After some consideration, Speyer told Mathews that he would purchase all of the outstanding bonds—aqueduct, power, and harbor—under one condition: that the city would agree not to incur any additional indebtedness until January 1, 1913, a move that Speyer considered necessary to preserve the standing or “condition” on the bonds in Eastern financial circles. Furthermore, he was only buying about $2.9 million in aqueduct bonds—the $1.3 million that the city had placed in its sinking fund as a hedge would remain there.
The good news was that Speyer would make his payment on those bonds by March 11, 1912, thereby completing the entire $23 million issue at last. A relieved Mathews wired the news to Alexander, who called an emergency meeting of the City Council on the evening of February 10, where the measure was quickly adopted. The money was as good as in the bank. “LOS ANGELES’ GREAT PROJECTS NOW FINANCED—TEN MILLIONS OF BONDS BRINGING QUICK CASH,” headlines blared, and the completion of the aqueduct—assuming all went as planned—was assured.
Meanwhile, the three-member Aqueduct Investigation Board (AIB) appointed by the City Commission had begun its hearings, but the proceedings were almost immediately derailed when one member, Charles Warner, insisted on issuing a preliminary report to the City Council so that immediate steps could be taken to improve the food being served at Joe Desmond’s cookhouses. Warner was particularly troubled by complaints that the condensed milk served to men was excessively diluted, that margarine was often substituted for butter, and that supervisors and special visitors were provided with better food than laborers.
Eventually, Mulholland and General Chaffee appeared before the Public Welfare Committee to defend the commissary system. Chaffee said that he was not quite clear on what the problem was with margarine: it was served on a regular basis to army and navy men, he said, and no one ever complained. Mulholland told the committee that he had often eaten at Desmond’s camps alongside the men, eating the same fare that they had. It was the Chief’s suspicion that most of the complaints about Desmond’s mess came from people “who hadn’t eaten there three times.”
As the date for the special election neared, the AIB also heard complaints from representatives of the Portland Cement Manufacturers Association that the tufa cement manufactured by the city at its plant above Mojave was inferior, and another from W. T. Spilman, owner of a small San Fernando Valley water company that would likely be put out of business if aqueduct waters were made available in the region. Spilman, a critic of the project from the outset, had recently published a pamphlet, “The Conspiracy: An Exposure of the Owens River Water and San Fernando Land Frauds,” whose subtitle conveyed the gist of the charges made. The aqueduct was nothing but a plot hatched to enrich Otis and others who had bought land for $50 an acre and were now selling it for twenty times as much. (Some lands had changed hands for as much as $350 an acre, though it would be quite a while before the figures claimed by Spilman were realized.)
When asked by the AIB to comment on the charges Spilman had made, Mulholland began by dismissing the tract as too hysterical to take seriously. In fact, he had been quoted by a reporter as excoriating “capitalists” who had possibly profited by speculating in agricultural land, but he was offended by suggestions that he had been in league with any such persons. Good sense, and nothing else, dictated that the water would have to come to Los Angeles through the San Fernando Valley. It was unfortunate that land that should have been used for agricultural purposes “has been subdivided into town lots and small rich man’s country estates at prohibitive values,” Mulholland said, but added, “I do not care whether the San Fernando Valley receives the water or not. I have merely done my duty as an engineer. . . . [The water] must be used somewhere.”
As the three-member board appointed by the City Council struggled to come up with a consensus on these matters, the special election was held on May 28, and voters approved the re-constitution of the AIB to five members by a vote of 16,564 to 15,697, perhaps the first time that citizens of Los Angeles had gone against what Mulholland would have wanted (though it might be noted that he had not taken any active part in campaigning on the issue). On July 9, the new five-member board reconvened and began to hear the testimony of some sixty individuals who had been involved with the project, beginning with the question of how the city had initially identified the Owens River as the most likely source of future water.
With the two Socialists added to the panel, it would come as no surprise that charges leveled by Job Harriman would receive renewed attention. In “The Coming Victory,” a pamphlet he issued during his mayoral campaign, Harriman laid out a “water plot” that played well to those segments of society perennially drawn to or eager to make use of what could be called the conspiracy theory of history.
Big business, realizing the wonderful possibilities of profit to be made in exploiting land and water in the vicinity of Los Angeles, conceives a gigantic plan, and starts to carry it out with official aid. This plan involved the gobbling up of all available lands in and near San Fernando valley . . . [and] the securing of the Owens Valley water to irrigate these lands, by first creating a fake water famine and frightening the people into building an aqueduct . . . thereby putting about $50 million dollars [sic] profit into the corporation’s pockets, while the city gets none of the aqueduct water.
Harriman was one of the few who went so far as to name the water superintendent as a coconspirator, claiming, “Fred Eaton goes to the Owens Valley and buys water rights; and Mulholland prepares the minds of the people with his reports of a ‘water shortage’ when there is an abundance.”
Mulholland was, of course, among those called before the reconstituted board, and he began his testimony on Wednesday, July 10, the second day of hearings. After three days of listening to the superintendent answer virtually the same questions that had been put to him in the initial hearings, two of the original board members appointed by the City Council had heard enough. On July 15, Edward Cobb and Edward Johnson announced their resignation from the new board and followed that announcement by issuing their own report based on the hearings that the three-man panel had conducted prior to the May election.
Cobb and Johnson asserted that they had heard evidence on every salient issue, including the original purchase of Owens Valley lands, the activities of all land syndicates whose purchases had been called into question, the matter of distribution of excess aqueduct water, the quality of construction, and all other matters appertaining thereunto. As to their findings, they said, “There has not been brought to our attention one particle of evidence that would reflect in any way whatsoever upon the integrity of the management of the Aqueduct proposition from its inception to the present time.”
While the resignations and report created something of a public stir, the reconstituted AIB, now a body of three, with two Socialists and one Progressive, Charles Werner, nonetheless soldiered on, calling Mulholland’s chief assistant, J. B. Lippincott, to testify. Some opponents of the aqueduct considered Lippincott a far more despicable player than Fred Eaton in the so-called water plot. In their view, Lippincott had betrayed his public trust when, as a Reclamation Service official, he had tipped off Eaton as to the US government’s intentions and aided Eaton in purchasing key land parcels that would forestall any reclamation project in the Owens Valley. Lippincott stood firm in his denials of all such allegations while before the AIB, and he was equally adamant that there had been no shortcuts or compromises made in the quality of work on the aqueduct project to date.
On August 31, after hearing testimony from project attorney Mathews and a number of businessmen who had entered into various subcontracts with the city, as well as aqueduct workers and foremen, the AIB delivered its report. There was a bit of attendant controversy when the AIB requested funds to publish several thousand copies of the report for public distribution and the City Council refused, but that matter was temporarily forestalled when the AIB leaked significant portions to the press.
In its report, the AIB co
ncluded that the resources of the Los Angeles River had been significantly underestimated—in direct contravention of Mulholland’s statistics, the AIB declared that waters drawn from the original watershed could support as many as 1,000,000 citizens (at the time there were about 350,000 in the city and 630,000 in the county). More alarming was the conclusion that the waters of the Owens River were contaminated by manure, sewage, and fertilizers, not to mention “drowning animals of various sorts,” and were categorically “unfit for drinking purposes,” making the entire “11,000 or 12,000” inches of water that might be obtained via the aqueduct useful only for irrigation purposes. These findings led inevitably to the further conclusion that, “the owners of the Times and the Express [owned by businessman and land speculator E. T. Earl], and wealthy associates . . . were interested in San Fernando Valley and other lands which would naturally be benefitted by bringing the Owens Valley Water to the head of San Fernando Valley.”
As to the charges of shoddy construction practices, the AIB declared that there was “a general lack of supervision,” and that “costly experiments” were made that resulted in “immense loss” to the city, including the use of tufa cement, considered substandard by consultants employed by the AIB. In addition, the once-touted caterpillar traction engines had finally proved to be unreliable in the desert climate, subject to regular breakdown and expensive repair. An exasperated Mulholland had finally ordered the machines be replaced with far less finicky mules, but in the AIB’s mind, purchase of the engines constituted an unfortunate, indefensible experiment to begin with.
However, the body had heard nothing that indicated malfeasance on the part of any public official connected with the project: “no direct evidence of graft has been developed,” the report concluded. However, the board did hedge somewhat by adding that “the Aqueduct system affords opportunities for graft, and that if this Board had the necessary time to develop all facts along lines suggested by individuals, a knowledge of human nature indicates that men would have been found who had succumbed to temptation.” The codicil was a veiled rebuke of Mulholland and a reflection of the traction that the conspiracy theory had gained.
Coverage by the Socialist-leaning Los Angeles Record featured headlines such as “AQUEDUCT WATER IS POISON” and “MILLIONAIRES PROFIT—CITY PAYS,” while the Times led with “ENGINEER PROTEST AGAINST FAKED UP ‘REPORTS’” and “INVESTIGATION WHIRLIGIGGLE—PROBE GOES AROUND IN VACUUM CIRCLE.” Mulholland had little to say about the report publicly, though he did complain about what he said were “willfully garbled and distorted reports of the sessions which had found their way into print.”
Meanwhile, the report was in the hands of the City Council, where it languished until January 21, 1913, when the council finally approved the funds necessary to print 10,000 copies in a newspaper-style format. Though no action was ever taken as a result of the AIB’s findings, the process, which took more than a year to complete, did lay the groundwork for a bifurcated view of the aqueduct project that endures to this day. In certain quarters, the AIB report—lacking any evidence of collusion or graft and ignoring all known water science of the day—would be held up as proof that the undertaking was a flawed-from-the-outset scheme hatched by oligarchs to make millions. The opposing view, that the Los Angeles Aqueduct was a visionary enterprise engineered by a public servant the likes of which the world had never seen before, may have simply been too inspiring for cynics to tolerate.
IF YOU DIG IT, THEY WILL COME
ONE OF THE MORE LAMENTABLE EXCISIONS MADE from Catherine Mulholland’s original manuscript is that of an entire chapter entitled “Thoughts on the Aqueduct Controversy,” in which the author ponders the immensity of the discord that lingers about the subject. “The sheer magnitude and excellence of the engineering feat has often been diminished (even ignored or dismissed) alongside the human conflicts it generated,” she writes, elsewhere theorizing that “suspicion remains that there must have been villainy, for the equivocal nature of the case dissatisfies those who demand that the event be a simplistic story of good vs. evil.” Better, she counsels, to adopt a mythic stance toward such material, quoting Joseph Campbell to explain. “Myth looks with a godlike gaze at the hardness of life itself,” she points out. It is a lens that, in Campbell’s words, “makes the tragic attitude seem somewhat hysterical, and the merely moral judgment shortsighted.”
Her grandfather “was never tortured by the ambiguities of what he had to do,” Ms. Mulholland writes. “He told his sons in their early trips to Owens Valley before the Aqueduct was completed and when it was still a hunter’s and fisherman’s paradise (my father never forgetting the trout that fairly leaped to the line) that you couldn’t let sentiment stand in the way of progress.”
In sum, she argues, “while he oversaw the gigantic undertaking of the Aqueduct, Mulholland may have sometimes failed in ‘displays of altruism’ but he also avoided the pitfalls this project offered in the way of corruption, cheating, favoritism, and failure. The man with a clear head is not always lovable.”
However dedicated he may have been to the building of the aqueduct, the various inquisitions of investigatory boards were not, by any means, the only matters Mulholland had to contend with during the long year of 1912. His wife, Lillie, had been diagnosed with uterine cancer, and given that there were now five children in the household—two not yet ten—domestic concerns were also taking their toll. Though much of the difficult work on the aqueduct was completed, key matters remained, and the work had begun to wear on him. As he told one reporter, “strain and responsibility have shattered my health. Now, under my doctor’s advice, I am trying to forget everything connected with the aqueduct. My work is nearly completed, and then I shall take a long rest.”
In May, however, he was described as cheerful when he announced to reporters, “This morning only twenty-five and one-half miles of the Los Angeles Aqueduct remain to be built,” and told them that the route of the main distribution line for the system was determined—southward from the site of the reservoirs underway in the San Fernando Valley near the Newhall Pass and through a tunnel in the Santa Monica Mountains at Franklin Canyon to serve what is now Hollywood and the Inglewood area. He could possibly complete work on this part of the delivery system by the time the Owens River water arrived, but appropriations would have to be made soon, he pointed out.
Meanwhile, there were still more than 2,000 men busy along the entire line, doing perilous work on the siphons and tunnels in the Saugus, Jawbone, and Grapevine Divisions, where they had been lucky to escape without serious mishaps so far. It was a rather surprising run of luck, in fact, given the nature of the work, and the terrain. Then again, good fortune is only known by what opposes it.
On the morning of June 16, in the Drinkwater Tunnel in the San Gabriel Mountains, about fifteen miles north of Saugus, there were about twenty men at work in the southern half of the 5,600-foot shaft known officially as Tunnel No. 9. A little before 8:00 A.M., foreman Lewis Gray led a blasting crew of three others to a point about 2,200 feet inside the mountain. About 400 feet of rock separated Gray’s crew from the men working down from the opposite end, and they were scheduled to break through on July 1, assuming nothing unforeseen took place.
At the blasting site, Gray went over the task at hand with the crew. They were to place fifty pounds of dynamite in holes that had already been prepared, apply the priming powder and caps to the charges, and run the fuses in readiness for the blast itself. It was nothing the men—shift boss Norman Stoble, tool nipper Thomas O’Donnell, and rock train man Edward Garside—hadn’t done any number of times, but still Gray left them with an admonition: “Be careful.”
Gray couldn’t be sure what happened after he rounded a curve that hid the men from his sight. There was electric light in the tunnel, and even if the lines didn’t run right up to the spot where the trio was working, there was plenty of light there to work by. Still, Gray knew, miners were creatures of habit. Though it was absolutely forbidden, th
e men liked to carry their candles and often used them to supplement the electric lamps. Or maybe it was just a spark thrown as someone crimped a cap on a charge.
All Gray knew for sure was that less than five minutes after he’d left the group, and as he was still making his way toward the mouth of the tunnel, he heard a tremendous roar. In the next instant he was flying through darkness, then slammed into a wall of rock. Gray was bleeding, stunned by the force of the blast and barely able to breathe the air that was filled with dust and fumes. Still, he forced himself to crawl toward what he hoped was light. To stay where he was would mean death.
The men he’d left behind were not as fortunate. Stoble and O’Donnell had been working together a few feet away from Garside, who himself was only inches away from the charges at the head of the tunnel when the blast went off. The bodies of Stoble and O’Donnell were eventually found, buried beneath the forty carloads of granite that came down in the cave-in caused by the explosion. Nothing was left of Garside.
Most of the other members of the shift, working closer to the mouth of the tunnel, felt the blast and had hardly turned to run when the lights went out and the roof came down, jamming the passageway—twelve feet wide and thirteen feet high—before them. As they tore at the pile of fallen rock, foreman Gray emerged bloody and battered from the cloud of dust and fumes at their heels. He told them what had happened, ignoring his injuries to join in the task of dislodging the jumble until finally—heads splitting from the effects of the fumes—they could see light and could crawl and stagger forward and were out of the tunnel and able to breathe at last.
The survivors were soon joined by a hundred other members of the work camp hurrying back inside the tunnel to search for survivors. Deep inside they found half a dozen men who had turned the wrong way in the darkness and confusion. Instead of escaping the fumes, they had run deeper into them, and, by the time they realized their mistake, were too weakened to go on.
Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles Page 18
