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

by Standiford, Les

  It could be difficult for a modern-day traveler to stand on these placid banks and imagine a no-nonsense William Mulholland surveying such a scene, then turning to the storied promoter Fred Eaton to announce that they had indeed finally found the answer to the question “What will make Los Angeles possible?” But as history tells us, Mulholland was an unusually perspicacious man, and that is essentially what he did.

  LUCK OF THE IRISH

  THE STORY OF HOW MULHOLLAND MADE IT TO THE banks of the Owens River in the first place is very nearly the equal of what he accomplished after he made the trip, yet another of the many improbable rags-to-riches tales arising from America’s Gilded Age. The period, named after a satirical work by Mark Twain, is generally thought of as spanning the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the country emerged as a world economic and manufacturing superpower. Twain meant it as a derogatory term, but to many these days, the words conjure up a time when larger than life individuals—often of humble origins—accomplished improbable feats. There was no shortage of wretched excess in the era, and many a fool’s errand was essayed, but certain of the real-life tales transcend dismissal.

  Though Mulholland never amassed the personal fortune of a Carnegie or a Rockefeller, it can be argued that his legacy surpasses everything that those two left behind. Certainly, what he overcame to achieve a position of influence rivals any Horatio Alger–style narrative. Much of what is often told about William Mulholland’s early life can be found in an unpublished master’s thesis by Elizabeth Spriggs, “The History of the Domestic Water Supply of Los Angeles,” written for the University of Southern California in 1931. Ms. Spriggs not only interviewed Mulholland’s daughter Rose for the piece, but was also able to speak with Mulholland on at least two occasions. One of her most intriguing sources, however, is an autobiographical sketch written by Mulholland himself in 1930 that was in the possession of Ms. Spriggs at the time of her writing. Likely penned at Ms. Spriggs’s behest, the eight-page document disappeared for more than eighty years until an employee of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, looking for an arcane item in the city archives, chanced across it.

  The sketch, by an often guarded Mulholland, was a vexatious loss to historians, though now that it has reappeared, it seems that Ms. Spriggs made judicious use of her source, as she did of the manuscript of a Mulholland biography penned by his cousin Ella Deakers, whose family had preceded Mulholland in emigrating from Dublin to Pittsburgh in the 1860s.

  Certainly, Catherine Mulholland adds a great deal in her meticulous autobiography of her grandfather published in 2000, and some of the most colorful anecdotes about his roots come from Mulholland himself, passed along by a number of associates and journalists undoubtedly in the thrall of an Irishman as wedded to the concept of a good story as to the courtroom truth. He once claimed to have cast his first vote in a failed attempt to propel Samuel J. Tilden into the White House in 1876, but if he did so, it would have been an illegal act, for Mulholland did not become a US citizen until a decade later.

  While Mulholland may have embellished at times and misremembered at others, there is no doubt that he was born in Belfast, County Antrim, on September 11, 1855, the son of Hugh Mulholland, a guard for the British Mail Service, a sinecure that ensured survival if not wealth. His mother was Ellen Deakers, who had grown up (as had her husband) in Dublin, but who as a young girl spent a period of time with her family in the United States, where her father created a profitable drapery business in Pittsburgh.

  Sometime in the early 1850s, when she would have been no more than eighteen, Ellen returned to Ireland to marry Hugh. She gave birth to three sons in rapid succession: Thomas in 1853, William in 1855, and Hugh in 1856. There would be two daughters as well, both of whom died of pulmonary tuberculosis, or consumption as it was called at the time. The disease would also take Ellen herself in 1862, shortly after she gave birth to a fourth son.

  William Mulholland, who was seven when his mother died, would often tell outsiders, including Ms. Spriggs, that he had no recollection of his mother, but Catherine Mulholland passes along family memories of the Chief speaking candidly of his mother’s lively, playful nature, a welcome tonic to his father’s stolid seriousness. What can be certain is that in 1865, Mulholland’s father, at thirty-six, left with four boys ranging in age from three to twelve to care for, took a second wife, Jane Smith, then thirty. In short order there were three more children born, and by 1870, William, an impatient student who had already run off to sea at the age of fourteen, signed up as an apprentice for the British Merchant Marine.

  It was not owing to financial necessity or familial tension, according to Mulholland. “I had always wanted to travel,” he wrote in his sketch some sixty years later, “nurturing this desire since I was ten years old.” Given the first opportunity, he says, “I became an apprentice aboard the Gleniffer . . . without the whole-hearted approval of my father.” Though he returned and gave schooling one more brief attempt, Mulholland was soon back at sea, where he would spend four years on ships that plied the Atlantic between the British Isles, the United States, and the Caribbean.

  Though the life was full of the sorts of adventure that Mulholland had fancied, there was little pay involved, and it eventually occurred to Mulholland, as he put it, that the sailor’s life “would get me nowhere in a material way.” Thus, in June 1874, the same year that a German immigrant by the name of Levi Straus received a US patent for copper-riveted blue jeans and about the same time that a general named Custer was dispatched to the Black Hills to keep an eye on the natives there, William Mulholland stepped off a ship in New York harbor and at nineteen began a life in America.

  It may not have been the most propitious time to start. While the US economy had boomed in the aftermath of the Civil War, with railroading—especially western railroading—leading the way, a downturn began in 1873 that would be known as the “Great Depression” until the even worse economic troubles of the 1930s. A quarter of the workforce in New York was off the job and once-popular President Ulysses S. Grant, just elected to a second term, faced a firestorm of criticism for his inability to right the economic ship.

  Mulholland soon made his way to the Great Lakes, where his experience landed him a job aboard a freighter. When winter came, he took a job in a Michigan lumber camp, where he cut open his leg in a logging accident. The wound developed an infection, and Mulholland overheard the camp doctor mention to a colleague that the leg would probably have to come off. At his first opportunity, Mulholland struggled out of his infirmary bed and somehow made his way southward to Cincinnati. Broke and alone, seemingly out of prospects, he felt that he had reached his nadir.

  “Why bother?” he said, according to a story later passed down by his daughter Rose. There seemed to stretch ahead nothing but years of soul-crushing work and miserable pay. And then, as Mulholland tells it, he found himself limping past a local church where from the doors the voices of a choir of boy sopranos issued, singing the Gloria in Excelsis. Mulholland wandered inside the church, where he sat for some time in meditation. Slowly, his gloom began to lift. Though he had no idea how he would make meaning of his life, he would try. Truly, he wanted to live.

  In the days that followed, the infection in his leg abated and Mulholland made the acquaintance of a tinker who had been looking for a helper who wouldn’t mind the traveling life. In the young Mulholland he had found his man. In fact, Mulholland once told his daughter Rose, he found the life of buckboarding from farm to farm, sharpening scissors and mending clocks, as pleasant a time as he had ever experienced. Only the sense that there was surely something more meaningful for him to do spurred him to make a change.

  Mindful that his uncle had forged a successful business in Pittsburgh, Mulholland parted ways with the tinker and made his way to that city in the fall of 1875, where he was joined by his brother Hugh Patrick, who had jumped ship from the British navy shortly before. By the time the pair arrived, Richard Deakers’s dry goods store
was thriving and he was willing to put the two boys up and set them to work at clerking, an occupation that allowed Mulholland to develop, he was told, into “an excellent salesman with a business reputation in the county.”

  The arrangement lasted for something more than a year before Mulholland was again compelled to make a change. In his sketch, Mulholland says that he was inspired by reading Charles Nordhoff’s California: For Health, Pleasure, and Residence, a rhapsodic tract that the popular writer had published in 1873. It was a book he had never heard of previously, Mulholland wrote, but it was one that “aroused such interest in me in this country [California] that I had no peace until I came here.”

  Family lore, however, suggests a darker cause. Sometime prior to Mulholland’s arrival in Pittsburgh, Richard Deakers and his wife, Catherine, had also taken in another relative referred to only as “Uncle Hobson,” a miserable wretch already emaciated by tuberculosis. By 1875, two of the Deakers children had died of the disease and two more were exhibiting symptoms. Given that three of Catherine’s brothers had gone off to San Diego County in 1868 to establish a cattle ranch, a venture in which Richard Deakers had made considerable investment, the couple made the decision to sell their Pittsburgh interests and move to California, where, as Nordhoff described it:

  There, and there only, on this planet, the traveler and resident may enjoy the delights of the tropics, without their penalties; a mild climate, not enervating, but healthful and health-restoring; a wonderfully and variously productive soil, without tropical malaria; the grandest scenery, with perfect security and comfort in traveling arrangements; strange customs, but neither lawlessness nor semi-barbarism.

  Thus, in December of 1876, while her husband tied up matters in Pittsburgh, Catherine Deakers and her six surviving children, along with Uncle Hobson, left New York Harbor aboard the Crescent City, bound for California via Cape Horn, the Panama Canal being not yet in existence. Also traveling aboard the ship, though not listed on the manifest, were William and Hugh Patrick Mullholland, stowaways. Inevitably, the brothers were caught, and deposited on shore during a refueling stop at Colon, Panama.

  Though William was confident that he and his brother could find employment aboard a California-bound ship leaving Balboa on the Pacific side of Panama, there was first the matter of making the forty-seven-mile crossing of the isthmus. Indeed a railroad could have provided transport, but the fare was $25, gold. Whether or not they had the money is unclear, but their decision was uncomplicated. They would walk the trail from Colon to Panama City. “That was the easiest way we knew to earn $25.00,” Mulholland was fond of saying in his later years, “I would walk that far today to make $25.00.”

  Once the brothers reached Balboa, they quickly found employment on a Peruvian military ship, the Bolivar, sailing for Acapulco, where they worked for a month to help rig another ship, the Frank Austin, bound for San Francisco. “We landed in San Francisco in February 1877, sailing in through the Golden Gate on a spankin’ breeze,” Mulholland recalls. After a day or two’s rest, they bought a pair of horses in Martinez and began the ride to Los Angeles by way of the San Joaquin Valley, much praised by Nordhoff for what he saw as unique drama: “The valley of the San Joaquin differs from an Illinois prairie in that it has two magnificent mountain ranges for its boundaries—the Sierra Nevada on the east, and the Coast Range on the west.”

  Something of what the brothers saw on their way to the Southland can be surmised by Nordhoff’s description of the territory between Stockton and Merced: “Wheat, wheat, wheat, and nothing but wheat, is what you see on your journey, as far as the eye can reach over the plain in every direction. Fields of two, three, and four thousand acres make but small farms; here is a man who ‘has in’ 20,000 acres; here one with 40,000 acres, and another with some still more preposterous amount—all in wheat.” Mulholland does not record what he thought of all that wheat, but he did say that the journey was inspiring. “I was tremendously interested in the whole country, although I can not recall definite impressions—everything was new, deeply interesting. The world was my oyster and I was just opening it.”

  As to his immediate impression of Los Angeles, he was even more fulsome. “Los Angeles was a place after my own heart,” he recalled. “It was the most attractive town I had ever seen. The people were hospitable. There was plenty to do and a fair compensation offered for whatever you did.” He went so far as to theorize that the place likely had the same attraction for him as it had for the Indians who had originally settled the area some 10,000 or 20,000 years before the arrival of Europeans.

  Significantly enough, the Los Angeles River was the greatest attraction, Mulholland said. “It was a beautiful, limpid little stream with willows on its banks . . . so attractive to me that it at once became something about which my whole scheme of life was woven, I loved it so much.”

  For all its attractions, however, the still-rugged pueblo was in the grip of a smallpox epidemic, he and his brother quickly learned, and they were also dismayed to learn that two more of their cousins had died of typhoid while still aboard the Crescent City. Their young cousin Ella’s own estimation of the place where her mother had dragged her was less than glowing: “Nothing looked like anything,” she complained.

  Furthermore, there was the matter of finding work, and Mulholland went a month without any. He was on his way to San Pedro Harbor to see about shipping out again, he told a Los Angeles Times reporter years later, when he chanced upon a man driving a well with a hand drill. The man—identified by Catherine Mulholland as Manuel Dominguez, grandson of the original grantee to Rancho San Pedro—offered Mulholland a job, and he accepted on the spot, thus transforming himself from a man who had made his living on the water to one who would define his life with it.

  IN MYSTERY IS THE SOURCE

  MULHOLLAND COULD SCARCELY HAVE KNOWN HOW significant his chance encounter with that well digger would be, and the fact is that he had one more adventure in him before he would cleave to the City of Angels once and for all. Beauty and mystical appeal aside, there were only 9,000 inhabitants in Los Angeles (San Francisco was then the country’s tenth-largest city with just under 150,000) and, even with his gratitude for finding a job, the long-term prospects for a well digger’s assistant could not have seemed utterly compelling for an ambitious young man.

  Accordingly, late in 1877, William and brother Hugh Patrick set out on their final quest: a search for gold in the Arizona Territory. Ignoring reports that Apache tribesmen, including a band led by Geronimo, had undertaken a bloody series of uprisings in southern Arizona, the two made their way the 230 or so miles eastward from Los Angeles to Ehrenberg, just across the Colorado River from a pipe-dream settlement that would one day become Blythe, through which I-10 runs today. In Ehrenberg, the two got hold of a pair of burros and ventured into the barren mountains to the north, where a few placer claims had been filed.

  According to the tale Mulholland later told his colleague J. B. Lippincott, the search for Arizona gold was fruitless, and the brothers turned their burros loose somewhere near the mouth of the Bill Williams River and floated down the Colorado the fifty miles or so back to Ehrenberg on a crude raft they had fashioned out of logs and reeds. At one point along the journey, the two ran out of food and pulled their raft to shore at the cabin of an enterprising settler who sold groceries to famished miners. When a fair number of halloos produced no response, the Mulholland boys entered the cabin to find it deserted. After some discussion, they took the groceries they needed and left, leaving payment on the table. It was the last they thought of the matter for years.

  In 1924, nearly half a century later, William Mulholland traveled back to Parker, Arizona, another Colorado River town not far from where their unsuccessful prospecting adventure had taken place. Mulholland, who was in Parker as part of a survey for what would become another monumental water-diversion project, told the tale of his first venture to the area to a group in the hotel lobby where he was staying. When he had finished and
was calling for another round of drinks, an old-timer seated amid the locals leaned forward.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” the old-timer said. “I’ve been wondering all these years who tracked up to the cabin from the river that day.”

  Mulholland stared back, puzzled.

  “No way you could know this,” the man said, “but the fellow who had that place was killed that day, right before you and your brother came in. Same time as you were in that cabin, his wife was run off into the hills with her baby, crying for help. Probably just as well you were gone when the posse showed up.”

  By this time, Mulholland, along with the rest of the audience in the room, was rapt. The old-timer waved his hand. “Of course they would have figured out it wasn’t you. The old boy’s brother was one of the posse, and he was a good tracker. They saw your tracks, of course, but they picked up the trail of the one who had done it and followed him all the way into Mexico.”

  If Mulholland was sitting there in a comfortable hotel lobby wondering if he’d miraculously escaped a lynching a half-century before, the old-timer dismissed it with a wave. “They brought him back for trial,” the old man added.

  It is only one of the numerous tales that swirl in the wake of the legendary Mulholland, so many of which seem to tread the border between myth and truth. Still, anyone tempted to doubt any Mulholland anecdote should keep in mind the indisputable facts of the man’s legacy, which still keep a major city afloat, and which to this day provoke legislative debate, lawsuit, and acts of criminal mischief.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1878, returned to Los Angeles from his prospecting trip, Mulholland took the job that, despite its unprepossessing aspect, would forever determine his fate—he became a ditch tender for the Los Angeles City Water Company, the privately held concern that had secured the lease to supply the city with its water. The water itself was diverted from the Los Angeles River at a point not far south of where today’s Griffith Park butts close to Los Feliz Boulevard. That irrigation canal, dubbed the Zanja Madre, or “mother ditch,” had been in use from the early days of Spanish settlement and, according to Spanish royal decree, the water in the canal as well as the river itself belonged to the pueblo that was situated upon it, a precedent that in the case of Los Angeles would eventually be upheld by the California Supreme Court.