by Jon Wilkman
After crossing the Antelope Valley, the Aqueduct arrived at the site of a second reservoir, Fairmont, near Lake Elizabeth, thirty-six miles from the San Fernando Valley. Ahead was another geographical barrier. To keep the water flowing, Mulholland and his corps of construction workers adopted a direct approach—tunneling. Along the Aqueduct route, 142 tunnels were blasted, drilled, and cleared by hand for a combined length of nearly forty-three miles. The most challenging: Elizabeth Tunnel, a shaft that measured between ten and twelve feet wide, began in the north at Fairmont Reservoir and traveled more than five miles until it found daylight in the upper reaches of San Francisquito Canyon.
Acknowledging the difficulties to complete the Elizabeth Tunnel, the Chief began preliminary work on September 20, 1907, only three months after L.A. voters approved construction bonds. The schedule of the entire enterprise depended on finishing the tunnel as quickly as possible. Laborers with picks and shovels attacked the job from both ends. Later, dynamite and machine drills hastened the process, but it wasn’t long before the job was seriously behind schedule—and, even worse for Mulholland, substantially over budget. Mulholland responded by paying salary bonuses, based on footage drilled, to encourage extra effort. With this incentive, workers on the South Portal set a world record for hard-rock drilling—604 feet in a single month—and the Chief was back on track, at least for the time being.6
To monitor progress, Mulholland spent many weeks in a construction camp located under a grove of trees on the floor of San Francisquito Canyon. Along with supervising operations, he added to his knowledge of local geology.
Ever since Mulholland encountered his first fossils while digging a well in 1878, the scale and time frame of geological change fascinated him. Drawing upon his reading and many years in the field, he saw evidence that the scrub-brush-covered terrain had once been submerged beneath a primordial sea. It took eons of scraping, smoothing, shoving, and lifting before the modern canyon appeared. In 1911, when the Chief studied the optimal route through San Francisquito Canyon, he described the hillside geology as “exceeding rough, and the dip and strike of the slate such as to threaten slips in case side hill excavation were made.”7 Because of this, Mulholland decided to bury the conduit in the hillside rather than position it on the surface, as he had in other locations.8
After exiting Elizabeth Tunnel at the top of San Francisquito Canyon, the Aqueduct took a precipitous drop to Los Angeles Powerhouse 1. It continued through concrete conduits, buried in steep hillsides, toward the route’s third reservoir in (soon to be no-longer) Dry Canyon. From there, a final run of pipelines, sag pipes, and tunnels ended in a storage basin near the old mission town of San Fernando, less than twenty miles from the faucets of Los Angeles.
On paper, the Aqueduct’s 233-mile journey was over, but in 1908 Mulholland had yet to build it. A hands-on manager, he never shied from hefting a pick or shovel to make a point with workers or impress a visiting reporter. As work began, it seemed fitting that the Chief sometimes chose a steam-powered automobile with a boiler and water tank to convey him to remote construction sites, where giant steam shovels and dredging machines were reshaping an arid California landscape.
During the construction of the Jawbone sag pipe, older construction methods worked best. Teams of fifty-two mules pulled wagons across rugged terrain, carrying thirty-six-foot-long sections of steel pipe, each weighing twenty-six tons.9 Riveted together, they were meant to transport a torrent from the Owens Valley. The Aqueduct sections started their journey in New York and Pennsylvania foundries and were transported to California by transcontinental trains.
While the Chief was hard at work and attempting to keep costs down, in Los Angeles newspapermen and real estate speculators Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler and rail-transit magnates Henry Huntington and Moses Sherman were eager to add to their profits from investments in the San Fernando Valley. In 1909, they established the Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company, acquiring options on the majority of Valley real estate. Soon ads and articles in the Los Angeles Times pitched town sites and subdivisions. In case potential buyers needed to be reminded of the benefits the Aqueduct would bring, one of the new communities was christened Owensmouth.
Mule teams haul pipe for the Jawbone Canyon sag pipe. (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power)
Running east to west through the center of the Valley, a twenty-two-mile long, two-hundred-foot-wide roadway called Sherman Way was constructed across a mostly treeless expanse. Plans for Chandler Boulevard paralleled Henry Huntington’s Red Car trolley tracks, with lumberyards conveniently located along the way. To further encourage a rush of potential buyers, and to court a growing number of automobile enthusiasts, Sherman Way had no speed limit, an L.A. and American ideal.
By the summer of 1910, Mulholland had completed fifty miles of his steel-and-concrete river. Theodore Roosevelt was no longer president, but his trust-busting legacy continued to unnerve America’s entrenched financial establishment, resulting in another economic “panic.” Markets wobbled, and sales of Aqueduct bonds dried up. Without adequate working capital, the Chief was forced to declare a temporary halt to construction and lay off nearly three quarters of his workforce. Sudden unemployment rankled men whose working conditions had never been easy or secure. From the beginning, there were complaints about food service. Aqueduct critics and the socialist press also spread allegations of faulty and dangerous construction practices.
Like many Progressives, Mulholland expressed admiration and sympathy for the workingman, but he was no friend of organized labor. An enthusiastic advocate for municipal ownership, he still chafed under civil service hiring regulations, which limited his ability to choose the men he wanted and deploy them as he wished.
Despite L.A.’s easygoing image, social and political unrest had been simmering for years. This dissatisfaction found a voice when Job Harriman, a lawyer and proud member of the Socialist Labor party who once ran for U.S. vice president, decided to run for mayor. Harriman placed well in a primary, and it looked as if he could be headed for victory.
During Job Harriman’s mayoral campaign, water was added to his list of fighting words. The Socialists had no problem with publicly owned waterworks. They objected to creating them with what they saw as deceit and capitalist profiteering. As Harriman’s race toward victory picked up speed, on October 1, 1910, the Socialist bandwagon hit an unexpected obstacle. At one A.M., an enormous explosion blasted the massive stone headquarters of the Los Angeles Times. Only one wall of the downtown edifice remained standing, topped by the newspaper’s vigilant symbol, the eagle, perched above smoldering rubble.
Twenty men were dead, including an assistant city editor and Harry Chandler’s private secretary. Fear and anger mounted when reports spread that an unexploded cache of dynamite was discovered at the home of Harrison Gray Otis. Visiting Mexico at the time, the General rushed to Los Angeles and took charge. Printing facilities were borrowed, and a four-page special edition of the Times was soon on city streets, hawked by excited newsboys. An investigation had yet to begin, but the headline was unequivocal: UNIONIST BOMBS WRECK THE TIMES; MANY SERIOUSLY INJURED. It was labeled “the Crime of the Century.” More militant than ever, the General drove around town in a limousine with a cannon mounted on the front bumper.
After nearly six months with no signs of progress in a nationwide investigation, agents from the famed Burns Detective Agency, hired by the city, announced a breakthrough. In Indianapolis and Detroit, they arrested three men and secreted them aboard a fast train to Los Angeles. The suspects were brothers John (J.J.) and James (J.B.) McNamara, officers in the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. The third man was another union member, Ortie McManigal.
The dynamited ruins of the Los Angeles Times, October 1, 1910 (Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection)
Across the country, supporters of organized labor sensed an antiunion setup in vehemently open-shop L.A. Thousands of dollars were contributed to
a defense committee, and one of the country’s most distinguished attorneys, Clarence Darrow, was hired to fight the charges. A former corporate lawyer turned ardent defender of civil liberties, Darrow was known as “the Attorney for the Defenseless.” Mayoral candidate Job Harriman also joined the McNamara defense team. The Times explosion wasn’t the first dynamite attack associated with iron-worker-union radicals. The American West was at the front line of an increasingly violent war between labor and capital, with sunny Los Angeles an unexpected battlefield.
Shortly after his arrest, unknown to the McNamara brothers, Ortie McManigal confessed. As Darrow learned more, he was convinced the evidence against the McNamaras was overwhelming. A lifelong opponent of the death penalty, he decided to cut a deal. The brothers would confess if prosecutors wouldn’t demand death sentences. The McNamaras were quickly convicted and incarcerated in San Quentin Prison. Stunned by an apparent capitulation by the defense team, labor supporters felt betrayed and never forgave Darrow. Despite the plea deal, L.A.’s antiunion leadership wasn’t satisfied with the results and accused Darrow of bribing the jury. Barely acquitted, the famous attorney hastened to Chicago, determined never again to see the streets of Los Angeles.
On election day 1911, mayoral candidate Job Harriman, sullied by his association with the Times bombers defense team, was soundly defeated. Later, tired of Los Angeles politics, he founded Llano del Rio, a Socialist commune in the Antelope Valley, seventy miles northeast of the city. Started in 1914, the isolated agricultural collective, a utopian alternative to business- and tourist-welcoming L.A., was not far from William Mulholland’s Aqueduct. In 1917, after a promising beginning, Harriman was forced to transport his dream to Louisiana, the result of doctrinal infighting … and lack of water.10
The conviction of the McNamara brothers may have ended immediate prospects for Socialist government in Los Angeles, but Mulholland’s left-wing critics refused to relent. Nor did his adversaries from the free market. Not all the dissatisfaction was connected to the Owens River Aqueduct, but ongoing arguments affected the Chief’s reputation, and dynamite was a weapon Los Angeles would confront again as a decade of conflict and change rushed Bill Mulholland toward the St. Francis Dam.
In Los Angeles, socialists had been defeated, but not silenced. In 1912, they instigated a “Citizens Committee” and demanded an independent investigation of the entire Owens Valley project. Behind the scenes, private utilities encouraged the probe.
Aside from accusations that the entire enterprise was hatched for the sole purpose of enriching General Otis and his insider friends, critics questioned whether the city even needed that much water, and if so, if a more convenient source was available at less expense. There were conspiratorial rumors that city reservoirs had been secretly drained to create the perception of a dwindling water supply, a scheme that would have infuriated water-miserly Bill Mulholland, and would have never escaped his knowledge. Other Aqueduct opponents predicted that much of the flow from the Owens Valley would evaporate before it arrived, and whatever survived would be undrinkable, a result of environmental contamination, including rotting plant life and dead animals, the kind of pollution Mulholland faced when he was a ditch tender along the Zanja Madre. At one point, a prominent physician, Ethel Leonard, warned that the Chief’s pipeline could convey an epidemic of typhoid fever. “Any use of Owens River water is absolutely impossible,” she reported.11
Most of Mulholland’s critics didn’t have his engineering experience. One did—a square-jawed forty-seven-year-old hydraulic engineer, Frederick C. Finkle. The son of Norwegian immigrants, Finkle graduated from the University of Wisconsin after taking “special courses” in hydraulic engineering and geology. In 1887, he headed for California and began his career as a city engineer for various small Southern California communities. From 1901 to 1914, during the time Bill Mulholland established L.A.’s municipal water department and supervised construction of the Owens River Aqueduct, Finkle was a chief engineer for the city’s rival, Southern California Edison. For SCE, he was in charge of the design and construction of hydroelectric power plants. After leaving the company, the conservative Democrat declared he was disenchanted with the practices of big business and corrupt city governments. He worked as an independent engineering consultant with special interest in conflicts over water rights, as he pursued a career as a real estate entrepreneur.12
While Finkle worked for Southern California Edison, like his employer, he was a critic of L.A.’s Aqueduct plans, and didn’t hesitate to say so. Little escaped his sharp tongue and mocking attitude. Encouraged by private suppliers of Portland cement, Finkle was especially critical of Mulholland’s use of tufa, claiming that a blended mix was not strong enough for the job.13
Testimony for the 1912 investigation took place downtown, in room 311 of the ironically named Merchant’s Trust Building. On July 15, at 10:15 A.M., the Chief was called to answer questions. He usually refused to be baited by critics, but Finkle’s potshots from the sidelines got to him. “I might promise you that the concrete of the Aqueduct will last as long as the Pyramids of Egypt or the Parthenon of Athens, but I will not,” Mulholland fired back. “Rather I will promise you that the Aqueduct work will endure until Job Harriman is elected mayor of Los Angeles.”14
When the Chief was challenged, his years of experience, prodigious memory, and casual command of facts and figures were impressive. His folksy Irish humor, delivered with a slight brogue, amused admirers and infuriated opponents. Mulholland’s response to Finkle’s attacks on tufa cement may have been accurate about Job Harriman’s political prospects, but as it turned out later, there were problems with sections of the Aqueduct concrete. They were quickly repaired, but Finkle and cement-industry critics didn’t forget the slightest failing.
While the final report contained no findings of graft, other conclusions continued to raise questions and repeat past criticisms. In August 1912, with little support from the mayor and City Council, the results were published as an oversize folio on cheap paper, with type so small it took a magnifying glass to read it. Despite this, the allegations of the 1912 Investigation Board persisted to play a role in the aftermath of the St. Francis Dam disaster.
In 1916 the Los Angeles Board of Public Services Commissioners published the city’s own “Complete Report.” Featuring an impressive full-page portrait of William Mulholland on the frontispiece, the detailed and lavishly illustrated document made it clear who was the hero of the day, linking the no-nonsense engineer’s great accomplishment to his hardscrabble past—comparing the length of the Aqueduct to the distance between his birthplace of Belfast, in the north of Ireland, to the southern Irish seaport of Queenstown, reminding readers that the Chief’s life had taken him much farther.
Confronting opponents to municipally owned water and power, the Complete Report used language that Job Harriman would have approved and echoed the oratory of Teddy Roosevelt. Critics of the Aqueduct were “selfish interests” who employed “mere dummies posing as citizens jealous of the welfare of the people, or as public spirited engineers … as screens for the ‘malefactors of great wealth.’”15
Mulholland liked to say “politics and water don’t mix.” No one accused the Chief of naïveté, but he was a man committed to getting things done, not debating alternatives, and he was fully capable of rhetorical spin. In 1913, when Job Harriman considered another run for mayor, Los Angeles Progressives were anxious to elect their kind of candidate. They turned to Bill Mulholland. Expressing gratitude, the Chief wrote an uncharacteristically revealing letter to a friend and political ally: “I have tendencies that are absolutely autocratic and at times unreasonably domineering. It has always been a great pride with me that I have been able to secure and retain the loyal devotion of my co-workers, if not to myself personally, at least to the projects I have at hand, but I feel quite certain that in the discharge of the multifarious duties of Mayor I would utterly fail in this particular.”16 A widely repeated remark was more concise
and characteristic: “I’d rather give birth to a porcupine backwards.”
On Wednesday, November 5, 1913, an estimated thirty to forty thousand Angelenos made their way north across the San Fernando Valley. The open expanses were jammed with hundreds of wagons, buggies, and automobiles. The Los Angeles Times remarked that it was a “commendable day for the Auto Club.”17 Years later, a woman who had been there as a little girl remembered, “Dad just threw us in that old Ford and took us over to watch the water come down.”18
Opening Ceremonies in the San Fernando Valley for the Owens River Aqueduct, November 5, 1913 (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power)
Beneath the Aqueduct spillway gates, crowds lined the full length of the concrete chute, christened the Cascades. Some celebrants carried tin cups to sample the first rush of Owens Valley water. A short distance away, a wooden platform was draped with patriotic bunting. Of course, Harrison Gray Otis was there. Dressed in full military regalia, he sat prominently with other dignitaries. Fred Eaton was honored in speeches and newspaper articles, but Mulholland’s estranged mentor and friend had refused to attend.
As the ceremonies proceeded, General Otis orated, then introduced buxom soprano Ellen Beach Yaw, known as “Lark Ellen.” Yaw had composed an original song for the occasion: “California—Hail the Water!” After more speeches and honorary presentations, shortly after one P.M. Mulholland stepped forward. Leaning on the platform railing, he spoke without notes. “You have given me an opportunity to create a great public enterprise and I am here to render my account to you … On this crude platform is an altar to consecrate the delivery of this valuable water supply and dedicate to you and posterity forever a magnificent body of water …”19
