
California may have endured an onslaught of tropically-infused atmospheric river storms that filled the calendar for months at the end of 2022 and the start of 2023 and is staring at another atmospheric river this weekend, but those storms pale in comparison to the historic floods during the winter of 1861-1862.
Colloquially today known as an "ARkStorm" - a deft reference to an "atmospheric river (AR) 1,000 (k) year storm" - the storms were a recipe for disaster for a young region that had recently been settled. Abraham Lincoln was president at the time, and America was embroiled in the first months of the Civil War. But out West, California's population was bulging to about a half million in the wake of the great Gold Rush about a dozen years prior.












Comment: See also: