Kumeyaay - A River Runs Through It
By : Chet Barfield
San Diego River has witnessed the region’s history for the past millenium and beyond.
Santa Ysabel – From an outcropping high in the Volcan Mountains, the river below looks as endless as time itself – a swath of green snaking between the brown hills and canyons, winding beyond the horizon toward a distant sea.
The slopes just to the north carry the first tiny trickles of the San Diego River, a river that has been the lifeblood of this region for more than 2 million years, long before the first footprint of man.
Up here on a granite boulder, with empty sky above and rugged mountains all around, it’s easy to go back in time, to imagine standing here 1,000 years ago. The ridges behind you would have sustained Kumeyaay Indians, who came here every fall to harvest acorns. The hills would have been teeming with deer and rabbit, other staples of the Kumeyaay, along with seeds, berries and fish.
And down there, the river – source of water, source of legend. Source of life.
The story of the San Diego River is the story of San Diego, the story of those who have called this region home throughout the millenium. To find the footprints of San Diego’s earliest inhabitants and settlers all the way to the most garish landmarks of modern society, just follow the river.
The river has seen it all.
For most of the millennium, San Diego’s mountains, shores and river valleys were home only to the Kumeyaay, a hearty people whose roots in the region go back more than 2,000 years.
Life here was good., for much the same reasons as today—mild climate and plentiful resources. Water was an essential element of survival, as it would be for all who would follow.
Anthropologist Florence Shipek says the Kumeyaay were managing the river’s precious output long before the Europeans came. They placed rocks across channels to retard the flow and allow water to seep into the ground, creating ponds and marshes.
Migrating seasonally from the beaches to the mountains, the Kumeyaay had an abundance of food that allowed them to nurture their culture and spirituality.
Larry Banegas of Barona relates a tale passed down through oral history:
Sometimes the river changed directions. It didn’t always run where it does now. For thousands of years, the people were in one place. Then the river changed directions and parted the people as well as the land. After a time, the river came back together. When it did, the people were completely different in the language they spoke and the way that they thought.
The San Diego River, Banegas says, was “like the lifeline” for the Kumeyaay.
For centuries the river emptied not into the ocean, as it does today, but alternately into San Diego and Mission bays, (the latter named “False Bay” on early maps.)
It was running into the big bay in 1769 when Father Junipero Serra and a few dozen Spanish soldiers stepped ashore to establish the first European settlement in California. They built a mission and fort on the riverbank in what is now Old Town. The white-towered Serra Museum, erected in 1929, stands at the presidio site like a sentinel overlooking Mission Valley.
After the mission moved in 1774 to its present location near the stadium, site of the Kumeyaay village of Nipaguay, the Franciscan priests had recurring problems sustaining water for their crops and 20,000 sheep, 10,000 cattle, and 1,200 horses.
Depending on the year or time of year, the San Diego River might range from a trickle to a torrent. The region—then and now—was subject to extremes of flooding and drought.
So, using American Indian labor, the priests supervised construction in 1813 of the first irrigation/flood-control project on the Pacific Coast: the Old Mission Dam, remnants of which are preserved at the Mission Trails Regional Park, just west of Santee.
Near the head of Mission Gorge, the stone dam was build 12 feet high, 250 feet across and 10 feet thick, forming a lake 300 yards long. Using a technique imported from Rome, rocks were cemented with a mortar of lime and crushed seashells mixed in riverside kilns. Then, during the next three years, a flume of cobblestone and ceramic tile was built to carry water six miles downstream to the mission.
The flume, 2 feet wide and 1 ½ feet deep was used until 1831 when damage from floods went un-repaired as the Mexican government secularized California missions. But, the lesson was not lost on those who lived in San Diego then, as well as on the waves of newcomers to follow: control of the water was key.
Bigger plans for the river were to come.
Before the Spaniards, there was no written record of the San Diego River’s fluctuations. Droughts would dry it up in Mission Valley; then rains would come and the river would swell and meander, just as it did in Kumeyaay legend.
Philip Pryde, a San Diego State University geography professor and author on local history, says the river flowed into San Diego Bay from 1769 to 1825; Mission Bay, 1825 to 1855; San Diego Bay, 1855 to 1876; and Mission Bay until 1953, when engineers dredged the wide channel that still runs from Interstate 5 to Ocean Beach, forcing the river into the sea.
An earthen dike had been erected there 100 years before to keep the river and its insidious silt out of San Diego Bay. It lasted all of two years before succumbing to flood in 1855. The first three decades of this century saw tow of the biggest floods on record. The largest was in 1916 when the river, flowing at 70,200 cubic feet per second, covered sparsely populated Mission Valley side to side. The flood was blamed on rainmaker Charles Hatfield, hired by the city for the sum of $10,000, to end a prolonged drought.
The Hatfield Flood and another in 1926, about two-thirds as big, spurred renewed commitments to water control. A plan was launched to dam the San Diego River. But first, some American Indians had to be moved out of the way.
The El Capitan Indian Reservation northwest of Alpine, designated in 1875 but occupied for centuries, was among the largest in the county at 18,800 acres. It was home to some 200 Kumeyaay in two villages – El Capitan, on the San Diego River, and Los Conejos on an eastern tributary, Conejos Creek.
In 1932, the city got Congress to approve a plan to force the American Indians off of 2,800 acres in the proposed flood plain. The American Indians got $400,000 compensation.
Pooling their funds, the El Capitan villagers bought a 5,900-acre parcel near Lakeside that became the Barona Indian Reservation. The Conejos group moved south onto a 1,600-acre horse ranch now called the Viejas reservation.
Both bands would endure decades of poverty and hard times before breaking those chains in the 1990’s with hugely successful gambling casinos. But, back in the 1930’s, the American Indians lost their river and the city got its dam. Rising 217 feet and spanning a length of four football fields at the top, it took three years and cost $5.7 million to construct.
The El Capitan Dam formed a 1,574-acre reservoir, the largest in San Diego County. It captured runoff from a 190 square mile watershed for a thirsty, growing city and brought the first real measure of flood control to the river.
As it turned out, however, neither would be enough. Soaring population growth would force San Diego to import drinking water from the Colorado River. And continued sporadic flooding proved more work would be needed to tame the river for large-scale development in Mission Valley.
In the 1940’s, the valley was citrus groves, chicken ranches and dairy farms. The 1950s brought an emergence of motels, restaurants and retail stores that continued into the ‘60s and ‘70s.
But Mission Valley as it is now was ushered in by the first San Diego River Improvement Project in the late 1980s.
At a cost of $29 Million, funded by five major property owners, the river channel between state Route 163 and Stadium (now Qualcomm) Way was dredged and deepened. Banks were heightened and lined with rocks. Plants and islands were raised and culverts added.
The project spawned an explosion of construction: shopping centers, hotels, restaurants, theaters and high-rise offices, apartments, and condominiums. Mission Valley is now San Diego’s most commercially saturated area.
Strong rainstorms will still send water spilling to the west near Fashion Valley Mall, but so far the river has not come close to cresting the fortified banks of the improvement zone.
SDSU geology professor and historian Pat Abbott says the time line of San Diego history is marked with man’s efforts to dominate the San Diego River.
“If we go back…before the Europeans were here, the river is a magnet.” He says. “The first thing the Europeans do is try to take even more control of the water supply and not be quite as much at the mercy of nature as the Kumeyaay had been. Since then, you see varying levels of trying to ratchet up that control.”
Today, thousands live, shop and drive freeways beside this placid urban river, all but oblivious to its presence. Pryde, the geographer and historian, says someday they’ll be forced to notice.
“The thing to remember about any flood channel is that it will be exceeded sooner or later,” he says. “Nature bats last, and sooner or later it’s going to win.”
Hiking enthusiast Jerry Schad, author of “Afoot and Afield in San Diego County,” has explored the river’s pristine upper reaches, 11 grueling miles between the headwaters and El Capitan Reservoir.
It’s worth it, he says. Up there, you’ll find 30 and 100-foot waterfalls and hollowed out holes in rocks where the Kumeyaay crushed acorns into meal.
If you started at the beach and hiked the 50 miles upstream you’d feel you were traveling back through time, Shad says.
“It’s like the pace, the rate of change is greatest near the mouth, slower higher and very, very slow really high up,” he says.
With directions in Schad’s book,, you can pick your way down a treacherously steep, almost imperceptible trail from the overlook near Santa Ysabel and descend into the San Diego River’s narrow, V-shaped canyon.
Here above its several tributaries, the river is but a gentle little stream in the summer and fall. Water bugs skim puddles between boulders. Thorny plants tear at your arms and legs. Oak trees reach gnarled black branches toward the blue band of sky between the cliffs.
Listen closely and you might hear the mournful trill of a canyon wren. Look down at the stones underfoot and wonder who may have trod them before – a hiker last week? A panner from the 1860s gold rush in Julian? A Kumeyaay woman filling her water basket?
Maybe any, or all.
People have come and gone for a thousand years and will continue to for a thousand more.
And still, the river will run.