Rivers in the Desert

by Margaret L Davis

  But as the waters roared into the San Fernando Valley, charges that Mulholland had conspired with the Board of Control to deliver water to the board’s arid valley lands resurfaced. Influential critics continued to allege that Mulholland had helped conceive the aqueduct to benefit the powerful members of the San Fernando Mission Land Company. Once the water had been successfully delivered into the northeast corner of the San Fernando Valley, Mulholland never escaped the stinging accusation that the aqueduct was built solely for the greedy exploitation of the Otis-Sherman-Huntington land syndicate.

  Mulholland’s work on the aqueduct was well under way when a second syndicate was formed in 1910, this time comprised of Harrison Gray Otis, Harry Chandler, Otto F. Brant, Hobart J. Whitley, and Moses Hazekine Sherman. This new syndicate, called the Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company, or simply the Board of Control, secured an option on 47,500 acres in the San Fernando Valley at a total price of $2.5 million. Together, the two syndicates’ tracts encompassed nearly the entire San Fernando Valley from the present site of Burbank on the east to Tarzana on the west, including what is today known as Van Nuys, Canoga Park, Reseda, Sherman Oaks, and Woodland Hills. The company exercised its option in 1911, two years before the completion of the aqueduct, filing a subdivision map for “Tract 1000,” the largest single land development in Los Angeles history. Immediately the Pacific Electric Railway began construction of an extension into the huge new subdivision, virtually assuring its financial success.

  The men in the Board of Control were the power oligarchy of southern California and world-famous, each having amassed a private fortune. Harrison Gray Otis, who owned the Los Angeles Times, had come to Los Angeles in 1881 Known for his tightfisted, stingy personality, Otis loathed men disdainful of growth. “Hustlers, men of brain, brawn, and guts” were the people he admired. A “large, blubbery man with a Bismarck moustache,” Otis was never a subtle negotiator and was known for his violent temper, later earning him a reputation as Los Angeles’s most disliked capitalist. The greatest experience in his life was as a Union soldier in the Civil War that “transformed him from farm boy turned printer into a man who, once having experienced power, lusted after it even more.” Dubbed the “walrus of Moron-Land,” Otis had come to California broke and within one decade established himself as one of the city’s most influential and overbearing citizens.

  “There are certain combinations,” wrote author William G. Bonelli, “either of men or things—which appear to have been ordained by some natural law. These would include ham and eggs, hot dogs and mustard, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler.” Harry Chandler, born in New Hampshire, dropped out of Dartmouth College after he jumped into a starch vat on a dare and developed a severe lung infection. He migrated to Los Angeles for its climate and found his first job picking fruit in the San Fernando Valley. Chandler held onto his money, later purchasing newspaper circulation routes and then independent newspapers. In 1866 he purchased Otis’s rival paper, the Tribune. To deal with Chandler, Otis purchased Chandler’s distribution system, shut it down, and hired him as senior editor. Within two years the ubiquitous Chandler became Otis’s son-in-law.

  Moses Hazeltine Sherman had been a general in the army at twenty-nine, fighting Apaches in the Indian Wars. He moved to Los Angeles from Arizona, where he had been a school administrator, and later built the first rail line in the city—the famed “Red Car—” becoming a wealthy and eccentric trolley magnate. Otto F. Brant was vice-president and general manager of the highly successful Title Insurance and Trust Company. Originally from Ohio, Brant came to Los Angeles in 1888, becoming a shrewd, visionary real-estate speculator who was credited with the creation of the escrow process.

  The fifth member of the board, H. J. Whitley, was known as the “Great Developer.” Born in Toronto in 1860, Whitley was the youngest of seven children. At eighteen, he left Canada and pursued a career developing towns across the West. He constructed small cities from the Great Plains states deep into South Texas, making him a legend among developers and financiers. He was a friend of Teddy Roosevelt and an original Sooner. His most famous development, an obscure ranch spanning the hills just north of Los Angeles, was an orange grove he bought in the 1880s, later named Hollywood. Whitley believed that “land without population is a wilderness, population without land is a mob.”

  Pro-conspiracy advocates described Whitley as “the chairman,” Sherman as “the spy,” and Otis as “the booster” who chartered the board’s course. Together, it was alleged, they swayed public opinion, influenced city government, and manipulated information for their own purposes. Mulholland’s detractors claimed that Mulholland had steered the aqueduct to end in the San Fernando Valley, thereby guaranteeing each man in the syndicate a massive fortune after the water arrived. After the opening at the Grand Cascades, land values boomed. Within two decades, land values jumped from $20 to $2,000 an acre, putting estimated syndicate earnings at $100 million.

  The Board of Control, like the earlier syndicate formed in 1905 (the San Fernando Mission Land Company) represented a microcosm of the larger Los Angeles business community, and members of both groups overlapped. According to historian William Kahrl, the divisions within the group were as revealing as its alliances:

  Huntington despised Sherman personally, for example, and would be betrayed by him in a business deal only a year later. Otis had fought Huntington bitterly over the issue of the city’s harbor at San Pedro. Otis also regarded E. T. Earl as his most deadly competitor in the local newspaper industry, and the two devoted ten years of their Lives from 1901 to 1911 trying to drive one another out of business. And Huntington and Harriman, of course, had been at war since 1900, if not before.

  As heated as the rivalries were, members of both syndicates united on issues where their best interests were at stake. Support of Mulholland’s aqueduct was a primary example.

  Charges that Mulholland was engaged in San Fernando Valley land “thievery” never subsided. Yet, despite attempts to link him with the wealthy financiers of the syndicates, as one historian has noted, “he never really belonged in their world, in their clubs, or their way of life … and seems in general to have been rather careless about money.”

  Mulholland’s philosophical inclinations leaned more toward public service and less toward personal gain. “A man’s worth is measured by his importance to society and to humanity generally,’ he insisted. I never wanted to be wealthy. All I did want was work.” But such civic aspirations seemed disingenuous to Mulholland’s enemies. To the end of his life, Mulholland continued to insist that he was never involved in land speculation, and had no ulterior motive in the aqueduct’s construction.

  To his credit, Mulholland provided solid reasons for the proposed aqueduct to end at the northern end of the San Fernando Valley rather than proceed to the Los Angeles city limits. One compelling consideration was that the San Fernando Valley constituted a vast underground reservoir which could store Owens River water and raise the water table. The valley was the best receiving basin—water deposited there would automatically drain into the Los Angeles River and its broad aquifer, creating a vast, non-evaporative storage pool for the city to tap as needed. Further, it was a location where power plant construction was entirely feasible.

  Even though he tried to distance himself from the Board of Control, charges that he engaged in land speculation never ceased to haunt him, Historians later documented that no grand conspiracy between Mulholland and the land syndicate existed. Only a circumstantial case against Mulholland could be made, and no hard evidence ever surfaced proving that either syndicate did anything other than what they were in the habit of doing—investing purely for speculation. But until the day he died, Mulholland was found guilty by association, accused of land thievery and profiteering in connection with the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

  8

  Prodigal Daughter

  A man shall be known

  by his children.

  ECCLES. 11:2
8

  In APRIL 1915 Lillie Mulholland lapsed into a coma at the German Hospital and never regained consciousness. On April 28, she died at age forty-seven from cancer of the cervix. Mulholland was with his wife during her last excruciating days, and despite its inevitability, her death hit him especially hard.

  Lillie had always been reluctant to participate in her husband’s public life, and during their marriage she maintained a retiring disposition, never caring to share in the public spotlight. Like the wives of many great men, her identity was obscured by the long shadow of her husband’s success; the Los Angeles Times summarily described her as the “devoted loyal wife of one of the foremost residents of Los Angeles, and the most widely known engineer of America, Chief Engineer, William Mulholland.” When the newspaper wanted to print an obituary photograph there was none to be found. Extremely shy and self-effacing, Lillie chose obscurity for herself and refused to pose for photographers, and only tolerated herself to be photographed in the Mulholland family portrait.

  In death she received more attention than she would have preferred. Massive flower arrangements were sent from the Chamber of Commerce, the Board of Public Works, the Water Department, and from Mulholland’s many friends. The lavish displays paid tribute to Lillie and homage to her husband, the city’s powerful and leading citizen. Bessie Van Norman sent a large bouquet of wildflowers hand-picked from the ranch in Chatsworth, mixed with a store-bought bouquet of red roses and white gladiolus. Typically, the modest Lillie had requested that music not be played at her funeral, and the simple Episcopal ritual was followed by attendance at the Rosedale Crematorium. The final service was private to the family. Burt Heinley, Mulholland’s secretary, and H. A. Van Norman served as pallbearers as William Mulholland laid his wife of twenty-five years to rest.

  Although Lillie had lived to see the beginning of her husband’s climb to considerable national prominence, she did not live to see him achieve the status of an international celebrity, nor share the tragic climax of an amazing career.

  MORE THAN ANY OTHER ENGINEER of his era, Mulholland revolutionized construction and engineering practices throughout the Western hemisphere and much of the world. He was the first engineer in America to make practical use of hydraulic sluicing, a technique used in the construction of Silver Lake Reservoir. The concept was revolutionary and attracted the attention of engineers nationwide. In 1906, he instructed government engineers in how to move material over long distances through a modified method of hydraulic sluicing, and his method was adopted in two of the Panama Canal’s three most difficult construction problems—Gatun Dam and Culebra Cut. Since then, the techniques have been used extensively in cities around the globe.

  Mulholland was also the first American engineer to make major use of hydroelectric power in construction, the first to revive the old Roman method of making cement (saving three quarters of a million dollars in costs to build the Los Angeles Aqueduct), the first engineer in the world to use caterpillar tractors, and was a pioneer in tunneling machinery and methods, and an innovative leader in design of high earth dams. By 1913, he had successfully designed and constructed “the most gigantic and difficult engineering project undertaken by any American city” as well.

  Mulholland’s achievements brought the Irish immigrant academic honors he never dreamed possible. The University of California at Los Angeles awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Laws in 1915 in an elaborate ceremony hosted by the Board of Regents. Honorary memberships were bestowed on him by the American Water Works Association, the National Association of Power Engineers, and the Tau Beta Pi engineering fraternity. For the next decade, the name William Mulholland was emblazoned in headlines and he was photographed, quoted, sought after, and showered with civic awards wherever he traveled.

  Mulholland’s huge success in conquering the manifold problems of the aqueduct endeared him to the polyglot people of Los Angeles. Like a child who needed a baseball star to idolize, the city needed a mythic figure, and the newly crowned hero represented to Los Angeles citizens an “awe-inspiring glimpse of perfection.” To them, as one devotee wrote, Mulholland embodied a “constellation of super-human traits and unlike many of today’s celebrities, his achievements were built through hard work, and were genuine even in the scrutinizing eyes of God.”

  Author Joseph Campbell wrote that the hero is usually the founder of something—the founder of a new age, the founder of a new religion, the founder of a new city. William Mulholland was the realization of the American ethic of industry and self-education, an original American persona who became an integral part of the mythology surrounding the creation of modern Los Angeles. Rugged, fearless, and determined, he was a self-realized man of the West, a genius of the people. Like many of them, he had been a mere immigrant starting out with nothing more than a strong back and a willingness to work.

  As a celebrity, Mulholland was a superstar in that era’s version of the national lecture circuit, speaking to groups of every kind that solicited his appearances and paid handsome lecture fees and travel expenses. He was an exceptional public speaker, and the many thousands who heard him could testify to his uncanny ability to move an audience to laughter and tears with his mesmerizing voice and odd, formal language. His great store of anecdotes and his sassy wit made Mulholland a genuine crowd-pleaser—the kind of speaker that was always saved for last in an evening’s program. Mulholland’s earthy speeches and popular public appearances played a significant role in creating his public mystique, something that today’s image, makers could envy.

  As his fame and prominence grew, journalists found Mulholland to be a difficult interview. His charismatic personality was often overbearing, and they complained that Mulholland dominated every discussion, never seeming to answer a question directly. More than one exasperated journalist said that Mulholland’s thoughts jumped from “psychology to international relations, from etymology to Sarah Bernhardt, from Rembrandt to baseball,” all in one sentence. Nevertheless, requests for interviews continued to pour in, and Mulholland’s secretary, Burt Heinley, assisted him in answering the enormous amount of correspondence, scheduling interviews and assisting in writing many of Mulholland’s speeches.

  As one reporter noted, a big part of Mulholland’s appeal was due to the fact that even though he was an engineer, he had none of the characteristics of the typically boring technician. He was, by all accounts, larger than life, and he credited his engaging personality to his theory of “mental expansion.” Mulholland explained to one journalist that the reason engineers were considered dull was because they made no effort to “broaden mentally in any other direction but by their slide rules.”

  “The only feasible way to study mankind is reading good books, written by men who were masters of their art,” he pontificated.

  Mulholland’s reading preferences included authors like Shakespeare, Twain, and Carlyle. “No one,” Mulholland snorted, “can say that he understands human nature, the actions and reactions of men, unless he had read Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution.”

  “Damn a man who doesn’t read books. The test of a man is his knowledge of humanity, of the politics of human life, his comprehension of the things that move men,” he once exclaimed to yet another weary reporter.

  Mulholland’s public image was cultivated not only in the many colorful articles written about him, but also in pieces that Mulholland wrote himself. In addition to the dozens of articles about the region’s water supply, the construction of the aqueduct, and his vision for a second aqueduct which were published in newspapers and trade journals including Hydraulic Engineering, Journal of the American Water Works Association, Community Builder,and Municipaland County Engineering, lively articles for the non-engineer promoting various controversial Mulholland projects were often published with considerable attention in Harrison Gray Otis’s (later Harry Chandler’s) Los Angeles Times.

  Despite the saintly reverence bestowed on him, people knew Mulholland was very much a human being. His vi
ces were known to be excessive drinking, smoking, and a reputation for telling obscene jokes when women were not present. He would occasionally lose his temper and verbally abuse his children and closest associates. He had little patience with others—including young children. Once, a group of elementary school children on a field trip observed a flock of geese swimming at the Haiwee Reservoir. Prompted by their teacher, the children badgered Mulholland over what could be done to keep the birds from polluting the water. “Well goddamn it,” growled the short-tempered Mulholland, “I suppose we could catch them all and put diapers on them.”

  For a long while after Lillie’s death, the grieving Mulholland was often depressed and out of sorts. Yet despite his crankiness, Mulholland’s work habits remained exemplary. He arrived promptly at the office each workday at 7:00 A.M. Today he would be branded a workaholic—in fifty years he never took a vacation—but to him, work was pure pleasure. “Don’t forget,” he told one young engineer, “I have been working all this time on the work that I loved. That is one of the greatest things that can come to any man—to do all his life the work he loves.” Mulholland did, however, break away from his many inspection tours of the aqueduct to go fishing with Dr. Taylor, and on Saturdays during the summer months when he was in Los Angeles he always headed for Hollenbeck Park to play baseball.

  After Lillie’s death, Rose assumed her mother’s role. She took over the many household duties, lovingly tending to her father’s every need. Like her mother, she was devout, quiet, and plain. Rose’s life, like that of her mother’s, was obscured by her father’s giant shadow.

  Hoping that a change of scenery might help her father’s depression after Lillie’s death, Rose suggested that Mulholland sell their Boyle Heights home, where they had lived for over twenty years, and choose another elsewhere. Reluctantly, Mulholland agreed to do so, and when Rose found an appealing listing on St. Andrew’s Place in the Sunday paper, she and Mulholland drove to see it. When they got there, they found it vacant and the door ajar.