Weeks of continuous rain and snow from November 1861 into January 1862, then a record storm on January 9-12 followed by a warm rain on the snowpack, flooded valleys across California, Oregon and Nevada. It dumped the equivalent of about 10 feet of precipitation on California over 43 days.
Sacramento suffered the worst flooding in its history. Leland Stanford, inaugurated governor in early January 1862, travelled to the ceremony by rowboat. The state’s finances were so shaken that the governor, the legislature and state employees went unpaid for a year and a half. In the years that followed, the city raised its downtown streets.