Restoring a Portion of the San Joaquin River’s Glory

For nearly 150 years, ever since this valley passed from Yokuts to white men, the river that runs through its heart has bent to the will of a wealthy few.

It has served as an irrigator for cattle barons and fruit kings, a country club for duffers and a lush backyard for Fresno bluebloods who, truth be known, claimed their piece of the river as squatters.

Now a parkway is taking shape along a 22-mile stretch of the San Joaquin River through Fresno and Madera counties, spreading its gifts from a handful to the larger community. After almost 15 years of rancor and planning, 2,800 acres of parkway land have been donated or purchased by the state for $48 million. A bond measure set for a vote in March could bring in an additional $25 million to buy even more land.

A five-mile trail replanted with native grass begins at Woodward Park in Fresno and meanders along the gentle bluffs carved out by California’s second-mightiest river, though it looks like little more than a creek on this side of Friant Dam.

An 1890s house near the river bottom is being gutted and turned into a museum with rooms that pay homage to the Yokuts, the natives who fished the river’s salmon, and pioneers such as Henry Miller, the cattle king who first diverted its flow and paved the way for the salmon’s demise.

“The San Joaquin is one of the most abused rivers in the country, and to see a parkway rising feels very hopeful,” said Mary Savala, one of three Fresno women who began pushing the idea in 1986. “It’s actually happened faster and better than we ever envisioned.”

Here in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley, it is the river that breaks the tedium of the fields and suburbs spread across the flatland. Fresno’s sprawl now reaches the bluffs, but down in the river bottom, Savala says, the temperature and quality of light and sound seem different. Though parkway proponents seek to preserve this vanishing habitat through land purchases, they also want to make the river more accessible to fishermen, bird watchers, hikers and joggers. Last summer, 800 children attended camp there.

“No matter how jaded they are, everyone who goes out on that river in a canoe feels the serenity, the removal from urban life,” Savala said.

In the days when tule elk and mustangs roamed in great herds and wildflowers carpeted the plain, the river that gave the valley its name was hardly serene. Like so many newcomers, the Mayfields, a clan from Kentucky, stood in wonder as they trudged over the bare hills in the spring of 1850 and caught a glimpse of a “shining thread of light” flowing through a “crazy quilt of colors.”

It was the Rio San Joaquin, and a peaceful tribe of Yokuts was living amid the oaks and tules.

“My Daddy had traveled a great deal, and it was not easy to get him excited,” Thomas Jefferson Mayfield recounted in a memoir, “Indian Summer.” “But he said that he would not have believed that such a place existed if he had not seen it himself. And my mother cried with joy, and wanted to make a home right here in the midst of it all.”

The Mayfields ended up heading 30 miles south, to the Kings River, but families from Illinois, Missouri and Texas were right behind them. Hundreds settled along the San Joaquin and planted crops in its flood plains, driving out the Yokuts.

Today, no major river in America, not even the Colorado, has seen more of its flow choked off by man, water experts agree. Nearly 98% of the Sierra snowmelt crashing down the upper river is shunted through a network of dams and canals to distant farms. Downstream from the parkway, the river runs dry for 50 miles. The only trickle in this stretch is the polluted runoff from the irrigated farm fields.

“The lower San Joaquin is dead. It’s nothing more than a sewer drain,” said Lloyd Carter, president of Save Our Streams, a Fresno-based group seeking to revive the river downstream.

“The Sierra snowpack is a public resource worth billions of dollars each year. Why should all of it go to farmers? Why not a little to bring back the river?”

It wasn’t farming, but the ambitions of developers that gave Savala and her two friends, Clary Creager and Peggy Smith, the idea to push for a parkway. In the mid-1980s, after the big floods seemed an inconvenience of the past, Fresno County began accepting proposals to build housing tracts, condos and Scottish link golf courses in the river bottom.

Developers argued that the history of the river was a history of trespass, from Friant Dam to the squatters to the gravel mines to the mobile home parks to the three golf courses already planted in the river bottom. What was the big fuss about a few thousand new houses?

“The more we thought about it, the more ridiculous it became,” Savala said. “There were lots of places to build, but only one river. What could we do to save it?”

A Cal State Fresno professor, Harold Tokmakian, told them such a plan had already been commissioned by the city of Fresno--in 1918. The passing of 80 years had made the words of Charles Henry Cheney, the plan’s author, only seem more relevant.

“A large park on the San Joaquin River [is] essential, where city people can get away and feel free of the cramped and narrow city life which holds them most of the time,” Cheney wrote. “Such a large park would therefore be not only recreational and ornamental, but could well promote the commercial welfare.”

Savala took the plan to one of Fresno’s most prominent and wealthy women, Coke Hallowell, and in 1988 they formed the San Joaquin River Parkway and Conservation Trust with 10 others. Four years later, the state Department of Fish and Game bought the parkway’s first piece of land, a 270-acre heron rookery known as Rank Island.

Parkway proponents got more than a little help from the river itself. In 1997, a historic flood washed away bridges, mobile homes and the dreams of developers. Looking to salvage the right to develop parcels along the higher ground, river bottom landowners in Fresno and Madera counties began approaching the parkway to sell.

Even the gravel mining and asphalt companies, after digging more than 1,000 acres of pits during 70 years of operation, wanted to get into the act. One company donated the 20-acre Riverview Ranch with its 19th century house for the Coke Hallowell Center for River Studies.

Today, the parkway has reached half of its 6,000-acre goal, though it is unclear who will pay for public safety and the operation and maintenance of the 22-mile main trail and restrooms. Local governments are looking to the state, and the state is looking to fish and bait shops and other businesses that may locate inside the park.

Parkway supporters see hope in a decade-long lawsuit brought by environmentalists challenging agriculture’s right to divert so much of the river’s flow. A federal judge in Sacramento has ruled that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation must comply with state law and provide enough water to sustain the river’s fish habitat. The two sides are trying to decide how much downstream water is needed.