by Jon Wilkman
Intrepid tourists walk beneath an outlet on the downstream face of the St. Francis Dam (Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society)
After a two-hour investigation, the Water Bureau bosses concluded that the foundation of the St. Francis Dam was safe. Mulholland was proud of what the DWP stood for and accomplished. Electricity wasn’t the Chief’s responsibility, but a second BPL powerhouse was nearly three miles beyond the St. Francis Dam. Together, the two electrical generating stations in San Francisquito Canyon provided 90 percent of L.A.’s electricity.
The St. Francis Reservoir, which was filled by the Owens River Aqueduct, was two hundred feet deep and covered six hundred acres, making it the largest lake in Southern California. Just before it was filled to capacity, the Water and Power Department employee newsletter boasted: “In addition to its utilitarian features, the new lake thus created will constitute a scenic gem amid our mountain vastness that will, without doubt, prove in time as a great attraction to both tourist and resident alike.”7
Around 12:30 in the afternoon, Mulholland and Van Norman said good-bye to Tony Harnischfeger, returned to their car, and began the trip to Los Angeles. On the way, they stopped briefly at Powerhouse 2. Van Norman instructed a workforce supervisor to shut off water entering the St. Francis Reservoir and to open gates to release flow into the channel below the dam.
On the road again, William Mulholland had no reason to look back as Powerhouse 2 disappeared behind the twists of San Francisquito Canyon. The little community of workers, wives, and children were left to continue their lives a short distance from the shadow of the St. Francis Dam.
The Water Department limo passed the Ruiz and Raggio ranches, the San Francisquito School with Cecelia Small and her classroom of students, and the Indian Trading Post. When the dirt road ended, Vejar steered the Marmon onto the smooth paved surface of Highway 99. He could accelerate now, picking up speed, heading south. As for Tony Harnischfeger’s new leak and the safety of the St. Francis Dam, “it never occurred to me that it was in danger,” the Chief said afterward. “It was the driest dam of its size I ever saw in my life.”8
Night fell in San Francisquito Canyon. Dinners were served and dishes washed. There was time to read or listen to the radio—perhaps the KFI Symphonette and Cavalier Dance Band on NBC—and then off to bed. As thousands slept downstream, it began without warning. Near midnight, the St. Francis Dam shuddered, as if something had shaken it awake. Tons of concrete shifted, heaved, and suddenly cracked apart. With a roar, a twenty-story-high wall of water burst into the night and rumbled west. The route the Chief had traveled through San Francisquito Canyon less than twelve hours before, including homes, schools, ranches, farmland, and the road itself, was relentlessly engulfed by churning debris and an enormous roiling shroud of mud.
Before dawn on March 13, 1928, almost everyone William Mulholland had seen or talked to, and hundreds more, were dead.
2.
The Chief and the City of the Angels
By 1928, William Mulholland had long been an iconic figure in the City of the Angels and the State of California, but he was also known in the paneled offices of New York City investment firms and in the hearing rooms of the United States Congress. Mulholland’s fame was a product of great accomplishments—but was enhanced by the era of American mass media that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Los Angeles Times and the active public relations office of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power heralded him as a visionary and highly skilled and dedicated public servant. Newspaper reporters knew the Chief was good for a memorable quote, even if they couldn’t include his expletives. Essentially a city employee, Mulholland was very well paid and courted and feted by wealthy business leaders, but he was never part of their circle. With all the power and influence he wielded, a sense of his working-class past never left him, nor did a mid-Victorian “duty to be done” attitude about work.
Other powerful men may have had fancy university degrees hanging on office walls. Bill Mulholland had honorary citations, but his expertise and gruff confidence were based on an incisive mind, hands-on experience, and years on the job. He had risen from humble beginnings to success and prominence, the kind of life story Americans admired and mythologized.
To the men who worked with him, the Chief was an inspiring leader and entertaining raconteur with a sardonic sense of humor. A young graduate student who interviewed him for her master’s thesis was charmed by the “twinkle in his eye.”1 His enemies—and he had more than a few—were less susceptible. They found him arrogant and overbearing. Some were willing to resort to violence to destroy what he’d created.
William Mulholland c. 1920 (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power)
When it came to the specifics of his life and career, Mulholland wasn’t the kind of man who left a paper trail. He preferred to act rather than write. His only attempt at an autobiography was an eight-page typescript. Signed on February 8, 1930, the memoir was touched by nostalgia, but straightforward and firmly proud. He offered few details, most of them about his early life. There was no introspection, and nothing about the St. Francis Dam.2
Young Willie, as his granddaughter/biographer, Catherine, called the youthful Chief, was born in Belfast, Ireland, on September 11, 1855.3 His father was a guard with the British Mail Service. After the family moved to Dublin, surrounded by the city’s squalid neighborhoods, Willie was restless. At age fourteen he ran off to sea for the first time, and a year later joined the British Merchant Marine. On board ship, the teenager showed an aptitude for the calculations required for navigation. He also discovered the satisfaction of hard work and the camaraderie of deckmates who shared a common purpose.
After four years under sail in the Atlantic, on June 9, 1874, Mulholland disembarked in New York Harbor, ready to try his luck in the United States. During the intervening years, his younger brother Hugh had followed him to sea. After independent adventures in America, in 1875 the two were reunited in the Pittsburgh home of an uncle, Richard Deakers. Deakers ran a successful dry-goods operation and immediately put his roaming nephews to work.
Willie Mulholland’s experience managing the stock of his uncle’s store revealed a formidable memory, a head for numbers, and some discomfort. Naturally good at his job, he wasn’t pleased when customers complimented his salesmanship. He may have had more substantive ambitions, but later he’d regularly employ his persuasive skills.
When an outbreak of tuberculosis threatened the health of the Deakers family, they decided to join the “Sick Rush” to California, booking passage on a ship to Nicaragua. From there the family planned to cross the Isthmus by train, then sail up the coast to Los Angeles. It didn’t take much to convince the Mulholland brothers to join them. While the well-off Deakers relaxed in their cabins, Willie and Hugh hid belowdecks as stowaways. When they were discovered, the penniless lads had no choice but to walk the forty-seven miles across the mosquito-infested Isthmus to the Pacific, where they found work on a series of ships that eventually took them to San Francisco. After a few days in the most important city on the West Coast, the brothers purchased two horses and headed south.
Mulholland had read Charles Nordhoff’s California: For Health, Pleasure and Residence and was eager to see the wonders the author described. As they approached Los Angeles, if the two young men followed the most common route, they were led to a precipitous path cut against a narrow pass: San Francisquito Canyon.
Emerging into the treeless expanse of the San Fernando Valley, the adventurers encountered the Los Angeles River. Later, in a rare moment of sentimentality, Mulholland recalled his early impressions: “It was a beautiful, limpid little stream with willows on its bank.”4
When Bill Mulholland arrived in Los Angeles in 1877, he was impressed with the little town, which was bustling after the arrival of the transcontinental railway the year before. For miles on all sides, vineyards and orchards still surrounded the former pueblo. Overwhelming fad
ing remnants of Mexican influence, a small American-looking business district was spreading south and west from the old plaza. Horse-drawn wagons, in town for supplies, parked in front of modest shops and office buildings. Large-lettered signs promoted dry goods, furniture, clothing, guns, and real estate. Business names suggested enterprising immigrants from Germany, France, and Italy, but along with Spanish, accents from New England and the American Midwest were more commonly overheard. Beneath broad awnings, wooden sidewalks kept pedestrians separated from unpaved streets that sometimes swirled with dust or clogged with mud.
Los Angeles, c. 1880 (Author’s collection)
Mexican L.A. had been pushed mostly north to a neighborhood called Sonoratown, but a small Chinese population, remainders of a generation who came to the Northern California mines of “Gold Mountain” and later worked on the transcontinental railroad, occupied a run-down area called “Nigger Alley.” Here, in 1871, after a police officer was killed trying to stop a shootout between Chinese gangs, an angry mob sought revenge. They dragged eighteen “Celestials,” as newspapers called them, into the streets and shot or hanged them before order was restored.5
This had been only six years before. It was a tragedy that the city preferred to relegate to the past, but signs of civilization were more common when Willie Mulholland showed up. “Los Angeles was a place after my own heart,” he remembered years later. “The people were hospitable. There was plenty to do and a fair compensation offered for whatever you did.”6
The young Irishman wasn’t paid much when he found a job digging artesian wells with a hand drill. During one excavation, hundreds of feet down, prehistoric tree trunks and fossils turned up. Mulholland claimed that discovery changed his life. Already an avid reader, he recalled, “I got a hold of Joseph Le Conte’s books on the geology of this country.7 Right there I decided to become an engineer.”8 Later, relying on his experience in the field and a retentive memory, he impressed companions with his knowledge of geological formations. He would hold up rocks and confidently announce their barely pronounceable names. As an old friend put it, “he saw sermons in such things.”9
Young Bill found steady employment with the privately owned Los Angeles City Water Company. His job was keeping city zanjas, or ditches, free from mud and debris, including the occasional dead animal. His pay was $1.50 a day. It was a lowly position, but the city’s top water man, the Zanjero, who was in charge of maintaining L.A.’s Spanish and Mexican-era water-distribution system, was an important figure—so essential that he was paid more than the mayor.
Settling close to his new job, Mulholland moved into a one-room shack beside the river. As the story goes, one day while he was hard at work, ankle-deep in muck, a man on horseback came by and asked him what he was doing. Without looking up, Mulholland growled his response: “None of your damn business!” After the horseman rode away, a coworker informed the no-nonsense Irishman that he’d just snubbed William Perry, the president of the company. Convinced he’d be fired, Mulholland put down his shovel and left to submit his resignation. Instead, an impressed Perry gave him a raise and a promotion—from laborer to foreman.
One of his new assignments was to keep an eye out for people attempting to divert L.A.’s water supply for private purposes. He was good at it. On another occasion, an earthen dam erected by his bosses unexpectedly collapsed. The flood spread for miles. Fortunately, no one died, but there was a lot to clean up and rebuild. It was an experience he would never forget.
From the beginning, whatever young Bill was asked to do, he took the work seriously. The former sailor was already fascinated by water and the influence it exerted on human life, especially in semiarid Los Angeles. During his few free hours, he explored the fundamentals of hydraulic engineering, reading late into the night. The city’s first librarian, Mary Foy, the daughter of a local merchant, was impressed by the heavy tomes the inquiring Irishman checked out—books others ignored.10
Mulholland’s hard work and dedication also impressed his bosses, especially the superintendent of the Los Angeles City Water Company, Frederick Eaton. Twelve days younger than Mulholland, Eaton was the son of Benjamin Eaton, the district attorney of Los Angeles in 1853–54 and later a respected judge. A beneficiary of the land booms of the 1870s, Judge Eaton encouraged the founding of the city of Pasadena and was instrumental in developing local water resources. His son Fred was reputedly the sixth American child born in Los Angeles. As a precocious fourteen-year-old, Fred submitted a design for a fountain in the old plaza and won a $100 prize. After briefly attending Santa Clara University, located in today’s Silicon Valley, young Eaton learned enough engineering on his own to become superintendent of the water company in 1875. He was nineteen.
Beginning in 1779, formal engineering education in the United States was associated with the military. In 1802, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was established with the founding of West Point. In the years that followed, the Corps became the country’s construction crew.11 In the late 1800s, there were university engineering departments, but it wasn’t uncommon for budding engineers, especially in the West, to start as apprentices, working on railroad construction and mining operations. On-the-job training was how Mulholland added to his self-education, enhancing his understanding of hydraulic engineering with Fred Eaton and learning about business management from water company president William Perry.
One of the first dams Mulholland worked on was the city’s oldest, built in 1868—an earthen embankment that impounded the Buena Vista Reservoir in the hills above the city. In the early 1880s, in response to the city’s booming population, Mulholland was charged with raising the height of the structure, and in the process quadrupling the capacity of an aging man-made lake. It was an opportunity to apply the engineering formulas he’d read in books, as well as develop his skills as a manager of work crews. Having proved his worth, in 1886 the thirty-one-year-old former ditch digger was promoted to the position of superintendent. By then he had left his riverside cabin. With the increased income from his new job he found better accommodations … in a building named after the L.A. mayor who, frustrated by the city’s demand for more water, had committed suicide twenty years before.
By 1890, the up-and-coming hydraulic engineer was settling in—professionally and personally. In 1889 Mulholland met his future bride, Lillie Ferguson, while supervising a construction crew near her father’s farm.12 The couple would have five children. A dutiful Victorian wife, Lillie played no role in her husband’s career but provided a home that was a sanctuary. Mulholland’s children remembered their father as a loving parent, but away for long periods.13
Supervising work on the city’s rapidly expanding water system while at the same time adapting to the unpredictable Los Angeles River was a high-pressure job. In 1889, a torrential downpour unleashed another L.A. flood, one of the worst. It hit on Christmas Eve. “I never had my shoes off from Tuesday to Friday night,” Mulholland remembered. “A 3,000 foot tunnel was plugged to the roof with brush, rocks, boulders, logs, etc.”14 His bosses honored him with a gold watch, but time was running out for the Los Angeles City Water Company.
Despite Mulholland’s best efforts on behalf of his corporate employers, the citizens of Los Angeles were angered by increasing prices and poor service. In 1898, rather than renew the lease, voters authorized the City Council to buy the privately owned system. To arrive at a price, they needed to determine exactly what they were purchasing and how much it was worth.
During years of contentious back-and-forth, Bill Mulholland proved indispensable to both buyer and seller. City leaders were especially impressed by his memory for detail. He seemed to know every pipe and valve. After the Chief was asked to itemize facilities in two hundred underground locations, he identified each on a map. When men were sent to check, they found that everything Mulholland itemized was where he said it would be.15
In 1898, while the city and the private water company continued to trade proposals, Fred Eaton decided to run for mayor
and won. He actively supported the creation of a municipal water system and pursued plans to beautify Los Angeles, including refurbishing Central Park, later named Pershing Square.
As L.A.’s population continued to grow, it seemed everyone claimed the right to dip into the city’s water supply. After a consortium of San Fernando Valley farmers attempted to tap the Los Angeles River before it arrived downtown, a six-year-long legal battle resulted in victory for the city. In 1899, the California State Supreme Court declared that rights granted by the King of Spain when Los Angeles was founded guaranteed the city’s ownership of the flow from the former Río Porciúncula.16
In 1902, with the help of Mulholland’s unbiased evaluations, Los Angeles and the owners of the private water company agreed on a sales price of $2 million, to be paid with a public bond issue.17 Given his demonstrated knowledge and reputation for hard work and honesty, it wasn’t surprising that the liked and well-respected Irishman was chosen to head the city’s new municipal water department. “They bought the works and me with it,” he said.
Taking care of the legalities was the responsibility of City Attorney William B. Mathews. In the years to come, Mathews would be an indispensable advocate for Los Angeles and the city’s water and power interests. Born in Ohio in 1865 and raised in Kentucky, as a newly minted lawyer Mathews arrived in Los Angeles in 1889. He quickly made a name for himself and was elected city attorney in 1900, serving until 1906—a term that spanned the founding years for L.A.’s city-owned water system.
