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

by Standiford, Les

  Debate on both the issues of additional land purchases and reparations dragged on for years, with the Public Service Commission rescinding its proposal to guarantee the maintenance of 30,000 irrigated acres and resuming a policy of piecemeal acquisitions, though the city did agree to the appointment of a three-person panel of valley officials to assess the value of properties. Using the figures of this board, the land purchase program continued until May 1, 1927, by which time the City of Los Angeles was the owner of about 225,000 acres, or 80 percent, of the privately owned farmland in the Owens Valley.

  The 1925 session of the California legislature approved a measure calling for reparations to Owens Valley residents where city liability could be proven. As a result, depreciation claims came in from the owners of town lots, homes, and buildings totaling nearly $2 million. The owners of sixty-seven businesses claimed losses, including surplus equipment, totaling almost $700,000. The claims of various doctors, dentists, mechanics, bank clerks, stenographers, bookkeepers, electricians, blacksmiths, barbers, and beauticians totaled something over $125,000, and thirty-five “Indians” said that they had lost $25,000 in wages they otherwise would have earned as farm laborers. In total, the claims were more than $2.8 million, though the Public Service Commission declined to make any immediate payments.

  With the disbanding of the Graves Commission and the intransigence of the Public Service Commission, tensions escalated in the valley and in 1926 a series of bombings once again shook the line, one of which took out a section of the aqueduct near Lone Pine, not far from the Alabama Gates, on May 12. Mulholland did not seem greatly concerned by the actions, characterizing the Alabama Hills blast as “just another gesture” in an attempt to intimidate the city. “They do it now and then up that way,” he said. “The dynamite is set off one night and we get a boxful of reparations claims the next morning.”

  At about the same time, and while a renewed fight to enforce the payment of reparations was being debated in the state legislature, R. P. Del Valle, president of the Board of Water and Power Commissioners, issued a statement that called the portrayal of the Owens Valley as the “Land of Broken Hearts” into question. Charges that the valley had suffered as a result of the city’s land purchases, many made at as much as four times the assessed market value, had never been substantiated by concrete evidence. On the contrary, Del Valle said, there had actually been “an increase in bank deposits, growth in railroad freightage and building construction,” over the period. Much of the controversy, Del Valle contended, was the work of private electrical power interests who were still battling the city in an effort to maintain their monopoly and who had conspired with others in the valley eager to extort payouts from the municipality.

  When the State Senate tabled the new reparations measure on April 27, the response from the valley was forceful, though not in terms of debate. Another explosion on May 27 took out 450 feet of the No Name Siphon in the Grapevine Division, an action that would disrupt water flow to the city for about three weeks, while another damaged a control gate near Big Pine on the following day. City officials decried the actions as nothing less than a blackmail attempt by valley interests, and when reporters asked Mulholland if he had any comment to make, he assured them that very little of what he had to say could be printed.

  Release of a battery of statistics supporting Del Valle’s contention that the economy of the Owens Valley had improved significantly as a result of the city’s investments there produced further bombings by way of response, one on June 5 near the junction of the aqueduct with Cottonwood Creek, close to Lone Pine, and two less significant blasts on July 15 and 16. After conferring with various elected officials from Inyo and Los Angeles, including William B. Mathews, Governor Clement C. Young issued a statement condemning the bombings and calling upon law enforcement to apprehend those responsible. To put an end to the strife, Young proposed that ranchers and other valley citizens should immediately bring a series of test-case suits against the city under the provisions of the Reparations Act of 1925. The city would then settle all outstanding reparations claims based on the outcomes.

  Young’s proposal might have put an end to the matter, but before any action could be taken, affairs in the Owens Valley took a completely unexpected turn. Rumors had been circulating for some time about the health of the Watterson Brothers’ five valley banks, and on August 2, a state bank examiner appeared to inspect the books. As it turned out, there was a vast discrepancy—about $500,000—between the cash on hand and what was owed depositors. All of it had appeared to have gone to support various private enterprises owned by the Wattersons.

  By August 4, the banks were shuttered and by the end of the month Wilfred and Mark Watterson were arraigned. The two would later claim that their only motivation had been to keep the valley’s economy alive, but they would be convicted on charges of embezzlement and sentenced to San Quentin. It was a stunning blow to the valley community, many of whose citizens lost their life savings. With the disgrace and fall of the Wattersons, organized resistance to the City of Los Angeles was at an end.

  FAILURE

  THE END OF THE OWENS VALLEY WATER WARS PROVED A great relief to William Mulholland. Though he lamented the fallout upon the innocent from the Wattersons’ perfidy, he would go to his grave certain of one thing: his own dealings with property owners in the Owens Valley had always been on the square.

  Shortly after the Watterson Brothers closed the doors of their five banks in the valley (two in Bishop, one in Big Pine, one in Independence, one in Lone Pine), Wilfred Watterson issued a statement that depositors would be able to recover their funds “when the Owens Valley reparations claims against the city of Los Angeles have been paid.” When word of this reached Mulholland, he was nearly apoplectic.

  “Astounding,” Mulholland described the claim. “What has the reparations business to do with the financial condition of Watterson’s banks?”

  “The first statement made by these valley bankers when they closed their doors was that their banks had been affected by ‘frozen’ loans on ranches,” Mulholland said. “The farming interests have never even made any reparation claims against the city.”

  He pointed out that the city had made about $12 million in land purchases in the Owens Valley and in many instances the properties were mortgaged by the Watterson banks. In every instance, Mulholland said, the sellers had received cash in excess of the amount of the mortgages and the bank could have—certainly should have—gotten its money out at that time. (The astonishing fact would come out at the bankers’ trial that many mortgages—including one on a well-known piece of property—were simply never cancelled by the Wattersons, even though they had collected the payouts. Thus, the mortgagees were left still responsible for the notes even though the bank had been paid.)

  Mulholland disputed the notion that the city had devastated the valley economy and suggested that the reparations group had engaged in a long propaganda campaign to bolster hopes of a large payout from the city. As to the Wattersons’ claims that the city was somehow responsible for the banks’ condition, Mulholland said he was happy to let state bank examiners make that determination. Meantime, he said, it was his sincere—though ultimately forlorn—hope “that the people of the valley who have money in those banks will be able to recover it.”

  There had been other matters for Mulholland to deal with throughout the stormy period, not all of them distressing. The new Mulholland Highway was dedicated at its Calabasas terminus on December 27, 1924, when the Chief smashed a bottle of aqueduct water over the gates and inserted a golden key to open the road to traffic. A rodeo featuring Tom Mix and a cadre of Hollywood cowboys ensued, followed by a caravaning of dignitaries along the twenty-five-mile twisting road that crossed the now-legendary canyons in the hills—Sepulveda, Beverly Glen, Benedict, Coldwater, Laurel—all the way to the Cahuenga Pass near the Hollywood Bowl. The event was marked with a huge parade in Hollywood, and Mulholland later spoke to about 10,000 people gathered at
the bowl, the landmark venue that opened in 1922 but that would not permanently install its iconic shell until 1929.

  Mulholland admitted that he had been advocating such a scenic road from the days of the aqueduct’s arrival in the San Fernando Valley, but it had only recently become a reality when a group of private investors owning 10,000 acres along the route underwrote the $1 million bond issue for its construction. “Persons having learned the advantages of living above the fog and turmoil, smoke and congestion of the city, would flock to the hills,” one of the developers predicted, admitting that the 70,000-acre area had long been considered “worthless” owing to the difficulty of the terrain.

  On March 17, 1925, Mulholland was again honored when the 200-foot high, 1,000-foot wide dam in Weid Canyon holding back the scenic Hollywood Reservoir was dedicated in his name. At the ceremony dedicating the structure, Mulholland remembered working nearby to quarry rock for the city’s jail forty-three years before. His colleagues had been ribbing him that some of the fifteen impoundment dams he had constructed as part of the water system resembled old women’s aprons. “But in this job I think I may take a little pardonable pride.” In fact, the gracefully curved dam, the first concrete dam Mulholland built, still stands as a striking example of its kind. Surrounded by a broad footpath, it remains a popular destination for joggers and bikers. News stories carried what had become a characteristic footnote to the completion of a Mulholland project—typical costs for comparable structures in other cities ran at ten to twelve dollars a cubic yard. Mulholland Dam cost but six dollars per yard.

  Mulholland also spent considerable time in the 1920s working vigorously on behalf of the Colorado River Project, which he saw as the only long-term solution to the city’s future needs. It was a foregone conclusion that the city’s population would pass the 1 million mark in the 1930 census (it would be nearly 1.25 million, in fact) and that of the county was already nearing 2 million. On February 29, 1928, he appeared before a group of Southern California municipal representatives gathered in Long Beach to discuss the implications of the state’s approval of the Southern California Metropolitan Water District, formed to distribute Colorado River water to San Diego, Los Angeles, and Southland communities in between.

  Mulholland explained to the group that the key to the entire project’s viability was the construction of a “high” dam at Boulder in order that sufficient electricity would be produced to pump the water up over the intervening mountains. The Colorado River Aqueduct would be 260 miles long and carry enough water for 7 million, he told listeners. Los Angeles would receive 1,500 cubic feet per second of that flow, or about three times what the Owens River was providing, but it all hinged upon the building of a properly sized dam.

  It is ironic that much of Mulholland’s time was being devoted to questions of dam construction, particularly given what was about to happen. Not only was the Boulder Dam on his mind, but he had also been called to the site of the new impoundment dam in the San Francisquito Canyon on March 12 by dam keeper Tony Harnisch-feger. The St. Francis Dam was the most recent of nine impoundment structures Mulholland had built or enlarged for the system in the 1920s, including the Lower Franklin, Stone Canyon, Encino, Sawtelle, Ascot, and Hollywood/Mulholland Dams. He hoped to be able to store a full year’s water supply in the new reservoirs, Mulholland wrote in his “Twenty-fourth Annual Report.” Largest and newest of them all was the St. Francis Dam, which could store 32,000 acre-feet of water, about half the total of the entire group.

  As fate would have it, the site of the St. Francis Dam was not Mulholland’s first choice. He had, in fact, planned “the big one” for Big Tujunga Canyon, but when the department began condemnation proceedings on lands there, property owners initiated a series of legal challenges meant to drive up prices. In disgust, Mulholland ordered proceedings in Big Tujunga stopped in favor of a second choice, one he had long identified as a potential dam site. During his surveys for the original aqueduct route through the San Francisquito Canyon, Mulholland had identified the area lying between Power Plant #2, well down in the deepest folds of the canyon, and the site of Power Plant #1, at the northerly head of the broad valley upstream, as a natural place for a reservoir. It would be a relatively simple matter to place a dam at the bottom of that valley, at the spot where the canyon began to narrow, and there was plenty of room to store waters behind it. More importantly, there were few property owners to contend with.

  The structure was designed as a curved concrete gravity arch structure, much like the Mulholland Dam in the Hollywood Hills. Though it was never documented, the choice in design was probably made because of the lack of sufficient clayey material in the surrounding soils, thus ruling out the use of hydraulic sluicing that Mulholland had used in building most of the other structures. A dam such as the St. Francis is called a “gravity” dam because its basic strength in holding back the waters pressing against it comes from its dead weight, enhanced by the width of its “sole” pressing against the ground at its base.

  One aspect of its design that would prove controversial was the fact that the height of the dam above the creek bed it crossed was planned to be 175 feet. During the actual pouring of concrete, however, it was decided to raise the height to 195 feet, so that as many as 38,000 acre-feet of water could be stored. As experts have since noted, the raising of the height of a gravity dam without a corresponding increase in the thickness of its base would be dangerous.

  There was also another issue involved, one that was only then beginning to be appreciated in the civil engineering community—the impact of uplift forces at work on a monolithic structure such as the St. Francis Dam. Once water is impounded behind a dam, the great weight of that water presses not only forward, but downward, exerting great pressure on underground water unavoidably percolating beneath the bottom of the dam itself. Today, no such dam would be built without great attention to the drilling of “uplift relief wells” beneath the base, but some analysts contend that such science was not fully understood at the time.

  Another factor to be considered when estimating the stability of a concrete dam is the relative porosity of its concrete. To the degree that concrete can become saturated by water, it actually becomes buoyant and the effect of its weight is counteracted accordingly. Some experts have theorized that owing to the nature of the aggregate taken from the nearby soils to mix with the cement, the porosity of the structure was substandard and its weight was actually about 7 percent lighter than that of comparable structures.

  In any event, construction on the St. Francis Dam was completed in May 1926 and by May 1927 impounded waters were at 177 feet, three feet below the spillway. During the time of filling, cracks appeared in the downstream face of the structure, which Mulholland identified as “transverse contraction cracks” to be expected as part of the curing process. The cracks were filled and sealed to prevent further seepage, and with the lowering of the water level during the summer months, all seemed well.

  Then, in February 1928 as the spring runoff again raised the water levels, some leaks began to appear on both the east and west sides of the dam’s foundation. In addition, the cracks that formed the previous year reopened, and a sizable leak (four to five gallons per second) opened in a concrete wing extending out westward from the crest of the dam. To avoid erosion, Mulholland ordered crews to install an eight-inch underdrain below the wing that carried the leaking water back toward the canyon where it splashed down the face of the dam, giving the impression that it was gushing from the main structure.

  On Monday morning, March 12, the waters were overrunning the dam’s spillway, and operators at Power Plant #2 downstream opened gates that dumped aqueduct waters from the system into the normally dry bed of San Francisquito Creek. Of course, dam keeper Tony Harnischfeger had by that point summoned Mulholland and Van Norman to inspect what he thought was an impending blowout on the west flank of the dam. Mulholland and his assistant arrived about 10:30 and spent the next two hours inspecting the various leak
s and seeps. As to the new leak, Mulholland pointed out to Harnischfeger that the water coming from under the dam on the west embankment was clear. It did not pick up its muddy color until it ran across the steep access road that had been recently cut into the hillside there. That meant that the water was either leaching out of the concrete or was being forced up from the underlying aquifer. Neither situation was cause for alarm, Mulholland said. The dam was not in danger of being undermined.

  Though he had reassured Harnischfeger, troubling thoughts could not have been far from Mulholland’s mind in the aftermath of that visit, as his daughter Rose was to attest. When the telephone rang shortly after midnight in the Mulholland home, it was Rose who picked up the call. Harvey Van Norman was on the line, offering a terse explanation of what had happened. As Catherine Mulholland retells the story, “She went to her father’s bed and awakened him with the news. As he rose and stumbled toward the phone, she heard him repeat over and over, ‘Please God. Don’t let people be killed.’”

  Mulholland and Van Norman were rushed to the scene in a car driven by Mulholland’s son Tom, who was still living at the family home near Third and Western. Inside two hours following their receipt of the news, the men, using back roads through Bouquet Canyon, were at the scene of the disaster, where only one narrow central section of the broken dam was still standing, looming against the night sky like the exclamation point of doom.