U. S. Circuit Court-Cal. Edwards Woodruff vs. In this exhibition, the use and abuse of water is used to illustrate some of these transgressions.
Water runs, quite literally, through all of California history.
The first gallery of the exhibition depicts the method known as hydraulic mining, developed in 1853, which was used in the search for gold. By the 1880s, once gold no longer lay close to the surface, huge quantities of earth and rock had to be processed to reach and extract gold economically. Dams often broke, devastating nearby farms and orchards that lay in the path below the dam. The 1882-83 photographs by J. A. Todd of debris dams and the damage they caused were used as evidence in the first federal environmental legal case filed by citizens, in this case, farmers from the Marysville area, against a large corporation. The federal court ruled in the farmer's favor.