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

by Standiford, Les

  However, the city had proved inept at the distribution of that water, and in 1868 the councilmen approved a thirty-year lease with the private consortium. In exchange for a promise to pipe water into domestic neighborhoods, install fire hydrants where necessary, provide free water to public buildings, and build an ornamental fountain in the city’s plaza, the company would pay the city $1,500 a year, an amount that was later negotiated down to $400 a year. The city retained the rights to set annually the rates the company charged consumers for water, so long as those rates did not dip below those in effect in 1868.

  Though the mayor opposed the plan and taxpayers were excluded from so much as voicing their concerns before the Council, the measure passed and while conniving and subterfuge would continue behind the scenes, as a public matter the privatization of the city’s water supply was essentially settled for the remainder of the century. By the time Mulholland came on board, the company, in exchange for the rate reduction mentioned, grudgingly built the plaza fountain, constructed a new reservoir—the Buena Vista—to ensure a steady supply of water for the city, and ran a twenty-two-inch main all the way to the city center.

  Still, much of the entire system’s viability depended upon the Zanja Madre, and it was the newly hired Mulholland’s job—at $1.50 per day—to keep it clean. According to another story passed along by J. B. Lippincott, Mulholland, shortly after being hired and twenty-three at the time, was down in the ditch, which ran alongside Riverside Drive, knee-deep in mud and shoveling for all he was worth to clear the flow. William Perry, then the water company’s president, happened to be riding by on his way back to the city from the headwaters installation. Struck by the ditch tender’s energy, Perry stopped to watch. Finally, Mulholland glanced up.

  “Who are you?” Perry asked.

  Mulholland scarcely paused. “It’s none of your goddamned business,” he replied and went back to his shoveling.

  Perry simply rode on, but other workmen hurried over to tell Mulholland with whom he’d just been having a conversation.

  “Is that right?” Mulholland said. He stuck his shovel into the mud, climbed the bank, and retrieved his coat, then made his way downtown in the wake of the departed Perry. He told a clerk in the company’s office his name and that he was there “to get his time” before he was fired.

  “You’re the one from the ditch out by the river?” the clerk asked.

  Mulholland nodded, not really surprised that word had already preceded him. The clerk rose and shook his hand.

  “Mr. Perry says you’re the foreman of the ditch gang out there from now on.”

  Mulholland stood by this story, which for him was profound. He’d behaved exactly as he was constituted, and instead of being punished, he’d been rewarded. To him it was an incident he often invoked to help explain a career.

  The truth is likely more complex, of course, as borne out by a slightly different tale he told regarding his brief tenure as a well driller. That previous summer, before heading out to the Arizona territories, he was part of a crew hand-drilling an artesian well somewhere near Compton. They had gotten about 600 feet down, Mulholland recalled, when the bit struck the fossilized remains of a tree. A few feet farther down and other fossils turned up. “These things fired my curiosity,” Mulholland said. “I wanted to know how they got there, so I got ahold of Joseph LeConte’s book [likely the recently published Elements of Geology]. Right there I decided to become an engineer.”

  It is tempting to think of Mulholland’s interest in the subject as drily encyclopedic, but a glance at LeConte’s introduction suggests the true source of Mulholland’s fascination. While the book would become an authoritative textbook, LeConte, cofounder of the Sierra Club with John Muir in 1891, insisted on greater aspiration for his work: “I have been guided by long experience, as to what it is possible to make interesting to a class of young men, somewhat advanced in general culture and eager for knowledge, but not expecting to become special geologists. In a word, I have tried to give such knowledge as every thoroughly cultured man ought to have.”

  While that might seem an ambitious stretch for modern readers, it is easy to imagine that Mulholland took LeConte at his word when the good professor insisted that his was a dynamic subject. “Geology may be defined, therefore, as the history of the earth and its inhabitants, as revealed in its structure, and as interpreted by forces still in operation.”

  Judging by Mulholland’s later actions, the interest in the interplay between the physical world and its inhabitants could in fact be the key to understanding what would eventually distinguish Mulholland from many of the highly trained engineers with whom he would labor. As to whether or not the acquisition of LeConte’s book was the beginning of Mulholland’s training in the field, it is undeniably accurate in characterizing the nature of that training. For all that he accomplished, and though he would one day be inducted into the American Society of Civil Engineers and be granted an honorary LLD from Cal-Berkeley, all of Mulholland’s engineering training came either on the job or through his own reading.

  If his restlessness had been an impediment to him as a schoolboy, Mulholland carried an understanding of the importance of reading throughout his life, often telling associates that he could not fathom a man who did not read. “I have always had a good memory as well as a nose for news, everything impressing me in some way and hooked up in my mind with important events and dates of history,” he would write in his sketch.

  Thomas Brooks, a coworker of Mulholland’s from their earliest days with the water company, recalled that during a period when they were rooming together, Mulholland would stay up long after Brooks had fallen asleep, poring through works as diverse as John Thomas Fanning’s Practical Treatise on Hydraulics and Water Supply, John Trautwine’s Civil Engineer’s Pocket Book, and Shakespeare. In addition, Brooks said, Mulholland was also “fond of Grand Opera.”

  Once, when he was being cross-examined as an engineering expert, an attorney hounded him: “Will you please tell us what education qualifies you on these matters?”

  Mulholland did not hesitate. “I learned the three R’s and the Ten Commandments, received my mother’s blessing, and here I am.”

  Among the benefits of Mulholland’s new status as ditch-gang foreman were quarters provided by the company, or what he called “a shack near the Old Sycamore Tree” on company land near the diversion point of the Zanja Madre and the then tiny Buena Vista Reservoir; his love of the place and the work are evident in his own descriptions. He would rebuild and expand the reservoir—the principal water storage source for the city until 1902—in the years to come, planting more than 1,000 trees, “with my own hands . . . still growing there, blue and flaming eucalyptus, desert palms, and oaks.”

  The Zanja Madre diverted water from the Los Angeles River at the North Broadway Bridge into four main lines, branches that Mulholland said “really beautified the town.” Though the mother ditch was a formidable canal, Mulholland said of the branch lines that “a sturdy man could jump across one.” In those days, he recalled, “The women used to wash clothes at certain places in those zanjas, wading in and clouting the clothes on rocks. I was fighting this use of the zanjas until 1902.”

  He lived in his shack in the Elysian Hills for two years, laboring, reading, and always inquiring of the trained surveyors and engineers with whom he worked as to best methods and practices in hydrology. Given his down-to-earth nature, local ranchers and developers grew to trust him.

  In 1880, he was promoted from ditch-tending duties and was placed in charge of a pipe-laying crew, his pay rising to $65 a month, though he had to furnish his own horse. While he enjoyed the raise and the move to a higher grade of shack that came with the promotion, Mulholland was also buoyed by the heightened technical aspects of the new work and the increased contact with principals in the company, particularly superintendent Fred Eaton, with whom he would develop a storied association.

  In 1886, with Fred Eaton having resigned from the wate
r company to become city engineer for Los Angeles, Mulholland was assigned the oversight of what was the most ambitious construction project his company had overtaken, the building of a five-mile-long conduit to enclose the Los Angeles River as it descended through the narrows below Griffith Park. Designed to protect the water from the polluting effects of the ever-encroaching settlement growing about it, the conduit was built of wood and lined with concrete and proceeded largely without incident under Mulholland’s direction.

  Then, in November, the superintendent who had been hired to replace Fred Eaton died of a heart attack. Water company president William Perry offered the job to Thomas Brooks, who had risen to the post of assistant superintendent. But Brooks, only twenty-four and sensing that the position was beyond his capabilities, declined. Why not give the job to Bill Mulholland, Brooks suggested? There was a man who knew water.

  Mulholland accepted, as we know, taking on at thirty-one a position he would hold for most of the rest of his life. In the early years, he saw the city’s population grow to nearly 50,000 and endured complaints of fishy-tasting water and pressure sometimes too paltry to feed fire hoses. In 1888, the company built a new headquarters where he and Brooks were roommates for a time, and in 1890 Mulholland got his first brush with celebrity when company president Perry identified him to the Los Angeles Times as the man who had averted a total shutdown of its water supply when a flash flood clogged the main conduit at the Crystal Springs headwaters. Mulholland had worked without sleep for four days, Perry told reporters, unclogging the conduit and restoring the flow of the water before any citizen was aware of the incident. For his part, Mulholland said, “I never had my shoes off from Tuesday until Friday night.”

  Mulholland got a gold watch from the company in return for his stalwart services, but at about the same time, he received a much more significant prize when, despite his own protestations that while he “enjoyed a wide interest in all phases of experience except girls—I was never known as a lady’s man or for feminine accomplishments,” he met and won the heart of Lillie Ferguson. Mulholland met Lillie, then twenty-one, in the summer of 1889, when he knocked on the door of her father’s home while seeking permission for a surveyor’s encroachment onto the Fergusons’ Los Feliz property. She would later write that from the moment her eyes met with blue-eyed Bill’s, she knew he was the man she would marry, and on July 3, 1890, she did just that.

  Not much has been told about Lillie, who did little socializing during their twenty-five-year marriage, perhaps because she had suffered mild hearing loss as a result of a childhood illness. She grew up in Michigan, not far from the lumber camps where Mulholland had nearly lost a leg, attended convent schools, and came west with her parents in 1887 not long before she met Mulholland. Though she was said to be quiet and retiring, Lillie by all accounts lived a fulfilling life with her children as her jewels. Lillie’s shyness might also have been explained by the dynamic character of Mulholland’s new mother-in-law, who was anything but a wallflower. Though she had been christened Frances (she was the ninth of ten children), she preferred to be called Frank and in fact had her silver wedding spoons engraved “Frank Ferguson.” She wore a nightcap, smoked a pipe in bed before she went to sleep, and claimed psychic powers, often stopping the preparation of meals (said to be prodigious) with the proclamation that some unplanned-for guest was about to arrive.

  Following the 1890 ceremony, the couple moved into a house at 914 Buena Vista, the first real home Mulholland had experienced since his arrival in America more than sixteen years before. From logger to well-digger to prospector to ditch tender to superintendent of a city’s water company, William Mulholland, with a wife and a proper home at last, had experienced a great deal in a relatively short time, and he was still shy of his thirty-fifth birthday. And he would, in short order, experience a great deal more as his first three children were born: Rose in 1891, Perry in 1892, and Thomas in 1894.

  “Perry,” as he was generally known, was actually christened “William Perry” as a result of a bit of typical Mulholland blarney. In a tale that is related in her manuscript, Catherine Mulholland explains that when her grandfather showed up at work to announce the good news of his son’s birth, company president William Perry asked Mulholland what he had named the boy. “Well, we’re going to name him after you, Bill,” Mulholland joked. When a set of silver flatware engraved “WPM” arrived at the household on the following day, Lillie, who intended to name her son after her father, James Ferguson, asked Mulholland what was going on. Mulholland was forced to tell her what he had blurted out to his boss and convinced his wife that none of it could be undone. Lillie went along, but for years referred privately—and perhaps possessively—to her son as “Boy Blue.”

  Yet for all that had taken place, Mulholland could have scarcely imagined what would unfold in the second half of his life, including a series of events that would eventually pit him against his employers and change virtually everything about the nature of his work before the ensuing decade was out. While he once wrote, “From the time I became superintendent and general manager of the water company in 1886 until the latter years of the century there is nothing special to report,” it seems impossible for Mulholland to have missed the portents of what was about to come.

  WHOSE WATER IS IT ANYWAY?

  BY 1890, THE FRONTIER TOWN OF 9,000 THAT MULHOLLAND had encountered in 1877 was greatly transformed, its population grown to nearly 50,000. Law and order had come to a city where at the time of his arrival, disputes were still being settled by gunfights in the streets and the social order maintained by lynchings. A county bar association was established in 1878 and the University of Southern California was founded in 1880.

  The Southern Pacific Railroad extended its line from San Francisco in 1876, linking Los Angeles to the rest of the nation for the first time, and by 1885, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe had come to town as well. In 1887 when the Santa Fe began lowering the price of a ticket from Kansas City, Missouri, to Los Angeles, first from $125 to $15, and then, on March 6, to $1, it fueled an enormous jump in tourism and relocation. The days of the wagon trains were long gone, and it was no longer necessary to brave a months-long voyage around Cape Horn or even to find significant wherewithal for the train ticket necessary to try one’s luck in a land where oranges grew year round. For a dollar, you could hop on the train to paradise.

  From the time of Mulholland’s arrival, agriculture in the outlying areas of the city had steadily encroached on ranching, with neatly tended groves and orchards displacing pasturelands. Owing to the development of refrigerated boxcars, the same rail lines that brought new settlers in were also carrying the newly hybridized navel and Valencia oranges back east, along with other crops. Present-day Beverly Hills was thriving in the 1880s, principally as a vast bean field. The area just south of Cahuenga Pass that would become Hollywood was a fig orchard.

  The newspaper that would become dominant in the city had begun operations as the Los Angeles Daily Times in 1881 (Harrison Gray Otis would take over as editor and publisher in 1882). Along with stories that the city’s Conservatory of Music (one day to be folded into Disney’s CalArts) was founded in 1883 and that in 1889 the USC “Methodists” had drubbed St. Vincent’s College (later Loyola Marymount) 40–0 in the first collegiate football game played in Los Angeles, the paper—in competition with such rivals as the Herald, the weekly Porcupine, and the short-lived Tribune—was running advertisements in 1890 that Prince Albert men’s suits could be purchased for as little as $12.50, Johnston & Murphy shoes for $6, and derbies for 95 cents. Prime orange-growing land was available for $125 to $200 an acre, and Mulholland could have purchased a home site in the Los Feliz Ranchos from his developer father-in-law for anywhere from $150 (100-foot frontage) to $750 (five acres).

  While the startling changes in early Los Angeles are diverting to look back upon, for William Mulholland such development translated principally into difficulties at work. More people and more businesses simply
meant more problems for the water company. There were periodic complaints from citizens about cloudiness or a “fishy” taste in their tap water and reports in the papers that by the end of the day, upper floors in downtown buildings (at the end of the water mains) often had no water pressure at all. There were other reports that firefighters in outlying districts often found only a dribble issuing from hydrants and were helpless to save homes and businesses.

  Most of the issues had to do with the historically uncertain rate of flow from the Los Angeles River. The river itself begins officially in the west San Fernando Valley near Canoga Park, where Bell Creek, flowing eastward from the Simi Hills, joins with the Arroyo Calabasas, which flows northward, draining a portion of the Santa Monica Mountains. From there the river flows for some forty-five miles eastward through the San Fernando Valley until it joins with the Tujunga Wash near present-day Studio City. Tujunga Wash drains about 225 square miles of territory in the San Gabriel Mountains east of the San Fernando Valley and carries significant water only in the rainy winter and early spring months. From this juncture, the river bends southward around today’s Griffith Park, passes through the Glendale Narrows, and continues on for a bit more than thirty miles to its mouth at Long Beach.

  From the earliest years of settlement, the Los Angeles River was the primary source of water for inhabitants, who, whether Indian, Spanish, or greenhorn settler, had to put up with seasonal scarcities interrupted by times of torrential flooding. From his earliest days with the water company, Mulholland was well aware of the city’s dependence on this unreliable source, but there seemed little he could do about the matter other than improving storage reservoirs, avoiding waste, and preaching conservation. However, with the population having quintupled since his own arrival and with no end in sight, it was becoming clear that such tactics had their limit—something would have to change or Los Angeles would simply cease to grow.