Rivers in the Desert

by Margaret L Davis

  Another man in the car said to Carl, “How are we going to get them all to go at once?” The first man in the car then said, “We have electric caps that will set all the charges off at the same time, regardless of where they are. Jerry has both kinds. Which side will be best?” The other man in the car said, “I think the west side,” and Carl said, “No, both sides.”

  The affidavit went on to offer a physical description of Carl, and added that the voice was familiar–the same voice the employee had once heard complaining about having been forced to sell his ranch to the city of Los Angeles for an unsatisfactory price. The employee did not offer a name for the man whose voice he recognized.

  A second affidavit from an Owens Valley resident described a hitchhiker who had made violent threats against the department. “At the time we were passing the aqueduct siphon in Mint Canyon my companion said things to me like: ‘I would like to tear into this siphon. I would like to blow this and that out.’

  “I said to him if he did that it would drown lots of innocent people, and his answer was, ‘What do we care if we drown half the people of Los Angeles? We are going to show them we have not really commenced yet. Four plants of dynamite charges are ready where they will do the most good, and this time there will be bloodshed.’”

  Suspicious of the authenticity of the affidavits and affronted by the one-upmanship of the Mulholland forces, Keyes, acting quickly but in clear violation of the public trust, decided not to present the affidavits, claiming the documents were hearsay and irrelevant. Because the proceedings were a coroner’s inquest, not a full-blown trial, Mulholland was not represented by a lawyer of his own. Not only were the affidavits not shown to the jury, but some of the most compelling evidence which tended to corroborate a sabotage defense, namely the “Stanford Fish” theory and Pierson Hall’s convincing evidence from the dynamite experts, was never presented for examination.

  OF COURSE, to have pressed Mulholland further on the dynamite issue would have foolishly courted disaster for Keyes’s case for leakage, but the reasons behind Mulholland’s painful reluctance to assert terrorism as the cause were as complex as the man himself. Although he had privately espoused the dynamite theory among water associates as fact and had immediately acted to protect the city’s water system from more violence, Mulholland had discovered in the witness chair that he could not publicly admit to it, even though to do so might have allowed the dynamite evidence into the inquiry and vindicated him of charges of incompetency.

  It also would have left him defenseless in the face of the enduring accusations that the Owens Valley water wars were brought on by his unyielding dictatorial refusal to purchase Fred Eaton’s Long Valley property for the city’s critical water storage facility, and that his failure to come to a fair settlement with the displaced Owens ranchers created the hostile climate that prompted the dynamiting of the St. Francis by still-vengeful insurgents. A new war would then break out in the Owens Valley, only this time families of the Santa Clara Valley victims would be the ones seeking revenge. A protracted wave of bloodshed would shake both valleys and Mulholland would be held accountable.

  Branded the villain in either case, Mulholland knew he could not win. Allowing the dynamite issue to disappear amid the mocking tones of Keyes’s repetitions of the word hoodoo, Mulholland would continue to fight against the charges of incompetency leveled against him, charges which still had not been–and possibly could never be–proven, charges that he could never acknowledge as true. It is easy to understand why Mulholland subscribed to the sabotage theory for the dam’s failure, but it was impossible for him to accept that the destruction of his own engineering achievements may have been instigated by his own actions.

  Like mythic heroes of antiquity, the perpetuated image of William Mulholland, the great self-made engineer, conqueror of desert sand and rock, deliverer of the life-giving water, the vigorous, infallible leader beloved by his men, was at the time of the tragedy an integral part of the psyche of the city of Los Angeles, as important and necessary to its esteem as the great aqueduct itself. And perhaps nobody in Los Angeles bought into the myth of William Mulholland more than William Mulholland himself.

  “I have a job to do. And damn it, I will very well do it. And if I have to step on a few bruised egos or hurt a few so-called educated types, I will. But by God I made a commitment to the people of Los Angeles and so help me God, I intend to finish the job,” Mulholland told Van Norman one day in the blistering heat of the Mojave Desert, venting his exasperation with the political wrangling over the aqueduct.

  The inquest was much more than a legal proceeding to establish cause of death. It was, also, the trial of William Mulholland and no one knew it more than he. Few individuals in American history have risen to the heights of fame and achievement that Mulholland had secured, only to suffer such extreme public disgrace and personal sorrow. The tragedy of the St. Francis afforded the Chief the occasion to rise to his highest point of inner strength. Mulholland’s immediate and unwavering acceptance of the responsibility for the disaster would earn him the admiration and sympathy of nearly every reasonable person, save those perhaps who had lost a loved one in the catastrophe. During the inquest, and following, letters and editorials running side by side with those which angrily attacked him filled the newspapers, assuring Mulholland he would not be abandoned in his darkest hour by the city he inspired.

  Ironically, the year the dam collapsed was the same year Mulholland succeeded, after three long years of lobbying in Sacramento, to obtain the California state legislature’s approval of a bill creating the Metropolitan Water District. After that, Los Angeles’s aggressive annexation program of Owens Valley land and water was halted.

  But for now, as the inquiry reconvened, Mulholland’s alleged shortcomings as an engineer were working to undermine his diplomatic achievement in preserving his position as the head of the city’s water program through more than forty years of political flux. The future of the Swing-Johnson bill, authorizing construction of Boulder Dam, was still in question. The violent history of the Owens Valley water wars coupled with the St. Francis disaster had caused the city’s Congressional supporters a degree of embarrassment they could ill afford in the midst of their delicate negotiations over the Boulder Canyon project. As historian William Kahrl pointed out, by now, as “the architect of both the dam and the city’s policies toward the Owens Valley ranchers, Mulholland was a liability that could no longer be sustained.”

  AS THE WITNESSES and audience settled into their seats, Asa Keyes wisely chose to continue his attack on leaks and departmental neglect. Harvey Van Norman was the first to be called. When questioned about the selection of the site of the St. Francis, Van Norman, though deeply bereaved by the catastrophe, was not so subdued in his replies as was the grief-stricken Mulholland. He sharply retorted that the dam’s site was sound and its location justified. “The dam wings were joined soundly to the hills, on both the east and west, on a foundation of very hard shale,” he said tersely. When asked by what other geological name the shale was called, Van Norman said it was called “schist.”

  Keyes was ready for the anticipated answer and pounced on it like a cat on a mouse. “As a matter of fact, schist is really nothing more or less than ‘rotten rock’, isn’t that so?” asked Keyes, referring with usual histrionics to a field geologist’s term for porous rock, or conglomerate, which percolating water could gradually reduce to a spongy precarious mass.

  Although he preferred calling it shale, “schist,” or “rotten rock” was safe, affirmed Van Norman, readily admitting three other dams–the Barret in San Diego, the Arroyo Seco in the San Fernando Valley, the Mulholland Dam in the hills above Hollywood–were all built by Mulholland on the same formations and were in fact “near duplicates” of the failed St. Francis. Keyes could not have been more pleased at the news, and Van Norman’s “rotten rock” testimony sparked a heated exchange over the safety of the dams. By noon the next day, hundreds of angry citizens carrying
placards were marching around the perimeter of the Mulholland Dam demanding it to be emptied.

  Reacting to the ensuing headline that blared, “Film City in Fear of Dam Breaking,” and charging that his life and property were in imminent danger, David Horsley, a motion-picture producer and Hollywood businessman, filed a multimillion-dollar suit in Superior Court against the City of Los Angeles and the Department of Water and Power. According to Horsley’s complaint, 250,000 lives and $300 million in property would be threatened if the dam were to break. “The people of Hollywood are justified in believing that like the St. Francis, the Hollywood Dam is doomed to failure–the dams were built by the same men with the same materials and by the same plans,” argued Horsley.

  To Keyes’s delight and to Mulholland’s mortification, in response to the public panic, and without consulting Mulholland, the Water Department emptied the reservoir by 25 percent.

  W. B. Mathews, special counsel for the department, sought a general demurrer with little fanfare; this was in stark contrast to the old days of the aqueduct when he and Mulholland were constantly in court battling special-interest groups. The Chief’s keen Irish wit would often turn an opponent’s attack into a striking point for Mathews, and the two men together rarely lost a case. Now, squelched by the momentous events closing in around him, the Chief sat in morose silence in the hot, humid inquiry room listening to his second-in-command struggle to his defense, affirming his choice of the site as sound.

  The issue of leaks, and knowledge by the department of those leaks, continued to be the focus of Keyes’s attack. Even through Keyes produced reports that the flow of the Santa Clara River several miles below the dam had increased over ten feet by 7:00 A.M. the day before the break, Van Norman was adamant that the leaks he and Mulholland had inspected were crystal clear and normal.

  “I want to bring out my intimate relationship with Tony,” Van Norman said firmly, referring to dam keeper Tony Harnischfeger. “I had known him fifteen years and we had the utmost confidence in each other. If he had been alarmed over the leaks he would have told me.” Backing up Van Norman’s statement, Dean Keagy, a shipping clerk at Powerhouse Number One above the dam and a worker on the dam during its construction, and also the aqueduct, testified that he had noticed nothing unusual when he drove past the dam at 11:30 P.M. Monday. Not to be deterred, Keyes quickly redirected his questions to the quality of the concrete and other materials used in the dam’s construction, asking Keagy if he had seen any red clay or dirt go into the concrete mixing machines, prompting Keagy, as quickly, to respond that he certainly had not.

  But others claimed they did. Knowing this time he was on safe ground, Keyes again posed the question that had sent him into throes of panic earlier. “Do you know of anything that would offer us here in this room a clue as to what caused the failure of the dam?” queried Keyes of Richard Bennett, who had operated a concrete-mixing machine during the construction. Aside from the rumors he had heard regarding old iron bed posts used as foundation girders, the florid, boozy-faced Bennett, attempting to substantiate Keyes’s contention that clay had been mixed into the concrete as a cost savings, said he “saw things go into the mixer that shouldn’t have gone in.” The clay, or red mica schist, he added, was a common element of the terrain from the San Francisquito canyon.

  The next morning, the fourth day of testimony, Keyes performed a dramatic experiment for the benefit of the jury. He held up what appeared to be a small ordinary piece of rock and identified it as coming from the ill-fated dam. Then he plopped it into a glass of water, waited three minutes and stirred the glass with a lead pencil. The rock, about the size of a walnut, disintegrated, coloring the water a muddy red and leaving a thick layer of sediment on the bottom of the glass. Without comment, but with eyes gloating, he set the glass down in front of the jury.

  Watching the display was an excruciating moment for Mulholland and Van Norman who feared the unscientific experiment would inflame an already angry public and could sway the minds of the jurors. The so-called experiment was indeed sensationally played up in the newspapers causing further outcries for Mulholland’s head, and, in a morbid twist, became for a time a popular parlor game. To play, one merely had to drive up to the dam site, gouge out a sample of the clay, take it home, place it in a glass of water, and then wager on the time it took to dissolve.

  To confirm the results of the clay experiment, Keyes called upon David Matthews, a dam laborer who gave sensational testimony to coroner Nance that the dam was not safe. Matthews worked at Powerhouse Number Two along with Ray Rising. He stated he had been extremely fearful about the dam, fearful of the “five-mile lake that would go crashing through the canyon if the dam ever broke.” He added that the west hill of the dam had become “soft and boggy” as a result of the continual day-by-day seepage.

  Matthews claimed that the leaks increased daily over the two-week period preceding the collapse, and on Saturday, two days before the flood, the entire west hill was saturated and looked like it was ready to give way at any moment. The day before the break, Matthews continued, water tinged with red clay oozed from the hill under the west wing. Walter Berry, Matthews’s boss, had ordered him to stuff logs into the aqueduct drain pipes to relieve the pressure and seal them with oakum. Berry then left to report to Tony Harnischfeger. “When Berry came back, he had some pretty sensational news.”

  “And what was that?” asked Nance.

  “Well, he called me aside and said, “This is confidential–but the dam’s not safe. I got orders from Tony to put logs in all the pipes.’” Going off duty that evening, Matthews said he passed Harry Carey’s ranch on his way home and was worrying about what Berry had told him when he saw his brother who lived in the area coming in his direction in his car. “I felt I owed a duty to him, being my brother and all, and I thought I’d ought to tell him. I yelled at him–For God’s sake, get your family and get them out of the canyon, and I told him about the dam. He said, ‘Dave, I’ll move to Newhall tomorrow.’ That tomorrow never came. That night she broke.” At this, Matthews buried his face in his hands and wept.

  A short recess was ordered, the inquest resumed with the testimony of Chester Smith, a working rancher who had shared his house with the Nichols family in the San Francisquito canyon.

  “Water began to seep from the west wing a month ago and I told him, Tony, about it,” said Smith. “Tony said he wasn’t worried, but that if the dam did break it would be just at the west wing. I went up to feed my stock above the dam the day before she broke. I met Jack Ely and asked him if he was going to flood us out because the west bank was saturated with water and water was slopping over the top of the dam. I know he was only joshing, just joshing, but Ely hollered back–’We expect it to go out any minute!’ Ely was working at the dam and I told him he’d better turn some of that water out. Why, it was splashing over the top and the leak was bigger than ever.

  “But I was afraid the dam might fail and I slept out in the barn that night and kept the doors open. The dogs woke me up at ‘bout midnight. They were barking and just raising the dickens. I knew something was wrong when they acted like that. Then I heard that awful noise–saw trees and telegraph poles breaking and electricity flashing from the power lines. I knew what was coming. I’d been in floods before. I ran out in my nightshirt and yelled to Nichols in the house. ‘Dam’s broke!’ I shouted, loud as I could. I had to drag them both out of the bed and we all started running up the hill. We had to pull Mrs. Nichols along, Nichols and I. We got out alright with the water all around us. It was 125 feet deep when it tore through my ranch. Stripped it clean as a whistle.

  “When the water hit the wires it made lightening, but that soon stopped and we couldn’t see anything, but could hear the roar. When we reached safety on the hill the water had covered everything. My feet were bleeding and most of the nightclothes I had on had been torn off. We stayed up there above the water till dawn, till it went away.”

  Keyes presented more witnesses who had p
ersonal knowledge of the leaks. Mrs. Anna Scott, resident of Mint Canyon, testified that she was driving up San Francisquito canyon in her new Ford on Monday, March 12, but had turned back when she noticed a large volume of muddy water flowing down the stream bed and threatening the bridge.

  Robert Atmore, a rancher at Hughes Lake several miles above the dam, testified that he had noticed a bad leak on the east wing of the dam. “It occurred to me more than once it was dangerous because I had seen it before. I talked to my friend Harry Burns who was living below the dam about it and told him he ought to get out of the canyon–that if it ever broke, he’d never get out alive. He just laughed. He died that night.”

  After presenting still more testimony from witnesses regarding the leakage and rumors of cover-ups by dam employees to substantiate his theory of criminal neglect, Keyes held a dramatic press conference in his office that night. “Should the committee’s investigation show evidence of knowledge of the defective construction, I will ask the Grand Jury to return an indictment charging murder. Should evidence propose either negligence in the construction or conscious knowledge of danger to lives through such construction, indictments charging voluntary manslaughter will be asked.”

  Keyes knew that by week’s end public sentiment and cold, hard statistics would be working to his advantage. He was right. The toll would stand at 511 dead or missing, with 381 bodies recovered, 297 bodies identified, and 74 corpses still unclaimed. Property damage would exceed $20 million.

  16

  Judgment

  We look for judgment,

  but there is none.

  ISA. 59:11

  DURING THE TWO-WEEK PERIOD of the inquest, Mulholland drew further into himself. Picking listlessly at his dinner, he asked Rose: “What’s the matter with me? I see things, but they don’t interest me anymore. My zest for living is gone.” Rose knew her father’s plaintive question was rhetorical, but he was, of course, correct in his self-diagnosis. The irrepressible spirit that had characterized him since youth was gone, washed away with the collapse of the dam. Returning home at night from the inquest, he would pull the blinds, lock the doors, and sit most of the night brooding in his study, unable to concentrate on reading or listening to the classical music he loved. When he tried to sleep he would toss in bed and wind up pacing the house. From her bedroom Rose could hear his footsteps “creaking the house in pain” as they padded across the oak flooring. Fearing their presence would sink him even deeper into depression, loyal friends and colleagues declined to visit. For some, unable themselves to face the dark despair inflicting their once-vibrant Chief, this reason served as a pretext for not calling.