Inside Kennett, California: How One Copper Town Was Buried Under 500 Feet of Water

[00:00:00]There is a saloon at the bottom of Shasta Lake. Not a foundation, not a rumor.

[00:00:05]>> [music] >> An actual building called the Diamond, known across the state of California for being ornate and dazzling and open 24 hours a day with the offices of the Justice of the Peace tucked into the basement so that on a bad night you could get drunk on the ground floor and get sentenced one flight down.

[00:00:23]When the water came for the town of Kennett in the 1940s, that saloon was still standing. Nobody tore it down.

[00:00:29]They just let the lake close over it.

[00:00:31]10,000 people at the peak. 40 saloons, [music] an opera house, a hospital, a school, churches, a hotel.

[00:00:39]6,000 acres owned by a single man named Charles Butters.

[00:00:44]Over a thousand Chinese laborers who built the railroad through here in 1883.

[00:00:49]Two copper mines, the Mammoth and the Golinsky, pulling ore so pure it made men rich in a matter of months. And around 400 ft of water standing over all of it today. Closer to 500 when the lake is full and the season has been kind.

[00:01:04]Beautiful on paper. A genuine American boomtown in the mountains of northern California. The most important place in the region outside Redding itself. And yet, here's what almost nobody tells you. By the time the government came to flood Kennett, [music] the town was already dying. It had been dying for 20 years. The copper had made it >> [music] >> and the copper had killed it and the poison it breathed out had stripped every living thing off the hills for 15 miles in every direction. When the lake finally arrived, there were maybe a hundred people left to [music] watch it come.

[00:01:37]So, the question here isn't the one you'd expect. It isn't who stole this town, it's harder than [music] that.

[00:01:43]What do we owe a place that destroyed itself? When a town poisons its own ground, burns through its reason for existing, and shrinks down to a hundred stubborn holdouts, does the country still owe it a hearing? Does anyone have to ask permission before they put it under 500 ft of water? And when the answer is no, when the government looks at 100 people and decides that's not enough people to bother asking, what exactly does that tell us about how America counts a life?

[00:02:12]If you're drawn to the towns this country chose to put under water and to the uncomfortable question of which [music] drowned towns we decide to mourn, then this is exactly that kind of story because Kennett is the one that doesn't let you feel good about being sad. Let me get something out of the way first because if I save it for the end, it'll feel like an afterthought and it isn't one.

[00:02:35]Kennett was not the first thing on that land and it was not the first thing drowned there.

[00:02:41]Before there was a copper town, before there was a railroad, before there was a name on a map, that stretch of the upper Sacramento River belonged to the Wintu, nine major groups, something on the order of 250 villages up and down that river system. They had a name for the exact spot where Kennett would later stand, Munuk Sirau.

[00:03:03]It was a place with a name for thousands of years before a mapmaker misspelled a railroad worker's surname and made [music] it Kennett.

[00:03:11]They met Europeans early, fur trappers and traders drifting through in the first decades of the 1800s.

[00:03:18]And what followed is the same catastrophe that played out across the whole state, disease, violence, [music] displacement. By some estimates, around three-quarters of the Wintu population was gone by the middle of the century before the mining even properly began.

[00:03:36]Then the gold came and the copper and the smelters and the industrial machinery that turned a river valley into an extraction site.

[00:03:45]I bring this up now at the beginning for a specific reason because everything that follows, the boom, the ruin, the flooding, is the second and third [music] act of something.

[00:03:56]When the Bureau of Reclamation drowned Kennett in the 1940s, it was drowning a town that had itself been built on top of a drowning.

[00:04:04]And when the same dam later cut off the salmon [music] runs and buried village sites and sacred ground up and down that river, the Wintu lost a homeland twice over, once to the mines, once to the lake. Hold on to that. It's going to matter when we get to the question of who gets asked. The town itself started as an accident of the railroad. In 1883, a construction camp went up along Backbone Creek [music] to serve the California and Oregon Railroad, and more than a thousand Chinese laborers did the brutal work of pushing steel through that country, blasting the 1884 Shasta train tunnel, cutting grade into mountainsides, living in conditions the official histories mostly skip past.

[00:04:46]Their labor is the reason the town existed at all, and you will find almost none of their names anywhere.

[00:04:53]That's not an accident, either.

[00:04:55]That's just how the record [music] was kept. The camp got named after a railroad man, Kennett, one T, and somewhere along the line a mapmaker added a second T, and that was that.

[00:05:06]A town christened by a clerical error.

[00:05:09]Then came Charlie Galinsky. In 1884, he opened the first store, ran the post office out of it, and built a hotel and a house for his family.

[00:05:18]That's the whole origin of a city. Right there. One man with a store and a mail bag deciding a place was worth staying in.

[00:05:26]And then, in the late 1880s, a man named George Graves found copper.

[00:05:32]Here's what you need to understand about copper in 1900 America, because if you don't, none of what follows makes sense.

[00:05:40]Copper was the new oil.

[00:05:42]The country was wiring itself, electricity into cities, telephone lines across states, motors and generators and everything the 20th century was about to run on. All of it needed copper. [music] Enormous, unthinkable quantities of copper.

[00:05:58]And the ore around Kennett was exceptionally pure.

[00:06:01]The Mammoth Copper Mining Company came in and industrialized the whole valley.

[00:06:06]The Mammoth mine sat about 4 miles west of town at a much higher elevation and the ore came down to the smelter on the river.

[00:06:14]In 1905, they opened what was described as the largest copper smelter on the West Coast.

[00:06:20]Charles Butters had 6,000 acres by then and he did what boomtown owners did when they believed the boom was permanent. He built roads, churches, schools, an opera house. An opera house.

[00:06:32]In the mountains of Shasta County.

[00:06:34]By 1911, 3,000 people lived in Kennett.

[00:06:38]Then World War I hit and the price of metal went vertical because a war is a machine that eats copper. Shell casings, wire, everything. And Kennett went from a mining town to a boomtown to something close to a small city.

[00:06:52]At its absolute peak, the population is often put around 10,000.

[00:06:57]40 saloons, a hospital.

[00:07:00]Businessmen stepping off the Southern Pacific in good suits to look at their investments.

[00:07:05]And I want you to stand in it for a second because this is the part the photographs can't do. You'd hear it first.

[00:07:11]That's the thing about a smelter town.

[00:07:14]The sound arrived before the sight.

[00:07:16]The stamp and grind of ore being worked, the constant shunt [music] and couple of rail cars, the whistle marking shift change, and under all of it a low industrial hum that never stopped day or night because a smelter cannot [music] be turned off.

[00:07:32]Then you'd smell it.

[00:07:34]Sulfur.

[00:07:35]That hot metallic scorch at the back of your throat. The smell of rock being cooked.

[00:07:41]And then you'd see the smoke, bluish, the accounts say, a blue haze pouring out over the town and settling into the folds of the hills.

[00:07:50]Winding streets cut into [music] steep hillsides, houses stacked above each other on the grade, men coming off shift with copper dust in the creases of their hands.

[00:08:00]The Diamond Saloon going all night, lit up, the most famous drinking establishment for a hundred miles, and a judge [music] asleep somewhere below the floorboards.

[00:08:10]Payday in Kennett around 1917 must have been one of the loudest, most alive nights in Northern California. Nobody in that crowd would have believed you if you'd told them the whole thing had six years left. Now, this part never sat right with [music] me, and it's the reason I wanted to make this video instead of just another sad town story. That blue smoke [music] wasn't just atmosphere, it was sulfur dioxide, and when it mixed with moisture, it came down as acid, and it killed everything it touched, not metaphorically, literally, comprehensively, for 15 miles in every direction.

[00:08:47]The smelters at Kennett stripped the vegetation off the hills until the mountains around the town looked, in one description I can't get out of my head, like the aftermath of a blast. Bare rock and dead stumps and dirt.

[00:09:00]Farms in the valley below were destroyed. People who had nothing to do with mining watched their orchards and their fields die because of what was coming out of somebody else's stack, 15 miles upwind. And once the vegetation was gone, the hillsides had nothing holding them together. The erosion that started then is still a problem in that country today, a hundred years later.

[00:09:22]The town was flooded 80-plus years ago, and the ground it poisoned still hasn't fully recovered.

[00:09:28]Here's why I keep circling this, because we tell drowned town stories in one particular shape, innocent community, indifferent government, tragic ending, and Kennett doesn't fit that shape.

[00:09:40]Kennett was, by any modern standard, an environmental catastrophe that happened to have people living in it.

[00:09:47]The town got rich by doing something to the surrounding country that would land people in federal court today.

[00:09:53]And yet, [music] and this is the part that makes it complicated instead of simple, the men breathing that smoke were also the ones getting sick from it.

[00:10:02]The families living under that haze were not the ones profiting most from it.

[00:10:07]Charles Butters had 6,000 acres. A smelter worker had a wage and a cough.

[00:10:13]When we say Kennett poisoned the valley, we're describing [music] a decision made in an office by people who didn't have to live downwind of it, and then we're pinning it on a town.

[00:10:23]So, does a place like that deserve our grief when it goes under?

[00:10:27]I don't have a clean answer. I'm not sure there is one, but I think the honest version is the people did, the company didn't. [music] And the water didn't distinguish between them, because water never does.

[00:10:40]The war ended in November 1918, and Kennett died at that exact moment. It just took a few years for anybody to admit it. Copper prices collapsed.

[00:10:49]Peacetime doesn't need [music] shell casings, and the entire apparatus of that town, the expanded mines, the enlarged smelters, the extra rail spurs, all of it built at wartime scale for wartime demand, was suddenly far too big to be supported by an ordinary economy.

[00:11:06]This is the oldest [music] and most brutal arithmetic in the American West.

[00:11:10]Build for the peak, and the peak leaves.

[00:11:14]In 1923, [music] the Mammoth closed permanently, never reopened. The Galinsky went with it. And that was the end, not the water. The water is what people remember, but the killing blow landed 21 years earlier, and it came from a commodities market on the other side of the country. You know what happens next because you've seen it happen to towns in your own life.

[00:11:36]The single-industry town loses the industry. First, the young men leave because there's no work. Then the businesses that serve the young men close. Then the families follow the businesses.

[00:11:49]The school gets smaller. The saloons, 40 of them once, go dark one by one. And the ones still open are quieter and older and meaner.

[00:11:59]The opera house sits there with nothing booked. By 1931, Kennett's population had fallen so far that it could no longer legally remain an incorporated city.

[00:12:10]The town was disincorporated, officially dissolved as a municipality, 13 years before the water ever arrived. That's a strange and lonely kind of death.

[00:12:20]Kennett died on paper first. The lake was just the burial.

[00:12:24]They'd been talking about damming that river since the 1870s. That's the thing that always gets me about these projects, how long the idea sits in a drawer.

[00:12:34]The federal government had eyed the Upper Sacramento as a dam site for something like 60 years before anything happened.

[00:12:42]The river flooded the valley below. The Central Valley wanted irrigation.

[00:12:46]California wanted power. And the geography at that spot was close to ideal.

[00:12:52]What was missing was money and will.

[00:12:56]Then came the Great Depression and the New Deal. And suddenly [music] the country had an appetite for enormous public works and an army of unemployed men to build them.

[00:13:06]In 1935, construction began on Shasta Dam.

[00:13:11]What they built there is genuinely staggering. A curved concrete wall over 600 [music] ft high, one of the biggest dams in America. And behind it, the largest reservoir in California.

[00:13:23]Water for the Central Valley, the agricultural engine that would go on to feed a huge share of the country.

[00:13:30]Flood control for towns [music] downstream that had been getting wrecked for generations. Power, jobs, thousands of them. During a decade when a job was salvation. I'm not going to stand here and tell you Shasta Dam shouldn't have been built. That would be dishonest. The dam works. It does the things it was built to do and millions [music] of people have eaten food and turned on lights because of it. But there's a paragraph in this story that I think about [music] more than any other and it isn't about concrete. There is no record of any public hearing being held to ask the residents of Kennett what they thought. None.

[00:14:05]No meeting, no vote, no formal process where a citizen of that town could stand up and object or negotiate or even simply be told to their face.

[00:14:15]The reservoir was going to cover the town site and the town had a hundred or so people left in it and the judgment, never written down anywhere, but obvious from the absence of any record, was that a hundred people were not enough people to warrant the ceremony of being asked.

[00:14:30]Compare that to St. Thomas, Nevada, drowned by Hoover Dam in the same era.

[00:14:35]Those people fought. They petitioned.

[00:14:37]They organized. They held out for a better price. They lost.

[00:14:41]But there was a process, however unfair.

[00:14:45]There was a decade of argument. Somebody at least had to say no to them. Kennett didn't even get the no and that's the part I want you to sit with.

[00:14:54]Not the flooding.

[00:14:56]>> [music] >> The silence.

[00:14:57]The dam didn't defeat Kennett.

[00:15:00]Kennett had already been defeated.

[00:15:02]The dam simply confirmed that a town in that condition had stopped counting. So what does it look like when a town gets erased without an argument? Quiet.

[00:15:11]That's the honest answer. It looks quiet. Most of the remaining residents sold their land to the government and left. Not because they were happy about it necessarily, but because what was the alternative? The mines were 11, 12 years dead. The town wasn't a town anymore, legally or practically.

[00:15:30]There was no economy left to stay for. A federal check for a house in a dying place in the middle of the depression was, for many of them, the best offer they were ever going to get.

[00:15:41]They packed up and went to Redding, mostly, or wherever there was work.

[00:15:46]Some scattered further.

[00:15:48]The Southern Pacific relocated its line to higher ground.

[00:15:52]The dam builders took what materials they wanted.

[00:15:55]But a few stayed.

[00:15:57]A few of them stayed right up until the water was actually coming, >> [music] >> and I find that detail more moving than almost anything else in this story.

[00:16:05]Because those people had no leverage, no organization, no petition, no hope of changing anything. Staying accomplished nothing. It wasn't a protest. It was just a refusal to leave a second before they had to. The lake began to fill around 1940, and it didn't come like a flood.

[00:16:23]That's the thing [music] people misunderstand about reservoir towns.

[00:16:27]There's no wall of water, no dramatic moment.

[00:16:30]The river simply stops going anywhere and starts getting deeper, backing up into every creek and draw and hollow, rising a few feet a week, patient as anything.

[00:16:41]If you were standing [music] on one of those bare poisoned hillsides above Kennett in 1941, you'd have watched it happen [music] in slow motion.

[00:16:49]First the low ground along the river, then the rail bed, then the streets. The water would have been in the doorways of the buildings on the flats while the houses up the grade were still dry, so that for weeks the town was half drowned and half standing, a place you could still walk through the top half of.

[00:17:07]And they didn't demolish everything.

[00:17:09]That's what gets me about the Diamond Saloon and the hotel. The accounts say they were still standing when the water came. Nobody bothered to pull them down.

[00:17:18]A hundred people had left, and the buildings just stood there in the empty town, waiting. And the lake came up the walls and over the roofs and kept going.

[00:17:27]By 1943, the town was abandoned.

[00:17:31]By 1944, Kennett was completely submerged. A full year before Shasta Dam was even finished.

[00:17:39]400 ft of water on an average day, closer to 500 when the reservoir is full. That's the depth [music] at which Kennett sits right now as you're listening to this.

[00:17:49]And unlike St. Thomas, that Nevada town that keeps rising out of Lake Mead every time the drought gets bad enough, Kennett does not come back.

[00:18:00]Not really.

[00:18:01]Shasta is too deep.

[00:18:03]Even in California's worst drought years, when the lake dropped so far you could see the bathtub ring from space, what surfaced around Shasta was mostly the margins of the drowned world. Old bridges, railroad trestles, a tunnel mouth, foundations from the smaller towns. Because Kennett [music] wasn't the only one.

[00:18:24]Shasta Lake covers a whole constellation of vanished places. Baird, Copper City, Elmore, Etter, Morley, Pitt, Winthrop.

[00:18:34]Seven or eight communities, depending how you count. An entire inhabited river valley converted into a body of water.

[00:18:42]Kennett was just the biggest. Some of the old mine workings above the town are technically still above the waterline, but you can't really get to them. Dense brush, steep embankments [music] up from the water, and the entrances have been sealed for safety. So, the closest thing to a monument Kennett has is a set of welded shut holes in a mountainside that nobody can reach. And here's the detail that stays with me longest, the one I can't put down. If you go boating on Shasta Lake in the summer, and people do in enormous [music] numbers. Houseboats and ski boats and a whole recreation economy built on that water.

[00:19:18]You will pass directly over Kennett, over the opera house, over the schoolhouse, over that saloon that ran 24 hours a day with a judge in the basement. 400 ft down, in total darkness and cold, sitting in silt. Nobody on those boats knows.

[00:19:34]Why would they?

[00:19:35]There's no marker.

[00:19:37]There's no plaque bobbing on the surface that says 10,000 people lived under here.

[00:19:42]It's just a beautiful blue lake in the mountains of northern California, and the shoreline is bare in places. And [music] if you ask the tourist why some of those hills came back so slowly, they'd tell you it's just how the country looks. It isn't. That's the smelter. That's Kennett, still showing, 100 years on. The town is gone, and its scar is the only part of it above water.

[00:20:04]So, let me come back to what I asked you at the start. What do we owe a place that destroyed itself?

[00:20:10]When a town poisons its own ground and burns through its reason for existing, and shrinks to 100 stubborn holdouts, does the country still owe it a hearing?

[00:20:19]Yes, it does. And it didn't give one, and that's the actual loss here, not the buildings. The buildings were half empty.

[00:20:27]Not the economy. The economy died in 1923, and no dam killed it.

[00:20:34]What was taken from Kennett at the end wasn't its prosperity.

[00:20:38]It was its standing. The right to be a party to your own ending, to be asked, even if the answer was always going to be no.

[00:20:46]100 people were still 100 people, >> [music] >> and they got no meeting, no hearing, no record, no chance to say the thing that everyone in every drowned town in America has wanted to say, "We were here. This counted. You have to at [music] least look at us before you do it." And when the country decided 100 people weren't enough people to bother asking, Well, that's the same arithmetic that had already been run on that valley once before, on the Wintu, on 250 villages in a place called Minnechaug.

[00:21:18]Kennett was drowned by the same logic it was built on. The town never saw the irony. It was underwater before anyone had the distance to notice.

[00:21:28]That's how America counts a life sometimes, not by whether you existed, by whether there were enough of you left to make the paperwork awkward. Kennett [music] didn't make the paperwork awkward, so there isn't any. Just a lake and some bare hills and a saloon in the dark.

[00:21:44]If this is the kind of story that stays with you, the places we chose to put underwater and the arguments nobody bothered to have, then tell me which one we go down to next.

[00:21:56]There's the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts, where four entire towns were wiped [music] off the map and legally dissolved so Boston could drink.

[00:22:05]There's Elbowoods, North Dakota, where the Garrison Dam flooded the heart of the Three Affiliated Tribes land. And there are photographs of the water walking into the empty streets.

[00:22:16]And there's Butler, Tennessee, the town that wouldn't drown, which got moved uphill, rebuilt, and still holds a reunion for the version of itself that's underwater. Different states, different decades, [music] same sentence every time. There is no record of anyone asking.

[00:22:33]Which one do you want to see?