Dirt and Iron
The Industrial Revolution in the Delta
Working in the California Delta
The western half of San Joaquin County, indicated in the map below, is a large geographical area known as the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The Delta, as it’s often called, is where the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Cosumnes, Mokelumne, Calaveras, and Stanislaus rivers come together and flow to the San Francisco Bay.
When anglophone American settlers first settled the Central Valley and displaced local indigenous Yokuts, Miwok, and Nisenan peoples, the Delta region existed as a large wetland that was difficult to navigate. The major city of the Delta, Stockton, has received several nicknames associated with the Delta, including Tuleburg, for the tule grasses of the Delta, and most famously Mudville, because of how muddy the City would become when it rained.
Seeing an opportunity to make profits in agriculture, between the 1860s and 1880s, local farmers from Stockton, Lodi, and Tracy worked with capitalists from San Francisco and Sacramento to “reclaim” the Delta. “Reclamation” meant draining islands and tracts of land, and then building levies around that land so that the area would be dry enough to farm. The work was mostly conducted by immigrants from China, who were recruited in “wheelbarrow brigades.” Chinese and later Japanese, Mexican, and Filipino laborers would ultimately become the backbone of labor in the Delta, both for building levees and working on farms.
Toward the end of the 1880s, the development of one of San Joaquin County’s first major inventions helped to accelerate the reclamation of the Delta. That invention was the Stockton Clam Shell dredge, which could scoop large quantities of mud from river bottoms and then dump the soil onto a levee, to increase its size.
The Stockton Clam Shell dredge and similar inventions during the 1880s and 1890s accelerated the process of reclamation in the California Delta, and as a result, increased agricultural production in San Joaquin County. However, the reclamation of the marshes also led to new challenges: how would farm workers succeed in growing crops in soft and muddy soils?