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

by Standiford, Les

  Though Mulholland had already agreed to let bids out for the work in the twenty-two-mile long Jawbone Division, the responses from private companies had been as dismal as he predicted. One private contractor who surveyed the area prefaced his submission by saying that he had never in his career seen conditions so adverse to such an undertaking. Even allowing for a 15 percent markup to contractors off the top, Mulholland said, the estimates that came in were beyond reason. As a result, he said, the city would be doing its own work there, including twelve miles of tunnels and eight siphons, and for about half the cost of the lowest bid that had been proposed. On average, Mulholland figured that the cost of each of the 1 million or so feet in the entire system would average about $22. By comparison, figures from those who bid on the Jawbone work came in at more than $50 a foot, a figure that would have bankrupted the project before it began.

  By early August, shortly after the last of the Jawbone bids had been rejected, Mulholland had 400 men at work in the area; by fall there were 700 there, and by the beginning of 1909, almost 1,300. As Mulholland told reporters, “Any man of family in Los Angeles who desires work at manual labor for $2 a day can secure a place,” adding that there would be “modest” homes built—some already available at Tehachapi near the cement plant—as well as schools, one already proposed near the South Portal—so that wives and children of workers could be brought along. Though such facilities added cost to the project, Mulholland argued to the commissioners that family men were more reliable than the itinerants who were content to live in tents.

  Despite such blandishments, however, the number of men who brought their families to live in aqueduct camps remained few. One later study calculated that only twenty-three women and twenty-three children ever lived in the Inyo County camps. The women who did come were wives of skilled or supervisory workers, although two prostitutes were also enumerated.

  Part of the knottiest construction problem in the Jawbone, where he would eventually have fifteen separate crews working, Mulholland told reporters, was the amount of preparatory work involved. Several miles of roads leading to the route of the aqueduct from the mail trail between Mojave and the Owens Valley had to be carved, telephone and power lines strung all the way down to the isolated region from the Cottonwood Creek power plant in the Owens Valley, and water pipelines twenty miles long laid from wells near Tehachapi and in the nearby mountains. Meanwhile, however, Mulholland announced that a mile of canal had been dredged in the Owens Valley and was brimful of river water; the power plant at Division Creek was at work and feeding electricity as far south as the Alabama Hills; and nearly a mile of the Elizabeth Tunnel had been bored. There was no question in his mind that the big tunnel through the “nice” rock down there would be finished by the time the rest of the line was in place.

  One of the innovative features of the nascent project was the floating dredge eating its way along near the Alabama Hills. There had been somewhat similar dredges used before, but “Big Bill,” as workmen named this one, had been designed by Mulholland and, using powerful streams of water to cut through the mud and soft earth in its path, was said to be the most efficient of its kind. “Mr. Mulholland thinks as much of that dredger as though it were his baby,” one of the stenographers in the aqueduct offices told a reporter.

  All the while, there was an existing water system in Los Angeles to be maintained, one that was constantly increasing in its demands. When the city originally took over the works, Mulholland pointed out, there had been only about 25,000 customers. By November 1908, there were nearly 60,000, with about 300 new accounts being added each month. When he began as city superintendent, there were about 650 meters in use, a figure that had grown to more than 25,000. In the coming year, he hoped to more than double that number. Despite the savings brought about by the metering system, the city’s consumption of water had risen from 23 million gallons per day to almost 45 million, a reminder of why the completion of the aqueduct was vital.

  At the beginning of December, Mulholland submitted his “Third Annual Report” to the Board of Public Works, summarizing the work completed to date and projecting that fully fifty-eight miles of the line would be finished in 1909. He lamented the time and expense involved in all the preliminary work as admittedly “appalling,” but stressed that “it was felt that better and more economic progress could be made with all the accessories in the completed state in which they now are.”

  He assured the board that morale was high among the workforce and supervisors alike, and that there was every reason to believe that the project would be completed “within the time and cost originally estimated.” Within the crucial Jawbone Division, he noted that about a mile and a half of tunneling work had been completed and that most of the rest would be finished in the year to come. Progress had been steady on the tunnel beneath Elizabeth Lake, he added, with the North and South Crews moving toward each other at the rate of 660 feet per month.

  At a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce later that December, the chairman of the group worked up the temerity to ask if Mulholland could give them some better sense of just how much work had been done to date on the aqueduct. Mulholland paused, glancing about the room with a look that suggested he’d finally been uncovered as a fraud.

  “Well, we have spent about $8 million all told, I guess,” the Chief answered, “and there is perhaps nine hundred feet of aqueduct built. Figuring all our expenses, it has cost us about $3,300 per foot.”

  Coming from the man who had estimated that he could build the entire project for an average of $22 a foot, the statement would have sent murmurs through the room. A third of the money gone and only 900 feet of aqueduct to show for it? Mulholland simply nodded, giving the audience plenty of time to let the figures sink in.

  Then, with his characteristic sense of timing, he brightened. “But by this time next year,” he said, “I’ll have fifty miles completed and at a cost of under $30 per foot, if you’ll just let me alone.”

  With that, the audience dissolved into hoots and applause. “All right, Bill,” the chairman laughed. “Go ahead; we’re not mad about it.”

  And go ahead Mulholland did, given that there was finally some money in the kitty. He laid out plans for work that would total nearly $5 million, reorganizing activities into thirteen divisions, including the splitting of the Antelope Valley work in two and setting aside work at the cement plant as a division unto itself. For the coming year he planned significant work in ten of those divisions.

  He had refined the workings of “Big Bill,” the dredge operating between the intake and the Alabama Hills, and intended to keep it running night and day during the upcoming summer months. They would use a land-based power shovel to dig through the more rugged terrain at the Alabama Hills, with construction gangs to follow along, shaping the open line there by hand. With the onset of warmer weather in April, another power shovel would go to work excavating the reservoir site at Haiwee and other crews would begin digging northward from Haiwee toward those working in the Alabama Hills.

  The work in the Rose Valley, directly below the Haiwee Dam, consisted of fifteen miles of relatively easy work and thus could wait. The next section, though, which Mulholland now dubbed the Grapevine, was “rough and expensive,” and would require a number of steel siphons and a significant amount of tunneling through solid rock. The Southern Pacific rail line from Mojave had finally reached the Grapevine area, however, and he planned to put two power shovels at work there during the summer once a dependable water supply was established.

  The Freeman Division, south of Grapevine, was a twenty-one-mile stretch of what he called “cut and cover work of easy character.” Nor did he anticipate any difficulties in getting the line extended across the Antelope Valley. The southern half of that stretch had just been let out by the city to subcontractor Perry Howard, who promised completion within two years. Mulholland already had two steam shovels on his own twenty-eight-mile section of the work in the northern Antelope Valley. In the Moja
ve Division, as he called it, he had originally intended to run an uncovered conduit similar to that between the diversion point and Haiwee, in the Owens Valley, but the work had gone so smoothly so far that with the savings already realized he could afford to cover that Antelope Valley portion “so no jackrabbits fall into it,” and still come in under budget.

  In the Elizabeth Division down south, work continued at both ends of the great tunnel, and excavation for the Fairmont Reservoir was under way. Mulholland also hoped to begin work on the Fairmont Dam itself, but his engineers had not yet settled the question of whether the structure would need to be built of earth or concrete. The work below the South Portal of the Elizabeth Tunnel was now known as the Saugus Division, with the charge of getting the aqueduct down San Francisquito Canyon and through the major tunnel at Newhall. It was “very rough” going there, Mulholland told a Times reporter, and work on twelve lesser tunnels would begin shortly, though any of the easier surface digging could wait.

  The most challenging part of his plan, however, lay near the aqueduct’s midpoint, within the twenty-two-mile-long bounds of the Jawbone Division, where crews had been busy at preparatory work since September 1908. Mulholland had budgeted more than $1 million for work in the Jawbone alone, planning to put an electrically powered shovel to work there and to complete most of the 43,000 feet of tunneling work before the end of the year.

  It was at Jawbone where the Out West reporter early in 1909 climbed to a vantage point 1,200 feet above the desert floor to stare down upon “a yellow streak of excavated rock and dirt and the thousand ants of men at work, the line appearing and disappearing in a country torn and twisted and tossed in the eruptive period of ages gone,” there to wonder upon Mulholland’s “effrontery” in setting the project in motion to begin with.

  By that time, the Southern Pacific had forged its line two-thirds of the way up from Mojave to the Owens Valley; 200 miles of access roads had been built; two power plants were up and running, with lines connected to the bulk of the construction sites; a telephone line stretched from the Los Angeles headquarters all the way to the intake site; the cement plant was churning out a thousand barrels a day; and machine shops, barracks, commissary buildings, warehouses, offices, and hospitals now dotted 230 miles of once-barren landscape.

  In the first ten days of 1909, Mulholland’s men drove a record 2,456 feet of tunnel in the Jawbone Division, and by February he calculated that progress up and down the line had reached the rate of 760 feet a day, or about 41/3 miles per month. With new machinery coming on line, Mulholland hoped to reach a rate of five miles a month by summer.

  One newfangled contraption that Mulholland put to work on the project would become legendary: a steam-powered traction engine developed by the Benjamin Holt Company, one that had enjoyed some success in helping develop the treacherous peat bogs near Stockton. The theretofore little-known device resembled a cross between a locomotive and an army tank with continuous steel treads placed where ordinary wheels would have been. Given the distances involved, the difficult terrain, the extremes of heat and cold, and the weight and volume of steel pipe and other supplies to be carried, Mulholland eventually agreed to commission the building of twenty-eight of the machines for service up and down the line to supplement the traditional mule teams that had been used for such purposes.

  Water department lore has it that Mulholland watched one of the devices at work shortly after its delivery at the South Portal in 1907 and remarked, “It crawls like a caterpillar,” thus christening the machine. That it was in fact the Chief who coined the phrase is unlikely (contemporary company literature attributes the name to a Holt photographer), but these “traction engines” showed great promise when they were first put to work and were just one more aspect of a project that seemed otherworldly for most. Widely featured in news accounts and photographs of the undertaking, the “caterpillar” would in time become a standard fixture on any earthmoving project.

  The Out West writer also spent a fair amount of time watching Mulholland at work in the field. The Chief might observe a gang at work with pick and shovel for half an hour without saying a word, the reporter noted, then later take the foreman aside to offer advice on how to improve his gang’s efficiency, along with a deft assessment of who was worth keeping and who was a drag on the line.

  It was the rare instance where Mulholland ever second-guessed a foreman, however, for he figured that a man in charge would never have achieved a position of authority if he hadn’t merited it. On one occasion, Mulholland sent a laborer out to a job with a personal note of recommendation. A short while later, the reporter noted, the laborer was back in Mulholland’s office.

  “What are you doing here?” Mulholland asked.

  The laborer threw up his hands. He’d presented Mulholland’s letter of recommendation, but the foreman had told him he had all the men he needed and that all of them were doing good work besides.

  Mulholland nodded. “I guess that settles it, then. Big John is responsible for laying that pipe, and if he says there isn’t a place open, then there isn’t.”

  Finally, the reporter who had wondered what had made Mulholland think he could pull off such a massive undertaking confronted the man himself with the question, one that drew a rare concession. “I don’t know why I ever went into this job,” Mulholland answered with a wry smile. He admitted that there was far more money to be made in a private practice, but then he paused. “I guess it was the Irish in me.”

  And there was also the fact of his ingrained sense of duty, he said. “I know the necessity, better perhaps than any other man. . . . If I don’t, my thirty years of employment on the city’s waterworks haven’t gone for much.”

  Mulholland sat silent for a moment, then gave his questioner a final reassuring nod. “We’ll pull her through on time, never fear, if the men in the ditch can have their swing.”

  BEST YEAR TO DATE

  THE LIST OF PROBLEMS WAS NEVER SHORT FOR MULHOLLAND. If the work itself were not enough, he had long been irked by the general intransigence of the city’s Civil Service Commission, a matter that came to a head when that body insisted that J. B. Lippincott, Mulholland’s chief assistant on the project, be required to pass the appropriate engineering Civil Service Examination or step down. To a practical-minded man such as Mulholland, the edict was the height of foolishness.

  “There is always the danger that he will not stand first in such an examination,” Mulholland testified in a hearing before the commission. But Lippincott, the Chief said, “knows what he is doing from the ground up,” in contrast to even top engineers, “who though they might best him in an examination, would be vastly inferior in knowledge of the work at hand.”

  Adna Chaffee appeared at the hearing along with Mulholland and also argued for an exemption for Lippincott. In the end, the commission requested that Mulholland and Chaffee provide a revised classification and definition of aqueduct-related duties. Meantime, they said, they would take the Lippincott matter under advisement. It should be noted here that if the council and new mayor thought the appointment of Adna Chaffee would create some sort of check on William Mulholland, they would be sadly mistaken. The fact was that throughout the arduous days to come, these two warhorses proved to be kindred spirits, united in their disdain for petty politics and motivated primarily to get things done.

  There was another brief flurry of concern in February when the California legislature considered a bill that would increase the minimum wage to $2.50 per day on all public works projects in the state. Given that the main budget item in his estimates was for labor, Mulholland fretted that if the measure passed, it would mean a $3.5 million increase in payroll alone. Ultimately, however, and owing to the lingering depression and high rate of unemployment, the measure was defeated in Sacramento.

  At the Jawbone, meantime, engineer John Freeman remarked to his chief on a survey trip that the place appeared to be nearly impossible country for canal digging. “It is rough on top,” Mulholla
nd agreed, adding that it was the reason they were going to do much of their work there underground. “When you buy a piece of pork,” he pointed out, “you don’t have to eat the bristles.”

  Tunneling carried its own version of “bristles,” of course. The Coastal Mountains of California are traversed by multiple fault lines, and underground digging and blasting in such terrain, even where the work seems to be going on in solid rock, can often trigger unexpected cave-ins or loose a flood of suffocating sand from hidden pockets. In those days, there were no metal hard hats, but miners did wear derbies that cushioned the blow of a falling rock. As one worker explained, “Any tool dropped from a height not too great, or a falling rock not too large, would cave in the derby or drive it down over a man’s ears, but not crack his skull.”

  To speed the pace of the treacherous tunnel work, Mulholland instituted a bonus system. For every foot that a crew exceeded the posted daily average—six feet where the roof had to be shored up with timbers, eight feet where it didn’t—each man would get forty cents added to his day’s pay. It was only one more reason why men were eager for what otherwise might have seemed dangerous and difficult for most.

  Fredrick Cross, a nineteen-year-old surveyor’s assistant who helped chart the course for the tunnel men, recalled that he accepted underground work with “the hazards of falling rock and delayed charges of exploding dynamite, the annoyance of the deafening air drills and the continually dripping water,” primarily because it got him off the alternately blistering and freezing desert floor. In the tunnels, the temperature held at a steady fifty-eight degrees, Cross said, “with no burning sun in the summer, no biting cold in the winter and no gritty winds.”