FRIANT, Calif. — "Remember this, water is California's most valuable possession -- we need every drop that falls on the mountains and on the plains."
The speaker was Gov. Earl Warren. The year was 1949. The occasion was the opening of two giant valves at the base of Friant Dam, for the first time sending the cold, Sierra-fed waters of the San Joaquin River pouring into an irrigation canal big enough to float a destroyer.
In few places in California was Warren's mandate taken to heart as conscientiously as at Friant, northeast of Fresno.
By the time the 151-mile canal running to Bakersfield, the Friant-Kern, was inaugurated two years after Warren's speech with a fly-over of 100 planes and flotilla of bathing beauties in cruising power boats, one of California's greatest rivers was in its death throes, swallowed virtually whole by the nation's biggest irrigation project.
About 60 miles of the San Joaquin, the state's second-longest river, shriveled to dust as its mountain waters were rerouted to a million acres of farmland up and down the arid eastern flanks of the San Joaquin Valley.
A chinook salmon run of tens of thousands was wiped out.
The lower stretch of the San Joaquin filled with runoff and farm drain water so tainted that it came to be known as the "lower colon of California."
Now, thanks to a settlement in a tortured, nearly two-decade-long court fight, the San Joaquin is about to get some of its water back.
The agreement, in the final stages of approval, is designed to resurrect the salmon run and return year-round flows to the river for the first time since Harry Truman was president.
"The San Joaquin was just killed," said Harrison "Hap" Dunning, a UC Davis emeritus law professor and authority on water law. "It's a monumental restoration."
It has not come easily.
Kole Upton is a 63-year-old Chowchilla grower with a sharp sense of humor, an engineering degree from Stanford, and 1,200 acres of cotton, corn, almonds and wheat that would wither without water from the San Joaquin.
He has been one of the leaders in years of off-and-on settlement negotiations involving growers, environmentalists and the federal government, which operates the dam.
He says he takes a lot of grief for dealing with environmentalists. Other growers tell him: "You're selling us out."
