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

by Standiford, Les

  Key to Eaton’s efforts was a rancher named Thomas B. Rickey, whose holdings covered most of the area where Clausen had proposed that the Long Valley Dam be built and with whom Eaton had already secured an option regarding his hydroelectric plans. Rickey, who also held substantial properties farther south, near Big Pine, had tired of ranching and was negotiating with more than one potential buyer when Eaton came along. As Rickey explained to Eaton, he wasn’t looking to retire altogether—he also had an interest in a company that wanted to develop a power plant on nearby Bishop Creek for distribution to mining companies in western Nevada and he simply wished to wash his hands of the ranching enterprise.

  When the former mayor traveled back to Owens Valley in an attempt to renegotiate the purchase of Rickey’s land at a more favorable price for the city, it is certainly possible that he produced the letter from Lippincott, suggesting that he had connections that just might be able to help Rickey along in his new business endeavor. In any event, the deal for all of the Rickey ranch lands—in Long Valley and near Big Pine as well—was quickly done. A gleeful Eaton wrote city attorney Mathews on March 23, 1905, that “after a week of Italian work,” the key option was in hand.

  However, the matter was far from settled. Eaton had already spent about $30,000 of his own money on options, and the city—with water commissioners uncertain as to the propriety of expending money outside the county and lacking voter endorsement—had been slow to provide additional funds for the process. Though he complained in a letter to Mathews on March 25 that “If the City had money, I could buy up the entire river in 60 days,” it took more than two months for commissioners to appropriate the funds to secure the options on Rickey’s land.

  All the while, Eaton had stewed. As he told reporters, it still rankled him that he had agreed to let the project be developed wholly by the municipality. While he had conceded to Mulholland and Mathews, he complained, “This I disliked to do, for it would deprive me of what I believed to be a splendid opportunity to make money.”

  Thus, by the time the water commissioners voted the funds for the Rickey options, Eaton had come up with a modification to the deal. The city had little immediate interest in most of the Rickey Ranch pasturelands, he knew, but they were certainly anxious to keep those in the Long Valley out of the hands of the Reclamation Service. Since the city was not named in any of the option agreements, he was personally in possession of an option to purchase Rickey’s holdings for $500,000. Eaton proposed to pass along to the city options for about half of the property, in addition to the property’s water rights and an easement to build a reservoir in the Long Valley that was significantly smaller than the one Clausen had proposed, for the sum of $450,000 (he later negotiated the price down to $425,000). Eaton would keep the other half of the land and the 5,000 head of cattle and other animals on it, worth $10 to $12 apiece.

  Eaton would later complain, “The result was an agreement that I would turn over to the city all the water rights I had acquired at the price I had paid for them, except that I retained the cattle which I had been compelled to take in making the deals . . . and mountain pasture land of no value except for grazing purposes.” However, he had gained control of a sizable amount of grazing land, equipment, machinery, horses, mules, and a herd worth at least $50,000 for about $15,000 of his own money. “Should I desire to continue in the cattle business,” he continued dourly to reporters, “it will be necessary for me to invest about $150,000 additional in the purchase of suitable farming land.” On the other hand, he had become an overnight cattle rancher at a pretty reasonable price. In the end, he would also receive about $10,000 in commissions for his purchases on behalf of the City of Los Angeles, according to final figures released by the city auditor.

  Water commissioners, with little recourse and time running out, agreed to the deal on June 5. Though Reclamation chief Newell doubted that his service could prevail in any eventual standoff with the city, he pressed the commissioners for a public statement of intention that he could use to mollify his own superiors, who were already fielding complaints from interests in the Owens Valley wondering when the service was going to get busy on the reclamation project. On July 12, the registrar of the local federal land office, S. W. Austin, wrote his superiors in Washington to complain about Eaton. The former Los Angeles mayor had been “representing himself as Lippincott’s agent,” Austin asserted, and had “secured options on land and water rights in Owens Valley to the value of about a million dollars.”

  “Said purchaser now owns all the patented land covered by the government reservoir site in Long Valley, and also riparian and other rights along the river for about 50 miles.” Austin explained that sellers “were all generously inclined toward the project and believed Eaton to be the agent of the Reclamation Service,” though Austin did admit that Eaton’s stated contention was that he was buying the lands to create a cattle ranch. However, by the time of his writing, Austin said, Eaton’s attempts to buy property at Haiwee Pass, in the desolate area south of Owens Lake, made it clear that these purchases were being made on behalf of laying a water pipeline to Los Angeles.

  Abandonment by the service of its irrigation project, Austin argued, would “make it appear that the expensive surveys and measurements of the past two years have been made in the interest of a band of Los Angeles speculators.” A few days later, Austin followed up with a similar letter of complaint to President Roosevelt himself. While the city’s intentions had become a matter of public record, and the outcry had begun, it seemed for opponents a bit too little too late. On July 28, 1905, Mulholland returned from a foray to the Haiwee district.

  “The last spike is driven,” he reported. “The options are all secured.”

  REMOVE EVERY SPECTER

  FROM THE TIME OF HIS VISIT TO THE OWENS VALLEY WITH Eaton the previous fall, Mulholland had been hard at work. In the subsequent three months, he had retraced their route several times, checking elevations and the flow rates of tributaries of the Owens River to verify his initial conviction that his plan was sound. “When my shirt got dirty,” he later told a reporter for the Examiner, “I’d come in for a change, but otherwise, I kept to the theme.”

  He also worked hard on the water commissioners to convince them that, though the concept might seem outlandish, it was in fact workable. He was staking his reputation on it. If the undertaking was unprecedented, it was by no means impossible. Furthermore, it represented the only possible way to skirt the looming impasse that the Geological Survey’s Mendenhall had cited: “Going to a distant source for its water supply is not merely wise, but is absolutely necessary if the City’s future growth is not to be at the expense of neighborhood communities.”

  If there seems a contradiction in the suggestion that going after the water of the Owens Valley was fine, while scooping up the water sources of nearby established communities in Southern California was predatory, Mulholland saw it otherwise. There was no burgeoning city in the Owens Valley with established pueblo rights to the Owens River waters—instead there existed merely a group of ranchers and farmers who saw the vague possibility of growth and development there. It made no sense to encroach upon the already developed agricultural areas in the San Gabriel Valley and the Coastal Plain to the south, he told commissioners, for those communities were well-established extensions of what was in essence a vast, interdependent organism. To Mulholland, what a visionary might see as possible in a largely undeveloped Owens Valley simply did not measure up to what was certain in Los Angeles: with the 400-cubic-feet-per-second flow that his aqueduct would provide, 2 million people could one day live comfortably where the present 206,000 had virtually exhausted the present water supply.

  Critics would later contend that Mulholland underestimated the number of citizens that the flow of the Los Angeles River could support, with the water department’s own estimates raised to 250,000 in 1928, 300,000 in 1936, and finally to 500,000, but the superintendent was by this point fixated on the future needs of the city h
e championed. As he later wrote, he had to contend with Eaton virtually at “sword’s point” in order to get the ex-mayor to drop his demands that he retain control of half of the Owens River water as well as rights to the power-generating capacity of the aqueduct.

  In April 1905, Mulholland led a fact-finding tour back to the Owens Valley with Water Commissioners John Fay and J. M. Elliott in tow, along with Mayor Owen McAleer, Eaton, and city attorney William Mathews. After listening to Mulholland’s carefully detailed construction plans and viewing the various tracts that Eaton had encumbered and those he had his sights on, the commissioners asked Mathews what he thought of the legality of the matter and of the practicality of floating a bond issue that would eventually repay the costs of the options, some $233,000 before it was done. Once Mathews gave his blessing, the commissioners agreed.

  As for the next step, convincing voters to approve the project, Mulholland was not overly concerned. He felt in his heart that the project was necessary and in his engineer’s mind that it was feasible. He was by now quite a popular public figure, far more trustworthy to voters than any politician in the region, indeed a man of the people.

  On Saturday, July 29, 1905, the day after Mulholland’s return from sewing up the final options in the Owens Valley, the Los Angeles Times broke the story of what was becoming one of the worst-kept secrets in the city’s history. “Titanic Project to Give City a River,” the front-page headline of Harrison Gray Otis’s paper blared. “Options Secured on Forty Miles of River Frontage in Inyo County—Magnificent Stream to be Conveyed Down to the Southland in Conduit Two Hundred and Forty Miles Long—Stupendous Deal Closed.”

  A sidebar called the news “the most important movement for development in all the city’s history.” One writer described Mulholland in heroic terms, telling of his having returned “scorched and browned by the almost intolerable desert wind and sun” to announce that “the vexed water question has at last been solved.” The new water supply was described as “immense and unfailing”; it would allow Los Angeles to “forge ahead by leaps and bounds and remove every specter of drought or doubt.” All of it was going to cost about $23 million the paper said, to be funded by a series of bond issues that would be “asked of voters.”

  Elsewhere it was claimed, “The price paid for many of the ranches is three or four times what the owners ever expected them to sell for. Everybody in the valley has money, and everyone is happy.” While much in the inflated front-page prose had its kernel of truth, the latter assertion would prove to go down in newspaper history along with lines such as the Chicago Tribune’s “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Initially, there was little reaction in the valley despite Chalfant’s later observation that the story was as much news in Inyo as it was in Los Angeles. The transactions that Eaton engineered were perfectly legal, after all, and the Times had gone so far as to applaud the role that the Bureau of Reclamation’s Lippincott had played in the process.

  Lippincott, the paper, said, “lent valuable assistance in getting title to land in Owens Valley.” Furthermore, the story said, “It is through Mr. Lippincott that the water board secured its concessions from the Government,” and it went on to assert that he provided three government engineers to help map the aqueduct’s route, “all the way from Charley’s Butte to the San Fernando Valley.” (That “Butte,” near the point ultimately chosen for the aqueduct’s diversion point, was named for African-American cowboy Charley Taylor, who was killed in 1863 while defending a party of settlers under attack by Native Americans.) “Any other government engineer, not a resident of Los Angeles,” the story applauded ingenuously, “undoubtedly would have gone ahead with nothing more than the mere reclamation of arid lands in view.”

  As later developments would bear out, it was the sort of approbation that Lippincott could have happily lived without, but it also bears out how little was thought of the manner of acquisition in Los Angeles. Mulholland, in fact, suggested that the commissioners ought to write a letter of thanks to the Reclamation Service for all its help. Because his employment as a consultant for the city occurred at the same time that he was drawing a salary from the federal government, Lippincott suffered considerable criticism from valley residents and from coworkers such as Jacob Clausen, who had met his future wife while working in the area and would take a personal interest in seeing the irrigation project move forward. Reclamation chief Haynes Newell was reluctant to censure Lippincott publicly for fear that the service as a whole would look bad. In the end, Lippincott was removed by his superiors from any involvement with the Owens Valley project in March 1906, and in July of that year he resigned his position with the bureau and went to work for the city.

  Meanwhile, of much greater controversy in Los Angeles was the fact that the Times had violated an informal agreement among all the principal newspapers to keep the matter of the proposed aqueduct off their pages until the work of securing the necessary land options had been completed. Once Mulholland had given the green light, it had been agreed, then all the papers could break the news simultaneously. Thus, when Otis went forward with the story without informing the others of his intentions, William Randolph Hearst’s proletarian-leaning Examiner reacted angrily, taking on an antagonistic role as Mulholland attempted to rally public support for the $1.5 million bond issue announced in order to pay for the options and purchases in the Owens Valley. The story’s appearance also caught Fred Eaton off guard. He was still in the valley when word came of what the Times had printed; as he later told reporters, he had to beat a hasty retreat to San Francisco to avoid a beating or worse. “When I go back for my cattle,” he told a reporter, “they will drown me in the river.”

  The Examiner complained that Mulholland had not produced a detailed plan of the planned aqueduct and said that a project such as he proposed could not be built for any less than $50 million, more than twice the superintendent’s estimate. Given that the total bonded indebtedness of the city stood at $7 million at the time, even Mulholland’s figures seemed formidable; the price tag insisted upon by the Examiner would have put the matter out of the realm of reason. Mulholland, however, was unfazed. On the Monday following the appearance of the Times story, he told a Municipal League banquet that he had “examined every foot” of the Owens River and showed attendees maps of the project he had prepared. With his characteristic wit, he told prospective voters, “If you don’t get it now, you will never need it.”

  The Examiner was not through, however. On August 24, the paper ran a story about the syndicate—including competing newsman Harrison Gray Otis—that had purchased the vast Porter Ranch tract in the San Fernando Valley, lands that would increase astronomically in value once Owens River water arrived. No wonder the Times was such an ardent supporter of the project, the Examiner said. Otis and the other rapacious businessmen who ran the city stood to line their pockets with ill-gotten gains.

  It is hard to know how much effect this vendetta could have had upon Mulholland’s campaign, for on September 2, 1906, matters took an unexpected turn, when, at the invitation of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, William Randolph Hearst came to town for a consultation on the matter. Following that meeting, Hearst appeared at the offices of the Examiner and informed his editor that henceforth the position of the paper would be to help the City of Los Angeles with its bond issue. After he had delivered this somewhat surprising declaration, Hearst wrote an editorial for the next day’s edition, recapping some of his paper’s earlier reservations but concluding that, so long as the promise of the city’s water commissioners to have Mulholland’s plans vetted by an independent group of advisors held, the Examiner was dropping its opposition.

  Though some have opined that Hearst’s change of heart was prompted by his desire to find support in Los Angeles for his presidential aspirations, it seems equally plausible that he agreed with the larger business community with whose representatives he had just met. If building the aqueduct would allow Los Angeles to grow and prosper, then liberals and those who sold
newspapers to them would benefit along with conservatives.

  Whatever the reason for Hearst’s shift, Mulholland proved correct in his suggestion to a reporter that the citizens of Los Angeles “have always been in the habit of taking my word.” On September 7 the bond issue was approved by a vote of 10,787 to 755. Though Mulholland had been confident, even he was surprised at the final margin. He had predicted something on the order of a 6 to 1 victory in his home precinct—the vote there was nearly 30 to 1.

  Though opposition in the Owens Valley would continue to mount, creating a fresh set of problems in the years to come, the immediate obstacle in Mulholland’s way had been cleared. The purchases of the lands under option were assured, and he could move on to the design and funding of the building itself. Only then did the gravity of what he had gotten himself into seem to strike Mulholland. “I put in the most anxious months of my life during that period,” he would tell a writer for the Times, admitting that even he had come to question the viability of such an unprecedented undertaking. But still, buoyed by his bedrock conviction that it was “the right thing to do,” he threw himself into what would become seven years of hard work.

  There were innumerable modifications made as engineers (actually employed by the hydrographic branch of the US Geological Survey with the city paying expenses) went to work in the field to lay out the route that Mulholland had originally intuited. Key to his sense of the viability of the project from the beginning was the geological fact that during the days of prerecorded history, the Owens River, draining some 2,810 square miles of watershed in the surrounding Sierra, Inyo, and White Mountains, ran originally at least as far as China Lake in the Mojave Desert, nearly half the distance to the bounds of the San Fernando Valley. Until the late Pleistocene Era, some 11,000 years or so before, glaciers in the mountains fed a lake so huge that it overflowed the valley at Haiwee Pass and pounded down the canyons into the Indian Wells Valley and beyond. Eventually came the recession of the glaciers, a diminution of the annual runoff, and the eventual formation of Owens Lake as the terminus of the river, a process likely aided by upthrust from earthquakes at the southern end of the valley along historic fault lines at the base of the Sierra and Inyo Mountains.