Rivers in the Desert

by Margaret L Davis

  Mulholland preferred pumping water back into the large natural underground lakes of the local aquifer, a concept since embraced by hydrologists. But civic and business leaders, including the office of the mayor and the Board of Control pressured Mulholland and the Board of Public Service Commissioners to construct a string of reservoirs throughout southern California. In the event the aqueduct was damaged or a severe drought persisted, the city of Los Angeles would have a water supply sufficient for at least two years. Immense economic and political interests were at stake, and the pressure placed on Mulholland to act quickly was enormous.

  By 1923, work on raising the height of the Encino Reservoir in the San Fernando Valley was underway, and construction began on a reservoir site in Weid Canyon to supply fast-growing Hollywood. The dam was officially named Mulholland Dam. In August, 1924, concrete was poured at San Francisquito Canyon dam, located midway between Bouquet Canyon and Elizabeth Lake. The dam was named the St. Francis, and was intended to be the largest arch support dam in the world, standing nearly 200 feet tall, 700 feet long, 176 feet thick at its base, with a reservoir capacity of 38,168 acre-feet, covering 600 acres. When it was finished it had cost $1.3 million to build, and became the second-largest reservoir in Mulholland’s system, holding more than 12 billion gallons of water, second only to that at Haiwee.

  However, Mulholland’s hasty construction of the secondary holding sites did not deter the irate Owens Valley ranchers, who continued their campaign of sabotage, keeping Los Angeles and Owens Valley in intermittent states of siege.

  Tensions continued to escalate throughout 1924. Finally, at dawn on Sunday, November 16, led by Mark Watterson, seventy armed men from Bishop drove a caravan of dust-covered Model-T Fords to the Alabama Gate spillway, one of the strategic water diversion controls of the Owens River aqueduct, just north of Lone Pine, and seized control of the gate house.

  The insurgents opened the hydraulic gates and hundreds of thousands of gallons of water crashed down the open spillway onto the desert floor. This relatively simple act of terrorism completely suspended water service to the entire city of Los Angeles.

  The “rebellion,” as it was deemed by the press, overnight became a publicity bonanza, creating a media event of such proportions that newspapers in Paris reported it. Suddenly the eyes of the world were riveted on “California’s Little Civil War.” The armed seizure of a municipal water system violated local and state law, but the “felonious” scene at the spillway was quickly transformed by Owens Valley citizenry into a celebration of civic solidarity. By noon the following day, seven hundred men, women, and children had joined the insurgents in a massive impromptu picnic at the spillway site. Western movie star Tom Mix, filming nearby in Bishop, brought his camera crew and a mariachi band to join in the festivities. Hoping to win public attention and sympathy for their plight and force the state government to intervene, the insurgents began camping out at the Alabama Gate with their families and townspeople. In the four days and nights to come, the picnic turned into a huge cookout that captured the imagination of headline writers everywhere.

  The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and Mayor George Cryer of Los Angeles pleaded with California Governor Friend Richardson to dispatch the militia to disperse the ranchers and regain control of the gate house. Fearing potential bloodshed and the negative publicity surrounding the deployment of state troopers, Richardson refused. When an Inyo County Superior Court judge was pressured by Los Angeles authorities to issue the insurgents’ arrest warrants, he readily disqualified himself from the case, and the Inyo County sheriff refused to interrupt the proceedings, stating that he was a “friend and sympathizer.”

  No arrests were made, and the jubilant insurgents stood in all night vigils, directing searchlights into the sky as local merchants delivered freshly slaughtered beef, pigs, and chickens, loaves of baked bread, milk, and hard liquor. The celebration continued, and eventually someone posted a sign in the center of a deserted Bishop exclaiming, “If I’m not on the job, you can find me at the Aqueduct.”

  The Owens faction, sensing victory at last, were now drawn together in sentiment and common purpose more than ever before. W. A. Chalfant, editor of the Inyo County Register, hailed the insurrection as an “American community … driven to defense of its rights.”

  Behind the festive scenes reported in headlines to a sympathetic world, inside the Department of Public Service there was a sense of cold fear and political uncertainty. When Mulholland learned that the man recruited to open the hydraulic gates had been an engineer who had worked on the aqueduct, he was furious at the betrayal. He immediately ordered the length of the aqueduct guarded twenty-four hours a day by private police, paid for by the city of Los Angeles.

  “Interference with a public utility,” Mulholland angrily declared to the press, “is a serious matter—of greater import than interference with the United States mail.…” Mulholland met in emergency sessions with the Board of Public Service Commissioners, the office of the mayor, and representatives from the governor’s office, and pronounced that lawless elements of a “radical fringe” had taken over and must be stopped at all costs.

  Expecting public concurrence with his righteous rage, Mulholland was stunned to see that by the fourth day of the Alabama Gate seizure, newspapers shifted to recounting sympathetic human interest details of the rebellion by an “oppressed pioneer community.” From the Los Angeles Daily News:

  An orchestra with several khaki-clad girls dragging drums and musical instruments with them, climbing up the slope a chord or two is sounded and 350 lusty throats joining in the singing of “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” the song sweeping across the barren Owens Valley and re-echoing against the tinted hills of the east.

  Mid-day passed, the sun dips behind the suncrest of the high Sierras. Long shadows creep across the valley as chilly winds, kissed by the snows, slip down from the mountain heights. Dusk settled and the determined ranchers remained at their posts. Bonfires began to grow on the hill sites, and a welcome aroma of hot coffee drifts across mesquite stretches and the overall ranchers remain on into the night.

  Darkness descends and the women folks, wearied by their day’s toll feeding their men—the guardian of their homes—join their husbands about the fires. Some are nestling their babies, others are “feeding” a phonograph with operatic selections.

  And the men of the Alabama toll gate remain on. Talking quietly in groups and never asking—how long?

  Who are these people who have hurled the boldest defiance at the officials of Los Angeles? They are the women of Bishop, wives of ranchers, Bishop’s leading business and professional men who have taken it upon themselves the big job of feeding scores of Owens Valley men who have opened the flood gate. The city can afford to be liberal in its settlement with these pioneers whose work of half a century it will undo.

  When still other area newspapers reported stories sympathetic to the rebels, Mulholland became incensed, blasting the newspaper accounts as “pure hogwash.” The facts, however, spoke for themselves. The resistance movement was based on one simple premise: The Owens people could tolerate Los Angeles’s compulsion to look to the valley to supply its water, but they could not justify their own demise when it could be avoided.

  The editorial page of the Los Angeles Times further summed up a general feeling among Los Angeles citizens about the unrest in Inyo County:

  It is to be remembered that these farmers are not anarchists nor bomb-throwers, but in the main, honest, earnest, hardworking American citizens who look upon Los Angeles as an octopus about to strangle out their lives. They have put themselves hopelessly in the wrong by taking the law into their own hands but that it is not to say that there has not been a measure of justice on their side of the argument.… There must be no civil war in California.

  The images of a tiny community united in defense against a Goliath oppressor were fed into the consciousness of the people of Los Angeles and the world. But for William Mulho
lland, the events at the Alabama Gate were nothing more than a lawless mob seizing government property for publicity, and he was fiercely determined to do everything within his power to secure order and cease any interference in the operation of his city’s aqueduct.

  12

  Retribution

  Consider mine enemies,

  for they are many.

  PS. 25:19

  THE TROUBLES IN OWENS VALLEY momentarily seemed but a distant popping of a harmless holiday firecracker. Though shaken by the recent uprisings, Mulholland looked forward to the approaching New Year’s holiday with noticeable good cheer. In a Mulholland-sized Christmas present to the much-honored chief himself, more than ten thousand people gathered on December 28, 1924 to see Mulholland dedicate the Mulholland Skyline–a million-dollar majestic highway riding the twenty-two-mile crest of the Santa Monica mountains from Hollywood to the Pacific Ocean.

  Befittingly, the occasion was epic in scale. Two brilliant, silver-caparisoned Spanish caballeros mounted on horseback stood guard while Los Angeles City Police Chief Roderick Heath, as brilliantly caparisoned in his sparkling blue uniform, handed William Mulholland a large golden key to unlock the exotic flower-bedecked portal erected in the middle of the highway. Mulholland, in a firm movement, smashed a bottle of Los Angeles Aqueduct water over the key and then inserted it into the gold lock. The chain of flowers attached to the sides of the portal and stretching to the shoulders of the highway fluttered apart, and the petals floated into the air like multicolored doves. Thousands of men, women, and children broke into a deafening cheer as the portal doors opened and the long procession of cars began to pass through.

  The most important city officials, including the mayor, and members of the omniscient Board of Control led the procession in their gleaming black limousines. As they passed heading east to Hollywood, a squadron of low-flying airplanes dipped their wings in salute and then roared away. The procession traveled the length of the new highway, the “rim of the world,” as the papers grandly called it, encircled by verdant foliage, recently planted, panoramic views of the San Fernando Valley to the north, and twisting curves to the south–it was a breathtaking stretch of wonderland.

  Reaching the end of the highway–a bluff overlooking the panoramic views of Hollywood and the Pacific Ocean beyond–the caravan entered Laurel Canyon and wove down its twisting lanes into Hollywood. There they were greeted by celebrations complete with a rodeo, and the squadron of “birdmen” stunt flyers dipping and careening in the blue, smogless Los Angeles sky. Further tribute to the magnificent highway was followed by a giant parade down Hollywood Boulevard from Vine Street to Highland Avenue. Mulholland, seated imperially in an open limousine was, of course, the Grand Marshal.

  Following respectfully behind the man of the hour were civic leaders, members of the Board of Public Works and the man who actually built the highway, engineer DeWitt Reaburn. Befitting an eastern potentate, the parade included a squad of mounted police, followed by uniformed officers and bugler; marching behind them was the Third Coast Artillery Regiment, with a mobile searchlight, a field cannon drawn by military tractor, and a motorized antiaircraft gun. Behind them came a full naval band, five thousand sailors, two hundred marines, and bringing up the rear, bagpipes, mariachis, and the American Legion Band.

  Like a huge glorious caterpillar, the parade turned north on Highland Avenue and ended at the beautiful, two-year-old Hollywood Bowl, where Mulholland gave a charismatic speech to the cheers and shouts of the overflowing outdoor audience. Toasts and tributes were followed by vaudeville acts, speeches, fireworks, and more speeches.

  Characteristically, Mulholland, in his address to the throng, disclaimed any personal credit for building the highway, giving credit to DeWitt Reaburn standing in the crowd of dignitaries behind him. By now at this stage of his long and prominent career, tribute to his ears was an old song. But rising to the occasion, the Chief modestly admitted that he did conceive the idea of the highway thirty or forty years earlier.

  More than ten thousand people flocked to the Hollywood Bowl to see and hear the great man for whom “one of the most scenic wonders of the southland” was named. Mayor George Cryer pronounced that the opening of the highway was the crowning event in engineer Mulholland’s career. The Commander of the United States Pacific Fleet, Admiral George Robinson, declared that today’s engineers of the great United States of America were the real “conquerors of today,” comparing them to the “conquerors of yesterday,” the ancient Roman armies which drove their slaves into the building of the Roman highways. Mulholland was heralded as the consummate American dreamer, who, when most people thought of Los Angeles in terms of only a hundred thousand inhabitants, visualized it as a grand metropolis for two million souls and more.

  The opening of the highway was one of the largest celebrations in the history of Los Angeles. The gala continued non-stop until midnight, whereupon Mulholland returned home, no doubt intoxicated by the heady acclaim as much as he was by the liberal toasting of alcohol. By morning, his attentions were again focused on the problems at Owens Valley.

  IN OWENS VALLEY, ranchers continued to institute a host of legal reforms to secure a continued indigenous water supply for the valley’s domestic and agricultural needs. Mulholland’s defense against this strategy, according to author John Walton, was “to humor the resistance movement with protracted negotiations over its demands, particularly the question of dam and storage reservoirs while simultaneously undermining its solidarity with individual property purchases.” Unable to compromise with Eaton over his million-dollar demand, Mulholland apparently, as critics pointed out, “preferred the slow economic death of the Owens Valley to Eaton’s profit in Long Valley at city expense.”

  The insurgents achieved a national audience with their takeover at the Alabama spillway. Owens Valley newspaperman W. A. Chalfant had written to Mary Austin that the “incident at the spillway became … a ‘shot heard ‘round the world,’” and the Owens Valley rebels hoped that the state of California would be forced to intervene and disperse the militia, thereby guaranteeing even more attention to their plight. But, fearing widespread violence, Governor Richardson shrewdly refused to take the bait, and when he did not send in state troopers, he upset the rebels’ plans, and by the fifth day the popular citizens’ takeover ended without violence. Talks began a week later, but broke down after two days. In the end, after innumerable negotiations, nothing was settled, and the city continued its piecemeal purchases of valley land connected to the Owens River.

  Anticipating even more violence, Mulholland intensified efforts in the Santa Clara Valley to complete the St. Francis Dam as quickly as possible. By spring 1925, Mulholland Dam in Hollywood, one of thirteen proposed reservoirs in the buffer system, was finished. The $1.25 million dam was formally dedicated on March 18 in a simple yet impressive ceremony. Several hundred prominent citizens including Mayor George Cryer, Harvey Van Norman, W. B. Mathews, J. B. Lippincott and two members of the Board of Control were present.

  The ninety-acre Lake Hollywood impounded behind Mulholland Dam today stands beneath the huge white letters of the Hollywood sign. The dam that Mulholland designed endures as an exquisite creation, an example of municipal Mission-style architecture. “From the north, the parapeted walkway, the balustrades, and single flanking tower give the dam an appearance of a castle wall and turn the lake into a broad moat. A row of concrete bear heads extends over the arches on the south side of the dam in homage to the state’s flag … a dam with panache, a memento of an era when the Department of Water and Power’s resources were allocated for the beautiful as well as the useful.”

  “When I built this,” Mulholland said in his dedication speech, “I wanted something ornamental and architectural as well as useful. The structure is itself the best tribute.”

  Mayor Cryer lauded the beauty of the work in dedicating the structure to the man who conceived the aqueduct: “For forty years Mr. Mulholland has been the guiding genius of
the city’s water organization, giving all that is in him to upbuilding of the municipality and in the service of the people. We are here today to dedicate this, the latest monument to his skill, his knowledge and his unquestioned ability. It probably will last for centuries. So I say: ‘Hail to William Mulholland, long may he live and prosper.’ “ Following the dedication of the dam bearing his name and the unveiling of the bronze tablet at the side of the structure’s tower, Mayor Cryer opened the gates that permitted the water to flow into the city’s water distribution system.

  “It hasn’t rained for three years,” Mulholland announced in his acceptance speech. “Yet you have impounded by this dam water which has been brought to this spot for a distance of 238 miles over mountain and desert, over vast, uninviting areas. This water comes from the San Fernando Valley where it has already been used once to grow crops that add materially to the prosperity of our city and southern California.” Mulholland’s remarks were followed by a standing ovation. “This entire area,” read the official program, “is a natural enclave of serenity and tranquility hidden in the heart of the city.”

  One year later, with the deteriorating situation on his hands in the Owens Valley, and the looming threat of more bombings, Mulholland did not indulge in any publicized ground breaking of the St. Francis Dam when it was completed. Instead Mulholland quietly christened the enormous project with a bottle of champagne, surrounded only by a handful of invited guests and engineers from the Department of Water and Power. By winter, Mulholland commenced the slow, tedious process of filling the structure with Owens Valley water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct, completing the string of emergency reservoirs demanded by city boosters.