Rivers in the Desert

by Margaret L Davis

  ASA KEYES (rhymes with “tries”), the city of Los Angeles’s young, ambitious, and colorful district attorney, quickly entered the case. As a politician of shrewdness and skill, the outspoken Keyes recognized immediately that public outrage over the bombings could build his own career, and he pounced on the occasion, calling for the immediate arrest and indictment of the dynamiters.

  But Asa Keyes’s hot pursuit of the “anarchists” faded as his investigation ended in no arrests or indictments. In one heated press conference, Keyes fumed that every resident in the valley “knew damn well” who did the dynamiting, but no one would say.

  There was more violence. The first bombings in May 1924, were random, disorganized affairs that did little damage, yet caught the eye of the national press and infuriated Mulholland. The Lone Pine Canal was bombed a few weeks later when twenty carloads of ranchers detonated three boxes of powder, breaching the canal wall. The warning was clear.

  Over the next six months, William Mulholland received hundreds of death threats, delivered by telephone and in the mail, both at home and at the office, intimating that he would be killed if he visited the Owens district. Mulholland never appeared concerned, announcing defiantly that despite the threats against his life, he would accompany the president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce during his visit to the valley the following week.

  In fact, Bill Mulholland probably did not take the threats against his life seriously or fear for his safety. But it is clear that he greatly underestimated the antagonism in the valley and the violent lengths to which the men would go to further their cause.

  Led by brothers Wilfred and Mark Watterson, an organized Owens Valley citizenry posed a formidable threat to the new water system. The Wattersons’ Inyo County Bank was the region’s primary source of economic life. During the post-war recession of the early 1920s the brothers had gained control of other banks in the region and refinanced most of the valley’s farms and ranches. Although they were trusted by the Owens Valley people, who often boasted they never foreclosed on a valley farm or sued a valley debtor, many ranchers and farmers were beholden to the brothers because of the mortgages they held.

  Meanwhile, city agents continued to checkerboard the valley by purchasing nonadjacent plots of land and urging holdouts to sell. Their patience and nerves worn out, and their very existence now in imminent danger of extinction, the ranchers reacted violently. Lynch mobs grew in size, and roamed the territory at night brandishing nooses before terrorized valley residents who dared to show signs of selling out. In Bishop, farmers forcibly withheld water from the streams that fed the aqueduct. These acts of terrorism at first were ignored by Los Angeles city officials, unaware that they were indicative of a collective valley sentiment of rage.

  Frustrated, Mulholland urged Harvey Van Norman and W. B. Mathews to go to the Owens Valley and do what they could to strike a deal. Led by the Watterson brothers, distrust was so widespread that every city offer was met with a warning that unless handsome reparations were guaranteed, the valley would not deal. It appeared the valley was not interested in a treaty, only in money, and hardened its position.

  Upon his return, Van Norman reported that he found Mulholland unwilling to listen to the many details concerning the city’s negotiations with the Owens Valley, and that Mulholland was distracted and aloof regarding the matters in Inyo County. His mind was now fixed on the problem of obtaining new water resources for the city and he left the entire Owens Valley matter in the hands of Van Norman and Mathews, who faced a seemingly endless series of clashes with valley ranchers. Every time it appeared a settlement might be reached it failed, and the water war assumed a pattern of alternating violence and negotiation.

  Mulholland’s pugnacious, difficult personality, the same no-nonsense stubbornness that created admiration among his subordinates, worked to his disadvantage when confronted with the seething sentiments against him from the Owens Valley. When a reporter from the Times asked him why there was so much dissatisfaction in the Owens Valley, Mulholland quickly retorted, “Dissatisfaction in the valley? … Dissatisfaction is a sort of condition that prevails there, like foot-and-mouth disease.” It was the same unreasoning rage that made him say, according to author Marc Reisner, when Mulholland’s war of attrition against the Owens Valley had finally caused events to take a drastic turn for the worse, that he “half-regretted the demise of so many of the valley’s orchard trees, because now there were no longer enough live trees to hang all the troublemakers who lived there.”

  ALREADY PAST RETIREMENT age, bored with the never-ending and tedious Inyo County war, unnerved by his aqueduct’s failure to keep pace with the city’s growth, and perhaps fearing forced idleness, Mulholland was already dreaming about a last great achievement. He would guide, at least through its preliminary stages, a final great water project on behalf of his beloved city—the giant aqueduct from the Colorado River, and he used his considerable influence to further that cause.

  “There are no more streams, small or large, within the boundaries of the state which may be developed by the great cities of southern California.” Mulholland told reporters. “Fortunately, however, California is bordered on the east by one of the greatest rivers in America, the Colorado.”

  Mulholland’s continual, obsessive quest for water at times manifested itself in outrageous notions—proposals which seemed almost out of step with sanity. Horace Albright, later director for the National Park Service under Herbert Hoover, recalled meeting Mulholland at a testimonial dinner in honor of Senator Frank Flint, and his surprise at Mulholland’s bizarre solution for a big dam in the state of California.

  At the time, Albright was a young park superintendent seated at Mulholland’s table. Midway through the evening’s program, Albright felt Mulholland tap him on the shoulder. Albright’s recollections were made to Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert.

  “You’re from the Park Service, aren’t you?” Mulholland demanded, more than asked.

  “Yes, I am,” said Albright. “Why do you ask?”

  “Why?” Mulholland said archly. “‘Why?’ I’ll tell you why. You have a beautiful park up north. A majestic park. Yosemite Park, it’s called. You’ve been there, have you?”

  Albright said he had; he was the park’s superintendent.

  “Well, I’m going to tell you what I’d do with your park. Do you want to know what I would do?”

  Albright said that he did.

  “Well, I’ll tell you. You know this new photographic process they’ve invented? It’s called Pathe. It makes everything seem lifelike. The hues and coloration are magnificent. Well, then, what I would do, if I were custodian of your park, is I’d hire a dozen of the best photographers in the world. I’d build them cabins in Yosemite Valley and pay them something and give them all the fill they wanted. I’d say, ‘This park is yours. It’s yours for one year. I want you to take photographs in every season. I want you to capture all the colors, all the waterfalls, all the snow, and all the majesty. I especially want you to take photographs in every season. I especially want you to photograph the rivers. In the early summer, when the Merced River roars, I want to see that. And then I’d leave them be, and in a year I’d come back, and take their film, and send it out and have it developed and treated by Pathe. And then I would print the pictures in thousands of books and send them to every library. I would urge every magazine in the country to print them and tell every American and museum to hang them. I would make certain that every American saw them. And then,” Mulholland said slowly, with what Albright remembered as a vulpine grin, “and then do you know what I would do? I’d go in there and build a dam from one side of that valley to the other and stop the goddamned waste!”

  “It was the tone of his voice that surprised me,” Albright told Reisner. “The laughingly arrogant tone. I don’t think he was joking, you see. He was absolutely convinced that building a dam in Yosemite Valley was the proper thing to do. We had few big dams in California then. There w
ere hundreds of other sites, and there were bigger rivers than the Merced. But he seemed to want to shake things up, to outrage me. He almost wanted to destroy.”

  In 1923 the city suffered another period of drought and Mulholland publicly announced a more realistic proposal and the need for a “vastly greater water supply.” In October, voters in Los Angeles approved bonds to give Mulholland funds to study the possibilities, and in December, he launched a survey to determine the most practical route for an aqueduct from the Colorado River to Los Angeles. Mulholland, Van Norman and W. B. Mathews, among others, ventured on a ten-day float in four rowboats through the majestic river where the party scrutinized 150 miles of river and terrain in a “brush-clearing expedition.”

  One famous press photo, depicting Mulholland and Van Norman aboard a Colorado River rowboat, published widely in California newspapers, continued to instill in the public mind the Mulholland mystique and helped persuade the city that water from the Colorado River was needed to support Los Angeles’s projected population of 7.5 million people. In sharp contrast to the rough survey days in 1905, Mulholland and his engineers would sleep in hotels and eat in restaurants; yet Mulholland hoisted his sleeping bag on his back and posed for newspaper photographers, in a deliberate promotion of the “Mulholland mystique.”

  It was in many ways a recapitulation of Mulholland’s buckboard-and-whiskey journey with Eaton in 1904, but this time the scale of what was envisioned increased fourfold. Flowing at 400 second-feet, the Owens River served only 2 million people, with 1500 second-feet capacity. The Colorado River could provide for 7.5 million—a huge billion-gallon-a-day water carrier. Like his earlier trip with Eaton, Mulholland and his colleagues also shared a deep sense of change and forced destiny as the men discussed the ingenious political and engineering maneuvers that were required to harness this new water source.

  Over the next four years, Mulholland sent sixteen survey parties to Colorado to study 60,000 square miles and five possible routes for the Colorado Aqueduct. “The preliminary work will require a year and half to two years,” Mulholland told reporters, but it would be an “incomparably simpler task” than planning the route of the Owens River aqueduct, which operated by gravity alone, and required an enormous number of cuts and tunnels. But “those were the days before people took to roosting on the hills like turkey cocks,” Mulholland mused. Now the elevated Los Angeles suburbs would require the delivery of Colorado River water by pumping.

  Mulholland’s survey teams considered dozens of possible routes for the Colorado River aqueduct, and submitted detailed maps of the five most suitable proposals. The most favored route with only minor changes was exactly the route Mulholland had sketched, completely without the aid of instruments on the “brush-clearing expedition” with Van Norman and Mathews in 1923, an incontestable example of Mulholland’s extraordinary ability.

  Mulholland’s perpetual search for water made him a pawn to those groups he detested most, the money makers and the politicians. This huge new water source again brought riches to speculators increasing the boundaries and population of the City of Angels. As late as 1938, their relentless booster work was still in evidence, and was captured to the delight of Los Angeles citizens by journalist John Russell McCarthy in Los Angeles’s popular Pacific Saturday Night Magazine in his tribute to William Mulholland:

  Some of us may doubt the necessity for building here, between the Pacific Ocean and Aimee Semple McPherson, a sanctuary for the outcasts of Pennsylvania, the sturdy sons and daughters of Iowa, and the trailer trash of the world. But Bill Mulholland never doubted. To his simple and rugged heart a great Los Angeles meant a big Los Angeles, and by the Eternal he would make a big Los Angeles possible.

  Even Owens Valley, for all its yells and dynamite, could not yield enough water to satisfy Bill Mulholland. Within ten years after Los Angeles had amazed the world (and the sands of the San Fernando Valley) by bringing the pure cold clear mountain water all those miles, he was up and at it again. Where to get more water? Well, there was nothing left but the Pacific Ocean and the Colorado River. The Pacific Ocean is useful in making bathing suits seem more-or-less nonexistent, but it makes bitter drinking. Mulholland simply went after the Colorado.

  11

  Unbowed

  God is the judge:

  He putteth down one,

  and setteth up another.

  PS. 75:7

  IN JULY, 1924, in the midst of the death threats and bombings, Mulholland received the painful news that John Gray, the man with whom he shared so much during their hard years of work on the aqueduct line, was dead. Gray had wandered into LaFayette Park near downtown Los Angeles, and shot himself in the head.

  A simple note was found in Gray’s pocket asking that in case of death the Ruppe Mortuary be notified. After Gray’s body was taken to the coroner’s office in the basement of the Hall of Justice, it was moved to the mortuary by the police.

  The owner of the mortuary, L. E. Ruppe, stated to the officers that he had known Gray for many years following his work on the aqueduct. Ruppe told them Gray’s wife had died a year earlier, and Gray had recently undergone surgery and had been in ill health for months. Ruppe was unaware that Gray had any children, but other sources believed that his son, Louis, had died in a construction accident a few years after the completion of the aqueduct. According to Gray’s wishes there was no funeral and Ruppe took it upon himself to bury him in a simple grave.

  Mulholland wrung his handkerchief when he read in the Los Angeles Times of Gray’s suicide. He found it hard to imagine the indomitable Gray, the hard-working foreman who shoveled dirt and granite alongside his own men to keep their spirits from flagging during the labor strikes, would end his life defeated and alone. Overcome with grief, Mulholland could only wish that he had been at Gray’s lonely grave site to say some final words as he had for those men who had died in his service on the aqueduct line.

  A few months earlier, Mulholland had broken ground for a new holding dam at San Francisquito Canyon. During the next two years he would spend nearly every day supervising its construction. Driven by his chauffeur or by his son Thomas, he left his St. Andrew’s Place home each morning at dawn, traveling forty-five miles northeast from Los Angeles to the Santa Clara Valley.

  The dynamite attacks upon the aqueduct that summer had spurred Mulholland’s rush to secure a giant storage reservoir hundreds of miles south from the battle zone in the Owens Valley. Mulholland had selected the canyon for a number of reasons: A more optimum site, located in Big Tijunga, was too expensive after owners had raised land prices to exorbitant levels. The canyon was located next to Powerhouse Number One, the main power facility for the San Fernando Valley, making it cheaper for the reservoir to generate hydroelectric power. There had always been concern for the aqueduct at the point where it transverses the San Andreas fault in the five-mile Elizabeth Tunnel, and need for an emergency storage facility below the fault line was undoubtedly one of Mulholland’s considerations in selecting the San Francisquito Canyon site, but the unpredictable events in the Owens Valley that threatened the safety of the city’s water supply was his primary concern.

  “When these facilities have been put into commission,” Mulholland declared, “the whole city will have been safe-guarded by storage near the south end of the aqueduct with a full year’s supply of domestic water.” The San Francisquito Canyon site offered another solution to Mulholland’s predicament. Located within yards of the aqueduct, the canyon was large enough to house the size dam needed to solve Mulholland’s water flow control problem, making construction of a dam at Eaton’s Long Valley unnecessary.

  Traveling to the canyon on the day of the news of John Gray’s death, Mulholland’s thoughts flashed to 1908. In that year, a large camp of aqueduct men laboriously at work on the Elizabeth Tunnel, including John Gray, had been housed on the floor of the future reservoir, and it was then that the idea of utilizing the site as a future storage facility first occurred to him. Mulholland had sun
k shafts and tunnels deep into the red conglomerate surface to test its characteristics, and was convinced that the site was sound.

  Mulholland knew the sufferings of others, and felt a sense of deep, embittered sorrow at the reasons behind the death of John Gray. His face lined with pain and eyes dark, Mulholland arrived at the site and focused his thoughts on the engineering problems of the St. Francis Dam.

  MULHOLLAND WAS NOW past retirement age, but stood at the pinnacle of his career, “basking in the affection of his fellow Angelenos.” His word was now gospel, and as his longtime secretary, Burt Heinley, wrote, recalling the criticism concerning the concrete used to build the aqueduct, “If Bill Mulholland should say that he is lining the aqueduct with green cheese because green cheese is better than concrete, this town would not only believe the guff but take oath that it was so.” Since the turn of the century, Los Angeles had grown five times its size, and the city surpassed San Francisco as the preeminent port on the West Coast. The aqueduct had established the San Fernando Valley as an unprecedented agricultural region firmly establishing Los Angeles’s new posture as the number one agricultural county in the nation.

  But the forces that had plagued Mulholland since 1920 had come to a head in 1924, ultimately forcing him to do the one thing he always resisted—surrender to political pressure from city bureaucrats and wealthy business interests. The dual threat of continuing drought and the continued war with the Owens Valley diehards posed a mortal danger to the city’s water supply and its economic prosperity, and city leaders urged Mulholland to immediately secure substitute reservoir facilities. Even when bombings of the aqueduct ceased, Mulholland’s fears of the ever-present threat of drought made it necessary to construct a buffer water supply system to safe-guard the city’s resources.

  Without Eaton’s Long Valley or another northern reservoir, flow from the aqueduct into Los Angeles could not be adequately regulated. At Haiwee Reservoir, as the system was presently designed, the aqueduct water could not be sufficiently controlled, and huge quantities of water overfilled the San Fernando Reservoir whenever the snow pack was bountiful in the Sierra Nevada, forcing engineers to dump thousands of gallons each day into the Pacific Ocean to ease the immense pressure on the dam wall—a practice Mulholland deplored.