Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles

by Standiford, Les

  Yet Mulholland’s satisfaction with the St. Francis Dam, the second largest in the system, was not mirrored by dam keeper Harnischfeger. From the very day that impoundment was halted, with waters lapping just three inches below the spillway, Harnisch-feger had discovered worrisome cracks and leaks in the structure. Though he reported his concerns to Mulholland, the Chief was confident that such cracks and leaks were part of the normal settlement process for such a sizable concrete dam. Still, over the ensuing days, passersby reported that the roadbed on the adjacent San Francisquito Canyon Road seemed to be sagging in places. One motorist noted that there was water running in the normally dry creek bed below the dam, even though the dam’s spillways were closed.

  On March 12, only hours before carpenter Hopewell would stop for his cigarette, a troubled Harnischfeger rose early and began another round of inspections. He might have been content to live with his chief’s insistence that every seep that he’d reported to date was part of a normal settling-in process for a new dam, but what he found himself staring at on this morning brought fresh concern. It was not just water oozing from a freshly discovered crack near the bottom of the dam, it was brown water, which suggested to Harnischfeger that the water had begun to erode the foundation of the dam itself. The dam keeper got on the phone and insisted that the Chief come out and see for himself.

  At about 10:30 in the morning, Mulholland arrived from Los Angeles, along with his chief assistant, Harvey Van Norman. A worried Harnischfeger escorted them on an inspection tour, sure that the two would appreciate his concerns. But in the end, Mulholland shook his head. There was simply no cause for alarm. Everything they had seen was to be expected. Cracks were common in a concrete dam of this size. And the muddy color of the water running down to the creek bed was caused by runoff from a recently constructed access road, Mulholland said, pointing to a gash in the nearby canyonside. Harnischfeger should keep his eyes peeled and report if anything extraordinary turned up, but meantime he was to rest assured. In William Mulholland’s opinion—and there was absolutely no authority in Southern California more highly respected in such matters—the St. Francis Dam was safe.

  DESPITE MULHOLLAND’S CERTAINTY and the respect he was accorded within his profession, it is an open question how much reassurance Harnischfeger took from the Chief’s assessment. After all, Harnischfeger lived with a woman named Leona Johnson and his six-year-old son, Coder, in a small cottage on the floor of the San Francisquito Canyon, about a quarter of a mile directly downstream from the dam. As a matter of fact, a motorist driving the canyon road about 11:30 that night reported seeing a light in the canyon near the foot of the dam, suggesting that Harnischfeger may have been down there poking about with a lantern at about the time that Ace Hopewell heard that odd sound of boulders crashing down a mountainside.

  What can be known for certain is that Hopewell—the last man alive to have seen the structure whole—had actually heard the total collapse of the St. Francis Dam. It is also known that the waters exploding down the canyon were 140 feet high when they pulverized the cottage where Harnischfeger and his family lived and, seconds later, the bully brick and concrete edifice that was DWP Power Plant #2. The fully clothed body of Leona Johnson was later found wedged between two blocks of concrete swept down from the broken base of the dam. Neither Harnischfeger’s body nor that of his son was ever found.

  Catastrophe would multiply, the wall of water catapulting down the ordinarily dry bed of the Santa Clara River, scouring a path a mile and a half wide all the way to the Pacific Ocean, fifty-four miles away. Eighty-year-old C. H. Hunick told one rescue worker at a hastily erected field hospital near Saugus that he had lived in a ranch house about a mile and a half below the dam. “When the water hit the house, it folded like it was built of cards,” he said. Hunick grabbed onto a chunk of wood and floated for miles, caught in the roaring current. Nearing exhaustion and about to lose his grip on what he realized was a piece of his home’s roof, Hunick felt a hand grab his arm in the darkness.

  “Is it you, Dad?” It was the voice of one of his sons, come miraculously from the darkness.

  Hunick described how his son hauled him to a plank he’d been using as a life raft. The two floated on together until the elder Hunick lost consciousness. He awakened in the hospital, and from an attendant wanted only to know where his two sons were. The worker stared and shook his head. The bodies of Hunick’s sons lay in a temporary morgue nearby.

  WORKERS AT POWER PLANT #2, a little more than a mile downstream from the dam, had only a moment’s glimpse of that avalanche of water rushing toward them before they and their plant and their families living in cottages nearby were swept away, all but three of them drowned. More than a hundred men working on a construction project for Southern California Edison were camped in tents near the mouth of San Francisquito Canyon when the waters hurtled out from between the canyon walls only minutes after the dam had burst. Eighty-seven of them drowned. Many who lived to describe the experience were those who instinctively buttoned the flaps of their tents as the enormous wave rushed down. They found themselves floating to the top of the swirling waters as if they were riding in huge canvas balloons.

  The flood took out every road and bridge between the dam and the coast, including the Southern Pacific Railway line connecting Oxnard and Ventura and the freight line between Saugus and Montalvo. In all, the dam’s failure took at least 450 lives, a disaster outdone in California history only by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. Thousands of homes were destroyed, and damage to property would make it the greatest civil engineering calamity of the twentieth century.

  In the aftermath, grief and outrage were the order of the day. A coroner’s inquiry was convened to uncover the cause of the disaster, and the legendary Mulholland, at seventy-two, faced a firestorm of criticism and scrutiny that neither he nor anyone else could have conceived. To modern readers conditioned by the duck-and-cover responses from public officials following any disaster, Mulholland’s response to the onslaught might seem as noteworthy as his stout accomplishment in building the aqueduct in the decades before.

  “Don’t blame anyone else, you just fasten it on me,” he said. “If there was an error in human judgment, I was the human, and I won’t try to fasten it on anyone else.” Devastated by the event that refashioned him from civic hero to villain in an eye-blink, Mulholland would at one point confide to a reporter, “I envy those who were killed.”

  DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO POINTS

  ACCORDING TO CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION figures, upward of 275,000 vehicles travel Interstate 5 through the Newhall Pass dividing the Santa Clarita and San Fernando watersheds each day. There is no way to tally the total number of individuals inside those vehicles, but taking into account the tendency of the average American driver, it is safe to speculate that at least 275,001 travelers per day have the opportunity to glance eastward of the thundering highway near its LA-side crest and behold “The Cascade,” as William Mulholland termed it, the concrete spillway marking the termination of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the place where the waters drawn from the Owens Valley enter the San Fernando Valley.

  While some likely know what they are looking at, it is probably just as fair to say that few of these quarter-million-plus individuals are much interested, being more concerned with overheating engines, lurking California Highway Patrol officers, traffic jams, and troubles looming at the end of a formidable commute to work or back home. Certainly, few average daily drivers or passengers could fathom the enthusiasm of the 30,000 (or 40,000 to 50,000, depending on whose figures one uses) who swarmed the nearby rugged hills back on November 5, 1913, to watch the water that would make Los Angeles as we know it finally tumble down. These days, the Newhall Cascade might strike some as a curiosity, especially on the occasions when it is carrying water (the water is often coursing through the huge steel pipes or “penstocks” adjacent), but even for those who notice or know what they are looking at, the crashing water is likely a g
iven, as is the sprawl of 10,000,000 or so people that has come to be where a century and a quarter before there were scarcely 50,000.

  It would take a book of its own to describe what wasn’t to be found in Los Angeles at the turn of the twentieth century. Only due to the fact that some contiguous lands remain in the public domain and others are so sheer and forbidding as to deter even the most resolute developer can current-day residents appreciate the tough desertscape that pioneers in the region had to contend with back then.

  It is difficult to imagine a dusty Los Angeles basin where virtually all the homes and businesses hugged the course of a feckless stream draining the forlorn San Fernando Valley from west to east before curving around the tail of the Santa Monica Mountains between today’s Griffith Park on the west and Glendale to the east. From that point, it is a little more than thirty miles southward to the emptying of the Los Angeles River into the Pacific, and for most of the time from the city’s founding by the Spanish in 1781, its days as a part of independent Mexico (from 1821 to 1848), and its early days as an incorporated city (its formation on April 4, 1850, actually predated by five months the designation of California as a part of the United States), almost no one lived any farther from the river (it was originally called the Porciuncula) than a gravity-fed irrigation ditch or a horse-drawn water cart or a few miles of leaking wooden pipes could reach.

  In contrast, settlement of the founding colonies of the East Coast was often a matter of finding a place where floods and tides would not drive a family from its home. Water was everywhere in abundance on the opposite coast, and often too much so. In fact, its staff-of-life properties aside, the most important function of water in the early days of the Union was as a means of transportation. At the time of the Revolutionary War, every Colonial settlement of any significance was situated upon a navigable body of water.

  In the arid West, however, water was not so much an “aid” to civilization as a sine qua non. Settlers didn’t go much of anywhere on the Los Angeles River—they simply didn’t go far from it. The history of development in the American West is, as any number of authoritative works have shown, largely intertwined with the ability to find, develop, and maintain a reliable source of water. Accordingly, for well beyond the first hundred years of its existence, the likelihood that Los Angeles would ever become a major city was very much in doubt.

  By 1890, and given the limitations of hydrological practice, it was clear that Los Angeles had tapped its “mother ditch,” as the Spanish referred to the main irrigation canal virtually synonymous with the river, just about dry. While there was a general understanding that much of the water of the Los Angeles River Basin ran its course well beneath what was visible at the surface (William Mulholland liked to call it an “upside down river”), no sophisticated equipment existed that allowed for an accurate mapping or precise measurement of underground reserves. Attempts to dig wells in one area often resulted in parching those previously dug elsewhere. In addition, while the interests of ranchers and farmers in irrigating relatively vast expanses of land were real, the implications of a water shortage for a city’s domestic consumption were, in terms of numbers and politics, even greater.

  It seemed clear to parties interested in governing a city, as well as to those boosting its efforts to grow, that while the current level of agricultural activity and a minimal amount of dry ranching could continue, and that a population of 100,000 or possibly 200,000 might be maintained as well, the city’s water source was just about tapped out. There were fruitless water-seeking forays into the nearby San Gabriel Mountains and claims from speculators and landholders surrounding desultory streams that their holdings could be acquired to solve the city’s problem, but the so-called solutions were stopgaps at best. All those acres of undeveloped land destined to sit idle evermore; the surrounding settlements such as Pasadena, begun with promise but soon to die of thirst; all those imagined cities existing only as glints in promoters’ eyes—including altitudinous Hollywood—sure to die aborning, unless water could somehow be found.

  It was out of such desperation that a 250-mile journey from Los Angeles to the far-flung Owens Valley—a mythic cradle of waters rumored to exist in the distant Sierra Nevada Range—took place back in 1904. Taking that same trip 110 years later has little to do with desperation, or myth, and it is certainly a quicker trip than one made by horse and buckboard. Still, in retracing the journey, the modern traveler gains an inkling of how unlikely was the connection between two such disparate physical points.

  IT’S DIFFICULT INDEED TO conceive of such a connection while, I-5 traffic willing, a twenty-first-century driver soars over the crest of the Newhall Pass and descends into the Santa Clarita Valley. While that valley actually lies within the borders of Los Angeles County, it is something of a world apart. It is within the realm of reason to commute to Los Angeles from the far-north San Fernando Valley communities of Chatsworth or Northridge, and a resident of Reseda or Canoga Park can vaguely be construed to be a member of the Angeleno fraternity, but by the time one makes it the twenty-six miles or so from the site of the Mulholland Memorial Fountain at the intersection of Los Feliz Boulevard and Riverside Drive to Valencia or Saugus in the Santa Clarita Valley, the concept of the city has begun to fade. For most Angelenos, the most identifiable feature of the Santa Clarita Valley—save for the few who might have forayed out to play a spectacular Valencia golf course since gone private—is likely the sprawling amusement park known today as Six Flags Magic Mountain, a 262-acre roller-coaster-heavy theme park just off the freeway in Valencia, thirty-five miles north of the Los Angeles city center. (Magic Mountain, which opened in 1971, attracts about 2.5 million visitors each year; Disneyland, situated about an equal distance south of Los Angeles, opened in 1955 and hosts 16 million or more each year.)

  On a clear, cold Thursday afternoon in January, however, there is no typical clot of traffic at the Magic Mountain turnoff, and it is only a minute or two to the next interchange and ten more or so of largely unimpeded twisting and turning beneath the pines and eucalyptus through an ET-worthy Santa Clarita suburb-scape to a turnoff for San Francisquito Canyon Road. If the connection to Los Angeles had previously seemed tenuous, at this junction it frays altogether.

  The two-lane blacktop road ahead, its course slightly modified in the eighty or more years since Ace Hopewell motorcycled it, winds northward along a mostly treeless valley floor for a few miles, passing a series of low-slung ranch homes of a style unchanged since the ’60s, a number of them hard by the trail, others surrounded by pastures and horse farms. Every so often a cluster of mailboxes appears atop a length of whitewashed two-by-six, suggesting any number of homes somewhere out in the flats that were once scoured clean. There is not a lot of traffic here—the occasional working pickup, a few mom-vans, once in a while a throbbing low-rider—and the smogless vista capped by a cloudless blue sky suggests a high desert scene from just about anywhere in the limitless stretches of the American frontier west of the Pecos and north of the Rio Grande. Everything in these parts seems to be waiting, waiting, waiting.

  There are only three or four miles of habitable land to pass through before the canyon walls narrow quickly, and anyone who’s read of the 1928 disaster gets a flash of what the workers in the Edison Camp felt when they saw a wall of water hurtling out from the looming jaws of rock nearby. A couple more quick turns, and the canyon has narrowed from a mile wide to a half mile and then to a hundred feet or so—the road has become a twisting track—and at the point about six miles up the canyon road where Power Plant #2 sits, the walls are so sheer that even an antelope would have been out of luck when the flood pounded down (press accounts told of a single power-plant worker who managed to claw his way up the cliff side of the water). Though there is a turnout at the stolid power plant rebuilt in the 1930s, and no shortage of historical markers to read there, it is not a place for the claustrophobic or the suggestible to linger.

  It is a mile or so on up canyon to the place wh
ere the St. Francis Dam once blocked the water’s passage to the chute below, but a seeker has to be looking hard for what remains of that structure. Though the road once directly skirted the remains of the ruined dam, the so-called Copper Fire of 2002 resulted in a realignment of the route, and only the resolute will spot the place to pull off and walk back down an abandoned stretch of blacktop to the place where William Mulholland once stood with Harvey Van Norman to reassure dam keeper Harnischfeger that the structure was safe. It is said that, in the wake of the Chief’s departure back to Los Angeles that day, a group of young electrical engineers took their lunch atop the broad concrete curve of the dam. What the Chief knew was all that needed to be known. There is no marker at this site.

  Still, it is possible to climb a few hundred yards or so up a rugged talus slope and stand atop the remnants of the dam’s wings and look northward toward the place where Power Plant #1 still sits, though there is no longer a three-mile-long, 12-billion-gallon impoundment of water over which to gaze. Water still courses the route, but it is unseen these days, all of it ensconced within huge pipes, not only slaking thirst and filling tubs but churning turbines on the way. What is visible is a broad, uninhabited swath of scrub-covered Angeles National Forest, ringed by mountains, where a hundred years ago, a man supposed that a displaced river might run.