project has already worked through the Sacramento Union, which we at Thinkwalks haven’t yet done anything with. It’s going to be full of 1861 & 1862 flood news. (They had devastating floods there.) They’ve also completed much of the SF Daily Alta, and a paper in LA. Since their OCR is low quality (based on limits in the low-tech originals and the microfilm itself), they’re hoping to implement a user-correction option. When it comes, we’ll submit all the stuff we’ve already hand-typed from transcription sessions.

Historically augmented reality is hitting its stride, with both entrepreneurs and public entities digging up old photos to overlay on the real world, using iPhone apps. Here are some augmented reality project links. Many are just news of plans, or prototypes, rather than finished projects. Philadelphia, Time shutter, Retronaut, Museum of London (& a blog post about it). There are also some map versions.

I predict the augmented reality fad now underway with photos will eventually extend to text, probably as a result of genealogy research. Someone will try to create descriptive text from history that you can hear or read when you are in the place described, just as my 2nd cousin Steve Echtman has created an app that tells you current info about where you are.

I suspect, also, someone will try to create a database of everyone who ever lived, and that requires looking at all text, right? Genealogy is the driving force behind a lot of history research these days. Mormons are obsessed with it for religious reasons, for starters, as are many others. Maybe grant money can come from rich users trying to buy an afterlife by saving souls. (If I understand right, collecting names of people that have died allows those who believe Mormon doctrine to improve their expected afterlife.)

If you want to help find and transcribe news from the storm, some of which will go to reconstruct the weather system as it passed through and dumped rain for weeks, please get in touch.

Official preparation is certainly important. Information about the science and history of storms also needs to be emphasized. In fact, it’s in some ways even more important for the public to understand the implications in context, than it is for officials to take protective action.

With that in mind, here is some scientific and historical context.

As the shouting from a recent spate of dire announcements inevitably goes quiet, the ARkStorm project scientists have some very interesting work ahead. The team of hundreds is tasked with creating a new system for rating storms. Currently, storms are rated only based on wind speed (for tropical storms) or on frequency. The new system would use a variety of storm attributes.

The ARkStorm “Big One” is modeled on a giant storm—an approximation of the very storm (1862) I’ve been researching myself these past eleven months. Such a large storm has been a rarity. Though it could happen twice in a row or not for a long time, a storm this size has come to California, we’re told by some press releases, an average of about twice every thousand years. That’s why it’s sometimes called a 500-year storm. Others call it the 100-year storm, for reasons I can’t understand.

But all these numbers are seriously misleading.

Location location location

First, the location is an issue. Even if we assume the averages are good predictors, we have to ask: predictors of what? A storm this big somewhere or other? A storm this big in the same place as before? And how wide an area? I’ve seen scientific texts saying the 1862 storm was not a 500-year storm unless viewed in a single location, but is instead a 30,000-year (or more) storm. This larger number is based on frequency of storms of that size happening simultaneously throughout California and Oregon.

Extreme weather events

Calling it a 500-year storm also won’t hold up to the fact that extreme weather is increasing in frequency. If the ARkStorm project aims to create a new storm severity rating system that can be used to compare storm strength on a more absolute scale (just as the Richter scale is used for earthquakes), then they have a lot of factors to consider. These range from depth of precipitation to concentration of local effects, duration, and perhaps even damage levels.

The resulting system would be better than the Richter scale in at least one important way. The severity of a storm can be estimated before the storm has dumped its full load and done all its damage.

Damage is a tricky metric

Of course, sometimes a small storm can do a lot of damage. For example, in 1955, a serious storm caused floods in many California locations, but it created a special havoc near Visalia, California, in the Kawea River Valley. In a steep part of the canyon, where big trees grow—just beside Sequoia National Park—some trees became upended and wedged. The resulting dam of debris built up a large lake behind it, breaking loose all at once.

The torrent that resulted was so large that, to this day, cores and wells drilled twenty or thirty miles out into the Central Valley often hit pockets of buried wood from trees flushed out of the Sierra Nevada mountains in a gush that rivaled Flushing, New York. (Just a little place name humor there. Forgive me.)

The quake leads to fires; the storm leads to floods

A storm’s damage level has, and clearly needs, a completely different method to measure it. I’m not crazy about the way damage is currently measured: Dollar amounts referring to repairs are not the main details that count, but that’s the standard system.

Science literacy is a life-or-death issue

When the hard work of protecting property is at hand, educating the disparaged public about the science may not seem important. But getting folks to pay attention usually is probably a fruitless effort, unless a great number of people can understand the bigger picture.

Dire warnings, without the empowering context of science and history, leave people making helpless and fatalistic quips, as offered in such comments as these, which are, soberingly, in an insurance discussion.

For our culture to shift, so we can avoid repeated Katrina-like panics and disasters, everyone affected should be treated as serious partners in solving the science. After all, a storm that big did happen in 1862 and will again, to a population much larger and more densely occupying the lowlands.

Why are we so blind to it?

I’ve been stunned to find how few people—even among flood control professionals—know about the 1862 storm’s severity! Flood control folks are the natural choice for who should be letting us all know about this fact of life.

According to M. Fred Strauss, a former water engineer for the State of California who says he did the first assessment of the flood levels from the 1862 storm, the probable reason for the blinders is the impossibility of measuring up to such high standards. Flood control efforts will never be able to prevent serious devastation from an “ARkStorm.” Therefore, he says, the natural purveyors of such information have an incentive not to spread the word about it. It would only get the hopes of the public up and create impossible-to-meet expectations.

All the more reason to focus on educating the public fully. Simply promoting safety measures is both foolhardy and patronizing.

Leland Stanford was apparently forced to take a boat through the streets of Sacramento just to attend his own inaguration as Governor of California. Here's the speech he gave, as reprinted in a paper called The American Flag.

At the time, there were at least as many broad-sheets and papers available as today, which I suppose is easy to do.

Here are dramatic readings, in my voice, of some excerpts from newspapers around the state. The dates printed are not necessary when written, as days passed before word could get out.

[1:43 length] First (above), from the Napa Echo. Note the final words, comparing to a worse rainfall in 1846. Little did they know what was in store for the next weeks.

[2:04 length] This is from the Virginia Enterprise, Virginia City, Washoe County, December 10, 1861. “Quartz” was the gold ore.

[0:20 length] By early January, things were dire in most places and deaths were commonplace. The above brief report is from the Marysville Appeal January 10th.

[0:52 length] From Sonora, The American Flag of Jan.30, 1862 tells of death and quotes the Santa Rosa Democrat similarly.

Mind you, this compilation represents a trove, but only a very tiny part of what was written. I’m hoping one of you eager readers will be interested in helping to track down more old newspapers. I have methods that are working, but are tedious, and I do wish for assistance, thanking those who’ve already come forward.

The source material is scattered in many forms, from single damaged copies in far-off archives to bound and/or microfilmed material that is still very hard to digitize or read. Are you up for a challenge with many rewards? Maybe we can build a timeline—or even an animation—of the storm as it passed over Oregon, California (both north and south) and Nevada during weeks of downpour. I already have tech people interested in making that happen, if we can provide the source texts! Or, perhaps, you’re more excited by tracking human life or town destruction? Plenty of all of that, for the enterprising.

And all painfully applicable, by way of insights, to the extreme weather of the present.

As always, I held off on canceling the tour on Tuesday. I hoped there would be a gap in the rain. I was right, but more than right, I was using a weather prediction system for local San Francisco short-term planning that I’ve now tested enough to share around. Feel free to pass the link along.

The tour ended at 2pm. At 2:20, this is how the oncoming rain looked, sweeping in from the west. Good timing!

The tour only had six people, but they all came with a can-do attitude, knowing there was a continuing chance of wet. Just as the tour began, a short drizzle gave us a moment to wonder, but then it quietly made way for a dry tour. Then, exactly as the tour ended, the drizzle started up again, this time leading into a serious rain for hours. You can see the serious rain heading into SF on this snapshot, taken from the radar website that I used, among other tools, to predict. You can also see the storm that spritzed SF just prior to the tour, drifting out past Modesto.

Often Walk the Wiggle tours attract large crowds, but being in the middle of a weekday, fewer folks were available. This can be a real treat, as it was on this occasion. Smaller groups tend to be more excitable, especially when they’re as curious and locally knowledgeable as these guys were. (I try to keep crowd size fairly low on all tours, but it can be difficult when people forget to RSVP!)

Thinkwalks, especially Wiggle walks, cover material in no particular order, because that makes it possible to keep things interesting for everyone, especially me. If I followed a sequence from an outline, it would become blah for me, which would make it blah for you. So it’s especially nice to have a very small tour like this one, where the agenda is set by something more like conversation, and less by a presentation. Often more material gets covered, but even when less gets covered (tangents, ya know), I’ve found that the knowledge retention is better.

For those of you on this tour, this blog post can act as an ongoing virtual space where you can post tour follow-up discussion using the comment reply form, below.

For everyone else, this post is an announcement of the new Thinkwalks resource page on local weather prediction!

My intent is to publish articles and a prospectus booklet, eventually extruding a book on the topic. I hope I can nudge The Great Storm and Flood from obscurity into public awareness with some serious research and writing. I consider myself lucky to have stumbled upon this incredible little-known topic. Of the professionals I recently consulted in related fields, few have been aware of the significance of the winter of 1861-62. Many of them coyly said they had heard “something about that” but few really had a clear idea that The Great Flood of California easily rivaled the Big One (1906 quake) in its impact.

Weekly update [October 10–16, 2010]

Sunday — Agitation. I’m nervous about launching into a book project, since I haven’t yet published an entire book myself. More jitterly, I haven’t yet had the chance to look into the quantity of information that may be available on my undeservedly obscure subject. Will it be enough for a serious book? I’m having some trouble setting up a database for my research notes. This is both frustrating and humiliating. The frustration is that I already have notes accumulating haphazardly. But worse: I used to be a professional database developer, and I keep finding that the new structure of FileMaker Pro stumps me. It’s a great distraction from the miserably low level of of my historical expertise—yet another concern. I’ve never even been to the California State Library’s History Room.

Monday — More frustrations with research notes database. The templates are backwards, or simply not useful. Backwards = many documents per note rather than many notes per document. Database guru Nancy Botkin encourages me to go simple, and just start a flat file of documents until I need to start detailed notes. I’m frantic to get going on topic evaluation. I had intended to decide a final “go or no” for this book project back in August. Here it is, October! I need administrative help! Luckily, a phone call to an old co-worker turned the mood. Next Wednesday, we meet. If it works out for us to collaborate, I’ll trumpet it then.

Tuesday — I’m frustrated, too, by the financial obligations involved, and my need to keep both the tours and my nascent Life History Books work going. I haven’t even had a chance to find a single client to interview for a Life History Book yet, despite Corina’s excellent set-up and gracious invitations. I vented my frustrations for more than an hour with poor Beate, but it really helped me to sort through priorities. She’s so patient with this. I looked up the ARkStorm project online and found ample reason to get in touch with the people there, at the US Geological Survey: Apparently, they’ve planned the project partly to create a new system for rating storm severity, designating the 1862 storm as the ultimate standard, set at 1,000 on the new scale they’re developing. This topic interests me greatly. I assume they are replacing the scale that measures storm severity by the average years between storms of that magnitude. That scale is becoming less useful, as extreme weather events increase. And the tropical storm scale of 1 to 5 is too blunt.

Wednesday — I awoke early at 4:30 and immediately tackled my database problems, without the former hesitation. I managed to set up my own many-to-one notes-to-documents relational file. I feel encouraged! Then I hopped a train to Sacramento for a couple days in the State Library. What a wonderful resource. A reference librarian named Karen gave me a brief but thorough introduction to the collection: photos, reading room shelves, file card system, web search, making reproductions and using their free wi-fi and free web site printing. My enthusiasm shot way up as soon as I began pursuing my main questions. Those were: What newspapers existed in California in 1862? (I found six so far.) What towns existed? (I extracted 78 towns from a complex compilation called Population History of California Places by Berlo.) Are there other photos than the two I’ve seen from the levee in Sacramento? (They have copies of ten or more!) I also found rainfall summaries and lists of newspapers to look at tomorrow.

Thursday — Up early again at Gordon’s house in Sacramento. I organized my many culled resources until the State Library opened. It was another banner day. I found a dozen more papers that existed, and a resource to find even more. Librarians had found, and held for me, a couple seriously useful bookish compilations, including a Newspaper History of the Great California Floods of 1861-62 and a book called California Storms, Floods, and Other Natural Benefits 1849–1997: A documentary by Allan Shields. There is clearly a plentitude of information, and I haven’t yet even begun to look at secondary topics. I also had a wonderful lunch with Mark Miller, a local acquaintance who showed me his house, where, he says, the sheriff lived at the time of the floods. I return to San Francisco deeply pleased.

Friday — Today’s effort, though it should be devoted to digesting the hundreds of notes and source leads from the California State Library, is instead a brief return to the California Historical Society archive on Mission Street here in San Francisco. Just in case the State Library is an anomaly, I need to experience at least one more major resource before I decide this book project is on. After my visit, I must say, yes. I have never seen two archivists’ faces light up so dramatically. Sure, I’ve found myself introducing the topic to people before. But I got the privilege of introducing two inspired people to the existence of this important event. This kind of startling interaction—which I’ve had with flood control people, geographers and historians alike—is what makes it worth my time to do this book. And, on top of that, I emerged, after only an hour, with seven leads to diaries and personal papers covering the topic (or at least the time period, in some cases), all held in their collection.

After six months of exploring haphazardly and a week of final evaluation, I’m now ready to brave the financial contortions and exhaustive effort to make this book happen. I already crave a written summary to print and hand out as the process begins. Oh, and…did I mention?…the sesquicentennial (150th) anniversary of the storms will be upon us in a mere 14 months. Time to leap.