Water has always been and continues to be of major importance in the development of Calaveras County. Water was essential to the recovery of gold, and since foothill rivers are seasonal and unpredictable, it wasn’t long before entrepreneurs constructed dams to store water, and ditches and flumes to transport it between drainages. Often transitory in nature, many of these ditch systems were abandoned as the placers played out, while others were improved and extended for hydraulic and hard-rock mining. Several small ditches in the project area served first the mining and later the agricultural needs of the community.
The county’s largest and most important ditch systems—the Union Water Company, now the Angels-Utica system, and the Mokelumne Hill Canal and Mining Company, now operated by the Calaveras County Water District, continue to serve communities on either side of the county. After the demise of mining, these ditches were converted to agricultural and domestic uses, and later to the production of hydroelectric power.
North of Coyote Creek, a small abandoned ditch (OHP Number P-05-3304) is identified as being part of the early Angels-Utica system. It was surveyed and built by the Calaveras County Water Company (CCWC) incorporated on November 1, 1856, with its principal place of business at Vallecito. The system took water from the North Fork Stanislaus River and, by a series of ditches, flumes, and creekbeds, delivered it to Coyote Creek, Vallecito, and Carson Hill. When the system was acquired by the Utica Gold Mining Company in the 1880s, major expansion of, and improvements to, the flumes, ditches, and reservoirs were made (Davis-King et al. 1993:5-17). After the Utica Mine was shut down in 1915, the Company shifted its focus from supplying water for mining to providing it for agricultural and residential uses. In 1946, Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) purchased the entire Angels-Utica system, and in the 1920s the route of the old CCWC system through the project area was finally abandoned (PG&E 1947, in Davis-King et al. 1993:5-15, 5-17).