Rivers in the Desert

by Margaret L Davis

  Mullholland hoped that the St. Francis Dam would close the ugly chapter on the controversial Long Valley Dam, and solve the vexing problem of an adequate storage site which had haunted his reputation and the aqueduct’s success. It was another crowning achievement in Mulholland’s lengthy, illustrious engineering career.

  IN JANUARY 1926, Fred Eaton traveled by train from his Long Valley ranch to Los Angeles to conduct business and visit two of his children. While he was away, two board directors of Eaton’s Land and Cattle Corporation, in collusion with other officers of the firm, took out a $200,000 mortgage against his ranch in the company’s name.

  Mark and Wilfred Watterson knowingly issued the loan to Eaton’s associates without Eaton’s legal approval. Once the cash had been distributed, Eaton’s land was encumbered by a $200,000 note owned by the Wattersons’ bank. Shortly thereafter, the Wattersons sold the note to the Pacific Southwest Trust and Savings Bank of Los Angeles.

  Unaware of the fraudulent transaction, Eaton remained in Los Angeles for two weeks doing business related to his cattle interests, visiting the dentist and ordering new clothes. He made no attempt to see William Mulholland, although as former city mayor, he entertained and dined with several prominent city leaders. Untypically, Eaton did not promote sale of his Long Valley dam site on this particular visit, but his fixation on the goal of obtaining his “just price” for the property persisted. At first, Eaton fixed a price of $900,000 for the land, but city officials appraised the value at no more than $255,000. After Mulholland’s continued refusal to meet this price, anticipating a rise of value due to the difficulties in the Owens Valley and the eventual return of seasonal drought to the Los Angeles basin, Eaton raised the ante to $1.5 million, then doubled the amount to $3 million.

  By now Eaton could well afford to play a game of bluff. He owned more than 12,000 acres, 5,400 head of cattle, and a sprawling white-walled hacienda ranch house surrounded with bougainvillea, fig trees, and fruit orchards. His cattle empire on the banks of the Owens River was thriving, and Eaton was dubbed by Hearst’s Examiner as the “Cattle King of California.” Eaton’s son, Harold, in a role much like Mulholland’s dutiful son Perry, was manager of the Eaton Land and Cattle Company, and father and son devoted themselves to working its rich pasture lands and bountiful watersheds.

  Despite these comfortable assets, Eaton still envisioned more money for himself, and speculated that in the future, downstream cattle ranchers would soon be forced out of business by the rapidly depleting indigenous water supply in the valley, and would have no choice but to sell their cattle to him at drastically reduced prices, further bolstering his considerable wealth. Eaton was convinced the longer he maintained control of Long Valley, the longer he held the golden key of opportunity. With Long Valley, Eaton was sure he held the city of Los Angeles captive for a big future pay-off, and believed he would become the sole surviving rancher in the valley while the others died a slow economic death.

  As a result, seventy-one-year-old Eaton was in no real hurry to cash in. He was a millionaire on paper, and biding his time, knew Los Angeles would have to pay his price. Returning to his ranch, Eaton continued to relish the activities of his cattle empire with his son, maintaining his dream of further riches and bringing Mulholland, his once pupil and now nemesis, to his knees. It was a coveted delusion that would last for ten years.

  Harold Eaton learned about the $200,000 note taken in secret by other corporate officers of the Eaton Land and Cattle Company. When Harold told him about the swindle, his distraught father suffered a stroke that rendered him unconscious and paralyzed. The family remained at his bedside in a twenty-four-hour vigil fearing he would die.

  Knowing the financial crisis that would soon come crashing down upon the Eaton family, Harold authorized his father’s longtime associates George Khurts and J. T. Fishburn to negotiate on behalf of the stricken Eaton a quick sale of the Long Valley dam site. Harold then immediately wired Mulholland at the Department of Water and Power informing him that Eaton was critically ill.

  The news of Eaton’s stroke left Mulholland deeply shaken. As a gesture to his ailing former friend, Mulholland, in a softening of his earlier posture, instructed Van Norman and W. B. Mathews to try to see to it that the city now make a “fair” offer on Eaton’s Long Valley. Van Norman and Mathews immediately began negotiations with Eaton’s representatives. By March 11, 1926, it appeared as though Eaton’s people would authorize a price of $66 per acre, roughly $792,000, but Van Norman knew that the commissioners and the city council would never accept a price in excess of $40 per acre, or $480,000.

  On March 12, Eaton suffered a second debilitating stroke. Hoping that resolution of the problems at Long Valley would encourage his father’s recovery, Harold turned to others and began heated and frantic efforts to close some kind of deal. Wishing to influence Mulholland, Harold wired W. B. Mathews in Washington, D.C., about his father’s dire condition and pleaded for a swift resolution of the problem. Mathews quickly wired to Harold that he was available to resolve the matter and conveyed “his affectionate regard and earnest hope for an early recovery.”

  On March 26, Harold Eaton reversed tactics, feistily demanding that the city accept the offer at $66 per acre now, or he would tie the property up for five years by selling options on parcels to a land syndicate of Owens Valley ranchers, which had been formed by the Watterson brothers. Van Norman, sympathetic to Eaton’s plight, wired W. B. Mathews that he frankly believed that Harold’s threat was another bluff. But in no event, he said, could the Department of Water and Power justify Eaton’s price. Earlier, under the supervision of Van Norman, three teams of appraisers had evaluated the property and found its value to be no more than $40 an acre.

  By early January 1927, Eaton was slowly recovering and had regained partial physical mobility, but no deal had yet been struck. By mid-January, Harold reiterated to Van Norman his father’s price of $800,000, as opposed to his original $1 million. As Los Angeles officials continued to mull over the offer, Fred Eaton suddenly raised the ante to $1 million once again.

  To Eaton’s disadvantage, there had been no further dynamitings in the Owens Valley since the final blasts at the Alabama Gate on May 12, 1926. By now, Mulholland had completed the string of reservoirs to strengthen the city’s emergency water supply, and the city was no longer as desperate to obtain the Long Valley dam site.

  BUT AFTER ONE OF YEAR CALM, in May 1927 violence erupted again against the aqueduct; suddenly, Eaton’s ambitions were closer to becoming reality. Four masked men kidnapped two guards at the No Name Siphon, ten miles south of Little Lake, and dynamited 450 feet of concrete aqueduct pipeline. With precious water gushing from the immense rupture onto the desert floor engineer Clark Keely arrived on the scene and described it as a “torrent of water … a young Mississippi flowing out over the desert.”

  Mulholland ordered machine guns posted at every conduit and horseback patrols to guard the length of the pipeline at hourly intervals; Harvey Van Norman was dispatched to direct operations. Floodlights were installed throughout the system to illuminate trespassers, but bullets from out of the darkness of night shot the lenses out. A second explosion blew up the intake at the power plant at Big Pine Creek. Then at Cottonwood, twelve miles below Lone Pine, a concrete aqueduct wall was dynamited. Mulholland’s aqueduct, now listing like a huge tanker under siege by submarines, was severely damaged and the lifeline of the Los Angeles water system was incapacitated.

  Mulholland responded with a vengeance. He ordered six guards armed with Winchester rifles and tommy guns dispatched to No Name Canyon with orders to shoot and kill any suspect, no questions asked. The city offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to conviction of the insurgents, and Mulholland called upon the governor to send in state and federal troops. The Los Angeles Times reported that six hundred specially recruited police were “concentrated and ready to do battle.” Within five days, Mulholland sent another hundred guards to patrol the entire l
ength of the 233-mile aqueduct, and scores of uniformed patrols roamed up and down the valley at all hours with searchlights. Owens Valley was now in “a state of virtual warfare.” Mulholland believed that nothing short of an armed occupation by city police would stop the violence.

  As Mulholland’s armed patrols gathered in one place, sabotage occurred in another, and the bombers’ ingenuity turned the patrols into a vicious game of hide-and-seek. The aqueduct was hit with four more blasts. Two miles south of Lone Pine, at Tuttle Creek, a sixteen-foot hole was blasted open. Two bomb explosions occurred at the Alabama Hills, and then, on July 16, a forty-foot section of the pipeline was blown to pieces at Tebo Gates. Investigators discovered even more bombs along the line which luckily had failed to explode. Los Angeles-owned water wells in the Owens Valley were incapacitated, aqueduct phone lines were cut, and police search fights dismantled.

  Finally, in view of the destruction, newly elected California Governor Clement Young asked President Coolidge to intervene, and the White House dispatched uniformed federal agents and Pinkerton men to patrol the aqueduct. In retaliation, bombers struck the Big Ditch section of the aqueduct near Lone Pine. Blasting the aqueduct–or “Shooting the Duck” as the bombers proudly called it–became the obsession of the insurgents throughout the long, violent, hot summer of 1927.

  Much to the fears of Los Angeles city officials, the violence appeared to be spreading to Los Angeles itself. An anonymous phone call was received by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department reporting that a carload of armed men were on their way from Inyo County to dynamite the St. Francis Dam. Due to the dynamiting in the Owens Valley, the St. Francis Reservoir was now the sole source of water from the north, and a threat of sabotage to it was enough to shake even Mulholland’s steel nerves. At his insistence, dozens of officers descended on the high concrete ramparts of the St. Francis. Apparently tipped off to the police response, the bombers never materialized.

  After federal troops arrived on the scene, Mulholland’s anger turned into grave concern over the future protection of Los Angeles’s fragile buffer water supply. By this point, the St. Francis Reservoir was almost filled to capacity, and Mulholland ordered heavy water withdrawals from the reservoir to replace the lost flow into Los Angeles from the damaged aqueduct. Mulholland’s only source of consolation during this unpredictable period was that in one short year, the St. Francis Dam had already justified its existence by feeding a parched city which was now threatened with outright water famine. As the violence intensified and the citizens of Los Angeles realized their well-being was in the hands of “a group of angry valley terrorists,” public sympathy for the ranchers quickly dissipated.

  But the super-charged atmosphere in the valley remained so heated that it was ripe for bloody confrontation, and Mulholland, pacing in anger in Los Angeles, was fiercely determined to end the war once and for all. He now directed his attention to attacking what he believed to be the root reason underlying the unrest in the valley–the economic power and resulting control the Wattersons maintained over Owens Valley residents.

  According to historian William L. Kahrl, Mulholland obtained detailed financial statements on the Wattersons’ operations which suggested that some bank funds had been diverted illegally to other Watterson enterprises. On August 2, Mulholland took the evidence to the state corporations commissioner, who dispatched a state bank investigator to the Owens Valley. Three days later, while an audit ensued, the Watterson banks closed and on August 10, the brothers were jailed on charges of embezzlement.

  In the subsequent trial, Wilfred and Mark Watterson admitted they had diverted more than $2.3 million of the ranchers’ savings into their own companies, with an explanation that they had acted only to “preserve valley industries in the face of the city’s onslaught.” The brothers were convicted on thirty-six counts of embezzlement and grand theft, and were sentenced to ten years in prison.

  There was scarcely a rancher or merchant anywhere in the valley who did not have a mortgage with the Watterson banks. Hundreds of Inyo County residents, who had placed their life savings with the trusted Watterson banks, were ruined, their savings lost, and their property forfeited, and the valley economy virtually collapsed overnight. With the banks’ demise, the resistance movement was broken, and the violence against the aqueduct and Mulholland abruptly ended.

  Fred Eaton did not escape the fate that he had once wished upon his valley neighbors. When the Watterson banks collapsed, the $200,000 note secured by Eaton’s Long Valley property went with them. The Los Angeles bank holding the note on Eaton’s land promptly initiated foreclosure proceedings. Unable to come up with the $200,000 cash required to save his ranch, Fred Eaton suffered a third stroke. He and his family now lived in constant fear that they would be forcibly removed from their home by the Owens Valley County Sheriff and stripped of the possessions of a lifetime.

  ONCE AGAIN, an uninterrupted flow of water coursed from Owens Valley to Los Angeles. The water was secure but it was becoming increasingly apparent that it was insufficient to meet the city’s demands. Mulholland now focused his thoughts on another struggle–his continuing fight for the Colorado River project. After three years of intensive lobbying in Sacramento, Mulholland had finally obtained the California state legislature’s approval of a bill creating the Metropolitan Water District, thereby laying the necessary groundwork for the creation of the Colorado River Aqueduct.

  On New Year’s Eve, 1927, Mulholland, Van Norman, and Mathews set out in a first-class sleeping cabin on the Southern Pacific for an eight-day trip to Washington, D.C., to lay their request before the U.S. Senate. Before departing from Union Station, Mulholland declared with finality on the steps of his rail car to a throng of reporters: “Members of Congress and people of the Southwest must realize that this section of the country is face-to-face with a desperate and dangerous situation and only the federal government can aid us.”

  This trip was one of many Mulholland had made to Washington with W. B. Mathews to testify on behalf of the Swing-Johnson bill, the final shot in the six-year legislative battle for Boulder Dam. Residing at the elite, staid Cosmos Men’s Club, for months Mulholland and Mathews lobbied, entertained, and testified in endless hearings on the Hill as the bill wound its way tortuously through Congress.

  Upon return to Los Angeles from one of his lobbying junkets, Mulholland was surprised to find the now seventy-three-year-old Fred Eaton calling upon him at his offices at the Department of Water and Power. Eaton had recovered sufficiently from his last stroke to be treated by doctors in Los Angeles. Mulholland was saddened almost to tears to see the once handsome, vibrant comrade of earlier days demonstrating the obvious signs of partial paralysis–the slurring of speech, facial distortion, and incoherent thoughts.

  Eaton again reiterated his demands for Long Valley. Pridefully he kept the impending foreclosure of the property to himself, refusing to sell it to Mulholland for less than a million dollars. Mulholland had no choice but to deny Eaton’s demand. In spite of his illness, Eaton issued forth a rain of invective. In a replay witnessed many times before by the hapless Mulholland, the infuriated Eaton stormed out of Mulholland’s office.

  A few weeks later, Mulholland received an urgent telephone call from the wife of one of Eaton’s sons, Burdick, who lived in Los Angeles, requesting that Mulholland come to the house to visit Fred as soon as possible. In a letter Mulholland wrote to W. B. Mathews still lobbying feverishly in Washington, D.C., Mulholland described his visit to Eaton:

  Burdick’s wife called me last Friday to come and see Fred. I was somewhat alarmed by the urgency of her call and I responded at once, but found when I got there that he was merely in a talkative mood.… He wanted to prod me up about his affairs. He doesn’t seem to me to be ailing anymore than he did a couple of weeks ago when he called here at my office, but seems to realize that the time is getting short to urge his case in the land matter on the Board.…

  As you know, I am keeping clear of it altogether myse
lf, except when urged to talk about it, as I was on my visit to Eaton, but I avoided discussion of the matter as much as I could. I told him he would have to take it up with the proper committee. The Board has not approached the subject in my presence at any time within the last three or four months, or at any time since you left here. My purpose in writing you this, is, as I stated, so as to let you know how things stand as far as anything we have done here is concerned.…

  Eaton’s “desperate” call to Mulholland can be taken as more than just erratic behavior of a stroke victim. Even though he had stormed out of Mulholland’s office angry and defiant, the underlying reason for the visit was perhaps an unexpressed cry for long lost companionship. Besieged by impending financial doom and death, he could find comfort in the company of an old friend-turned-enemy.

  As Mulholland implied in his letter to Mathews, the matter of Long Valley was no longer completely in his hands. Mulholland’s vote either way would now not make it possible for Eaton to get his price. The Board of Water Commissioners had the final say and Eaton, volatile and erratic in his dealings with them over long years of stormy negotiations, had sealed his fate with some of the members.

  Sympathetic to Eaton’s dire plight, Mulholland dispatched Van Norman to visit the ailing Fred Eaton and try to come to some kind of an arrangement. “Going to see Fred and see if anything can be done,” Van Norman telegrammed Mathews. “I think the matter can not be handled until the situation becomes so desperate for Fred that he will agree to let some of his friends work out a deal without his interference.” In deference to Eaton’s former position as mayor of Los Angeles and superintendent of the Los Angeles City Water Company, his ailing health, and Mulholland’s concern, Van Norman continued with: “I hope it can be done with sufficient clear money to provide Eaton with a good income. The Chief is anxious to see the matter disposed of but after having had two long interviews lately with Fred cannot see very much chance at present.”