Rivers in the Desert

by Margaret L Davis

  ON DECEMBER 1, 1928, on the occasion of Mulholland’s official retirement, Harvey Van Norman was formally installed as chief engineer and general manager of the Department of Water and Power. Van Norman’s appointment was applauded by labor groups such as the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and the vast majority of the employees of the Department. However, to the many foes of Mulholland’s regime desiring a clean slate in the administration of the water department, the appointment was not a satisfactory one.

  In an early effort to stave off Van Norman’s appointment, confidential memos circulated to Dr. John R. Haynes, President of the Board of Water and Power Commissioners, which offered a disparaging portrait of Van Norman, describing him as lacking integrity, engineering skill, and executive leadership, and branding him a “wily politician who never hesitates to boldly and openly make misstatements.” “Unfortunately he has a frank and open manner and is rather captivating to those who do not know his real nature,” cautioned one critic, who deplored Van Norman’s ties to Herald, Examiner, and Times editors.

  The Los Angeles newspapers and magazines depicted Van Norman as a perfect successor to Mulholland. They described him as an innovative thinker, planner, and doer who comes “ably equipped to step in the large shoes of Chief William Mulholland.… Puffing his ever present brier and amicably walking his Boston bulldog on his Sunday evening meditations, he is every inch an able leader, profoundly absorbed in the world around him.”

  After taking office, one of the first things Van Norman did was retain Mulholland as Chief Consulting Engineer for the Department of Water and Power at a salary of five hundred dollars a month, despite protests from foes charging the appointment was gratuitous, overlooking the fact that Mulholland’s long experience in the affairs of the department was an invaluable resource and a bargain for the price. However, as Van Norman was well aware, the accusation was not without foundation. He loathed watching Mulholland waste away listlessly at home, and he hoped the appointment might give him some renewed energy and sense of self-worth.

  For a time it worked. Back in the familiar surroundings of the Department of Water and Power building at 207 South Broadway and in the warm loyal company of long-time associates, Mullholland sat in on the many day-to-day meetings, his opinions eagerly sought by the young engineers. His dark depression seemed to wane. Then in May 1930, Raymond Rising, the dam engineer who survived the midnight flood by his chaotic ride on a rooftop, filed a series of wrongful death claims against the City of Los Angeles, the Department of Water and Power, and William Mulholland for $175,000 for the deaths of his wife and three young children. Once again, Mulholland was forced to relive the events leading to the catastrophe at St. Francis dam.

  Although the city had managed to settle out of court all but nine death claims from the more than four hundred, city attorneys feared that if Rising succeeded in proving the city’s negligence, it could open a floodgate of litigation and cost the city millions of dollars. Thus far, the city had managed to keep the genie in the bottle, and what could have cost the city over $20 million in damages, had been quietly and expeditiously settled out of court for roughly $7 million. The Ray Rising trial threatened to change that.

  Defense attorneys representing the city immediately attempted to prove the dam collapsed not through negligence by the city or by the chief engineer of the Department of Water and Power, and denied the city was in any way responsible for the deaths of Rising’s wife and children. In a complete reversal of the city’s position during the coroner’s inquest of 1928, city attorney Jess E. Stevens declared that the break in the dam was caused not through faulty engineering, but by an act of God—namely, an earthquake. It was far from the city attorney’s mind, but Mulholland’s previously established guilt so aptly orchestrated by the still-imprisoned Asa Keyes would be indirectly absolved if the act of God theory was proven.

  Rising’s attorney introduced once again the infamous parlor game, dropping a rock in a glass of water so the new panel of jurors could watch it dissolve, and once again Mulholland wearily denounced its validity.

  Rising’s attorney then called his principal witness, Professor F. L. Ransome, a geologist at the California Institute of Technology who testified that there was no seismograph record of an earthquake or earth movement of any kind immediately preceding the collapse, and in his learned opinion the collapse was indeed caused by faulty construction on a hazardous site. With nine other similar lawsuits at stake, city attorneys waged a fierce battle to prove the dam collapsed due to an earthquake and presented seven days of testimony by geologists and engineers to corroborate their case.

  Following long testimonies about the issue of quakes, Mulholland and the jurors sat through hours of dramatic descriptions of the flood that swept through the Santa Clara Valley on the night of March 12, 1928. The emotional strain on the seventy-five-year-old former chief was plainly acute when he broke down sobbing during Rising’s own tearful rehashing of the gruesome details of the events that killed his family.

  In his instructions to the jurors, the judge cautioned that if in their opinion the dam collapsed due to an earthquake or earth movement, and that if they found the city had utilized skilled and competent engineering techniques, there could be no liability found against it. He then defined an act of God as a “force of nature that cannot be prevented by human care, skill or foresight, but results from natural causes such as an earthquake, earth movement, lightning, tempests, floods or inundations.”

  Any hopes William Mulholland had for vindication were soon shattered. After only one hour of deliberation, the jury ruled in favor of Rising and awarded thirty thousand dollars in damages for the deaths of his wife and three children. Again, judgment placed the blame on William Mulholland and, despite the continued attempts of friends and allies like Van Norman to support his rapidly failing ego, he became even more withdrawn.

  THE YEAR 1930 found Mulholland troubled and depressed. Fred Eaton’s woes ran even deeper although seemingly more readily solvable. Eatons’ continued fight to thwart the imminent foreclosure of his coveted Long Valley ranch could be won by simple cold hard cash, but his deteriorating mental condition brought on by the ravages of old age and failing health was accelerated by his obsessive dream of a multimillion-dollar sale of Long Valley to the city of Los Angeles.

  In September Eaton offered to sell water rights for fifty-one thousand acre-feet of water to Los Angeles for a staggering $2,300,000. And in behavior described as “irrational and delusional,” Eaton boldly declared to the commissioners that his offer was “only good for fifteen days” after which he threatened the water would be sold elsewhere to the highest bidder. In an emotional declaration Eaton stated that his offer represented only 15 cents on the dollar of Long Valley’s actual value, a mere pittance, after all, for the man who conceived and inaugurated the Owens River water-supply project for Los Angeles.

  When Van Norman and the commissioners rejected the offer as preposterous, offering the market price of $800,000, Eaton’s bombastic reaction, according to witnesses, exhibited signs of paranoia.

  Eaton’s unreasonableness over Long Valley had generated severe marital troubles. By 1930, the stormy conflicts between Eaton and his wife, Alice, were gleefully highlighted in the pages of Los Angeles newspapers. Convinced her husband had crossed the lines of rational thinking, and in fear of her own economic security, Alice Eaton, long used to a life of ease, filled suit to have him declared incompetent. She asserted that the seventy-five-year-old Eaton was physically and mentally unable to conduct his affairs and had become “insane with an exaggerated idea of the value of the lands he owns in Long Valley.” In order to protect the rapidly depleting estate, and Eaton from himself, she sought to be appointed receiver, ousting him from control of the Eaton Land and Cattle Company. Within days, Alice Eaton formally separated from her husband.

  An ensuing court battle for the Long Valley property raged between the spouses. Eaton vigorously defended himself against the c
harges of incompetency and Eaton’s attorneys successfully defeated charges that old age and paralytic strokes had incapacitated his judgment.

  By January 1932, out of funds, Alice Eaton was forced to dismiss her lawsuit; in March, Fred Eaton was himself broke, and the Long Valley property was submitted into final foreclosure by bank officials.

  Alice Eaton’s personal holdings were now threatened, and the bank which held the deeds on her rental property and a Los Angeles house acquired as separate property before her marriage, also commenced foreclosure proceedings.

  Claiming she was utterly without financial support and forced into desperate personal circumstances, Alice appeared before the Los Angeles City Council begging County Superintendent of Charities William R. Harriman to provide her with money or canned food. Alice Eaton’s pathetic plea for charity received front-page coverage by Los Angeles newspapers in the continuing saga of the Owens Valley. Wrote the Los Angeles Times:

  … So Mrs. Eaton, a native of Los Angeles, once an active club woman accustomed to a life of ease, estranged wife of a former mayor of Los Angeles and a civic pioneer verges on the edge of poverty. “I do not blame him,” Mrs. Eaton said of her husband, who lay ill in the Los Angeles home of his eldest son. “He is sick and can’t understand my predicament. We do not like to feel that we are separated, although in the eyes of the court we are. But he is unable to do anything.

  “The land that we own—what will some day become the Long Valley City Reservoir in Inyo County is worth millions. It is tied up now in receivership. But land like that can’t keep me from getting hungry, can’t support my sons nor save my home. Today the bank foreclosed on my home—with interest amounting to $200 which I was unable to meet. That was the last straw. I went to see Mr. Harriman although the humiliation was beyond description. And today I had to ask him for help.”

  The plea of the former mayors’ wife generated city-wide expressions of sympathy, but not from the Los Angeles City Council which respectfully declined her request stating the law forbade county aid to applicants with personal property in their names exceeding twenty-five hundred dollars.

  Eventually, Alice Eaton lost all of her possessions as well as the property she owned before her marriage. An inventory of the seized items, valued previously by the City Council at over twenty-five hundred dollars, reflects the life of a former mayor’s wife and charity club woman whose life somehow had gone terribly wrong: “Two 9 X 12 Wilton rugs, twelve English Chintz curtains, six wrought-iron curtain fixtures, one piano, one Atwater Kent Radio in walnut Console cabinet, three velvet cushions, three Philippine bamboo armchairs, one Philippine Peacock Chair, one Cane desk, two Oak Stickney chairs with Spanish leather cushions, three walnut nest tables, one iron bridge lamp with beaded lapis shade, and various miscellaneous items…”

  In July Eaton’s youngest son, Henry, age twenty-two, published an exclusive article in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine about the family’s predicament, claiming the earnings from the article would put food on his mother’s table for another two weeks.

  The picture of my mother as she is today in comparison with the position she held is very tragic. Here is a worn, sorrowful little woman in a dotted, gingham dress asking the county to help her and her children to exist.

  Yet only yesterday, she had been the wife of a prominent mayor of this city: a man who as consulting engineer for the Los Angeles Water Board had received a salary of $100 a day, a cattleman whose grazing lands covered thousands of acres. Money, social position seemed very real things in those days. But where was all that now? Where were the homes too large for our immediate family? Where were the servants, the cars, the chauffeurs, our friends?

  The forlorn Henry Eaton may well have concluded that the world had abandoned his unfortunate parents, but a letter written in Mulholland’s own firm hand seems to contradict Henry’s lament; the unmailed letter was found among Mulholland’s papers after his death and seems to indicate that he retained a continuing interest in resolving his former friend’s problems. Handwritten on Santa Fe Chief Rail stationery, the letter was dated April 2, 1928, only sixteen days after the collapse of the St. Francis Dam. Despite Mulholland’s own bitter heartache following the disaster, he found time to write his ailing friend with advice. Perhaps Mulholland’s own troubles reinforced a sense of mortality, and grieving himself, Mulholland felt the need to reach out to his former mentor out of a sense of gratitude or even profound loss. In the letter, Mulholland relays information that he thinks would be helpful to George Khurts, Eaton’s agent in negotiations for the sale of Long Valley to the city.

  2 April 28

  Dear E,

  I do not understand yet how I missed seeing George Khurts last Saturday. It was in my mind to say to him something like this. The Board has never evinced the slightest desire to buy the Eaton property—neither the Board nor anyone else in the department has ever recommended it. No price has ever been named or discussed in the department on the subject.

  The only price I ever heard of was that suggested by someone of the mayor’s office committee—just when, to whom or under what circumstances I do not know. I believe I was away from home at the time and only heard of it afterward. I do not know whether this suggestion was ever reported by the board.

  The present is not a proper time to bring the matter up. I do not know what could be done about it now or for some time to come.

  Please read this letter to Mr. K personally and ask him to state if he will, whether the figure named by a member of the mayor’s committee [who] said $600,000 would be favorably considered. So that if he says it is untimely I may have something definite to act on: I cannot say whether that figure or any other will be paid by the board but I can find out, and thus put an end to the present uncertainty.

  Mullholland may have neglected to mail the letter amid the chaos of events or it may reflect thoughts conveyed later.

  By year’s end, Fred Eaton was finally declared bankrupt. On December 7, 1932, the City Council voted its final approval to purchase Long Valley out of receivership for $650,000. Eaton had paid $22.50 an acre for Long Valley in 1905, and the city of Los Angeles, after three decades of violence, obtained it for a paltry $25.00 an acre, forever eradicating Eaton’s long dream of riches.

  In the eyes of the Board of Control the retribution for Eaton’s betrayal of Los Angeles twenty-seven years earlier was now complete. He had committed the unpardonable sin of trying to hold up the predestined, glorious advance of the kingdom of the City of Angels.

  AT THE START OF 1934, William Mulholland received an urgent plea from Eaton’s family. When the message came, Mulholland put on his hat and hurried out of his house without a word. Eaton lay dying of complications from a final stroke. Ushered to Eaton’s bedside at his son Burdick’s Los Angeles home, Mulholland quietly greeted his old friend, “Hello, Fred,” and took his hand.

  The two were then left alone. There is no public record of what the onetime friends spoke of during this, their last visit together, no record of stinging reprimands or gentle words of forgiveness, but the scene was a common one in human affairs—one man on his deathbed and an old requested friend at his side, hands clasped, administering to him. They had suffered great wounding defeats in the twilight of their long careers, one accused of a ruthless pursuit of glory and the other battered by a quest for riches. Both were left in bitter despair.

  In those brief minutes behind closed doors, perhaps they restored themselves by healing the long rift between them with fond reminiscences of a happier time.

  IN THE FALL OF 1930, Elisabeth Mathieu Spriggs, a student at the University of Southern California, sought a visit with Mulholland for help with her master’s thesis on the history of the domestic water supply of Los Angeles. Reluctant to grant any interview, the depressed Mulholland finally did so, and friends recalled that his brief interaction with the sincere and enthusiastic young lady had lifted his spirits, motivating him to heed his appearance, and, for a short time, take a new inter
est in life. In the course of her interviews, Mulholland had proudly taken her on visits to the many old reservoir and intake sites of the early Los Angeles water system where he worked for Fred Eaton as a ditch tender and later as supervisor.

  In her short but glowing biography of Mulholland at the close of her thesis, she listed many of his early achievements in hydraulic engineering and dam building and, of course, recounted the achievement of the Los Angeles aqueduct, quoting Mulholland’s remarks at the opening of the Cascades acknowledging Eaton’s pivotal role in the establishment of the great man-made river.

  There was no mention of the catastrophic St. Francis collapse or of the troubling affairs of Long Valley in Elisabeth Spriggs’s thesis, but she poignantly captured in Mulholland’s own words the hopeful world of Los Angeles that Eaton and Mulholland shared in pre-aqueduct times.

  “The world was my oyster and I was just opening it.…Los Angeles was a place after my own heart. It was the most attractive town I had ever seen. The people were hospitable. There was plenty to do and a fair compensation offered for whatever you did. In fact, the country had the same attraction for me that it had for the Indians who originally chose this spot as their place to live. The Los Angeles River was the greatest attraction. It was a beautiful, limpid little stream, with willows on its banks.… It was so attractive to me that it at once became something about which my whole scheme of life was woven. I loved it so much.”

  On March 11, 1934, Fred Eaton, age seventy-eight, died, and that night a brooding Mulholland disclosed to Rose that “For three nights in succession I dreamed of Fred. The two of us were walking along—young and virile like we used to be, yet I knew we were both dead.”

  Mulholland’s hotheaded statement to Van Norman years before that “I’ll buy Long Valley three years after Fred Eaton is dead,” a vow to deny Eaton a profit in his lifetime, was a prophecy after all. One day before Eaton’s death, receivership of the Eaton Land and Cattle Company was terminated and title to Long Valley was transferred to the City of Los Angeles. Once a millionaire, Eaton died leaving an estate estimated at $20,000, consisting of $15,000 in stock from the Eaton Land and Cattle Company and $5,000 in Mono County land. His will divided his estate equally among his wife and six children.