Cadillac Desert (12 page)

William Mulholland came to Los Angeles more or less for the hell of it. He was born in 1855 in Dublin, Ireland, where his father was a postal clerk. At fifteen, he signed on as an apprentice seaman aboard a merchant ship that carried him back and forth along the Atlantic trade routes. By 1874 he had had enough, and spent a couple of years hacking about the lumber camps in Michigan and the dry-goods business in Pittsburgh, where his uncle owned a store. It was in Pittsburgh that Mulholland first read about California. He had just enough money to get to Panama by ship, and after landing in Colón, he traversed the isthmus on foot and worked his way north aboard another ship, arriving in San Francisco in the summer of 1877. Being back on a ship had renewed Mulholland’s taste for the sea, and, after a brief failure at prospecting in Arizona—where he also fought Apaches for pay—he decided to ship out at San Pedro, the port nearest Los Angeles. He had ten dollars to his name. Anxious to make a little extra money, he joined a well-drilling crew. “We were down about six hundred feet when we struck a tree. A little further we got fossil remains. These things fired my curiosity. I wanted to know how they got there, so I got hold of Joseph Le Conte’s book on the geology of the country. Right there I decided to become an engineer.”

In his official photograph for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which was taken when he was nearly fifty, Mulholland still looks young. He is wearing a short-brimmed dark fedora and a dark pinstripe suit; a luxuriant silk cravat circumnavigates a shirt collar that appears to be made of titanium; from a thick, bushy mustache sprouts a lit cigar. The face is supremely Irish: belligerence in repose, a seductive churlish charm. Once, in court, Mulholland was asked what his qualifications were to run the most far-flung urban water system in the world, and he replied, “Well, I went to school in Ireland when I was a boy, learned the Three R’s and the Ten Commandments—most of them—made a pilgrimage to the Blarney Stone, received my father’s blessing, and here I am.” He began his engineering career in 1878 as a ditch-tender for the city’s private water company, clearing weeds, stones, and brush out of a canal that ran by his house. One day Mulholland was approached by a man in a carriage who demanded to know his name and what he was doing. Mulholland stepped out of his ditch and told the man that he was doing his goddamned job and that his name was immaterial to the quality of his goddamned work. The man, it turned out, was the president of the water company. Learning this, Mulholland went to the company office to collect his pay before being fired. Instead, he was promoted.

The Sierra Nevada blocks most of the weather fronts moving across California from the Pacific, so that a place on the western slope of the range may receive eighty inches of precipitation in a year, while a place on the east slope, fifty miles away, may receive ten inches or less. The rivers draining into the Pacific from the West Slope are many and substantial, while those emptying into the Great Basin from the East Slope are few and generally small. The Owens River is an exception. It rises southeast of Yosemite, near a gunsight pass that allows some of the weather to come barreling through, heads westward for a while, then turns abruptly south and flows through a long valley, ten to twenty miles wide, flanked on either side by the Sierra Nevada and the White Mountains, which rise ten thousand feet from the valley floor. The valley is called the Owens Valley, and the lake into which the river empties—used to empty—was called Owens Lake. Huge, turquoise, and improbable in a desert landscape, it was the shrunken remnant of a much larger lake that formed during the Ice Ages. Due to a high evaporation rate and, for its size, a modest rate of inflow, the lake was more saline than the sea, but it supported two species of life in the quadrillions: a salt-loving fly and a tiny brine shrimp. The soup of shrimp and the smog of flies attracted millions of migratory waterfowl, a food source whose startling numbers were partially responsible for inducing some of the valley’s first visitors to remain. “The lake was alive with wild fowl,” wrote Beveridge R. Spear, an Owens Valley pioneer. “Ducks were by the square mile, millions of them. When they rose in flight, the roar of their wings ... could be heard ... ten miles away.... Occasionally, when shot down, a duck would burst open from fatness which was butter yellow.”

The greater attraction, however, was the river. When whites arrived in the 1860s, Paiute Indians who had learned irrigation from the Spanish were already diverting some of the water to raise crops. In traditional pioneer fashion, the whites trumped up some cattle-rustling charges against the Indians, which appear to have led to the murder of a white woman and a child. The pious Owens Valley citizens then murdered at least 150 Paiutes in retaliation, driving the last hundred into Owens Lake to drown. They then took over the Indians’ land, borrowed their irrigation methods, and began raising alfalfa and pasture and fruit. By 1899, they had established several ditch companies and had put some forty thousand acres under cultivation.

The huge new silver camp at Tonopah, Nevada, consumed most of what the valley grew. With prosperity, several thriving towns sprang up: Bishop, Big Pine, Lone Pine, Independence. The irrigated valley was postcard-pretty, a narrow swath of green in the middle of the high desert, with 14,495-foot Mount Whitney, the highest peak between Canada and Mexico, looming over Lone Pine and the river running through. Mark Twain came to visit, and Mary Austin, who was to become a well-known writer, came to live. But the entrance that most excited the valley people was that of the United States Reclamation Service (later renamed the Bureau of Reclamation). The Service was an unparalleled experiment in federal intervention in the nation’s economy, and was being watched so closely by skeptics in Congress that it could not afford to have any of its first projects fail. To Frederick Newell, the first Reclamation Commissioner, the Owens Valley looked like a place where he could almost be guaranteed success. The people were proven irrigation farmers—a rarity in the non-Mormon West; the soil could grow anything the climate would permit; the river was underused; and there was a good site for a reservoir. Sixty thousand additional acres were irrigable, and all of them could be gravity-fed. In early 1903, just a few months after the Service was created, a team of Reclamation engineers was already trooping around the valley, gauging streamflows and making soil surveys. Sixty thousand new acres would even make it worthwhile to run a railroad spur to Los Angeles. Los Angeles, everyone thought, was going to make the Owens Valley rich.

Fred Eaton thought differently. Eaton had been born in Los Angeles in 1856; his family had founded Pasadena. Most of the Eaton men were engineers, and when they looked around them it seemed that half of what they saw they had built themselves; it gave them an overpowering sense of pride-in-place. Fred had gone into hydrologic engineering, which is to say that he pretty much taught it to himself, and by the time he was twenty-seven, he was superintendent of the Los Angeles City Water Company. As San Francisco had bloomed into pseudo-Parisian splendor, Fred Eaton had chafed. When Los Angeles finally began to take on the appearance of a place with a future, he had been intensely proud. But he was one of the few people who understood that this whole promising future was an illusion. With artesian pressure still lifting fountainheads of water eight feet into the air, no one believed that someday the basin would run out of water. Few understood that the occasional big floods in the Los Angeles River were testimony to the
absence
of rain: that the basin was normally so dry there wasn’t enough ground cover to hold the rain when it fell. The annual flow of the Los Angeles River (that which ran aboveground) represented only a fifth of 1 percent of the runoff of the state, and because of the pumping the flow was dropping fast, from a hundred cubic feet per second in the 1880s to forty-five cfs in 1902. If growth continued, the population and the water would fall hopelessly out of balance. Everyone was living off tens of thousands of years of accumulated groundwater, like a spendthrift heir squandering his wealth. No one knew how much groundwater lay beneath the basin or how long it could be expected to last, but it would be insane to build the region’s future on it.

There was no other source of water nearby. Deserts lay on three sides of the basin, an ocean on the fourth. The nearest large rivers were the Colorado and the Kern, but to divert them out of their canyons to Los Angeles would require pumping lifts of thousands of feet—an impossibility at the time. It would also require a Herculean amount of energy.

But there was, 250 miles away, the Owens River. It might not be quite sufficient for the huge metropolis forming in Eaton’s imagination, but it was large enough; there was water for at least a million people. Indeed, Eaton was one of the few Los Angeleans who knew the river even existed. Its distance from Los Angeles was staggering, but its remoteness was overshadowed by one majestically significant fact: Owens Lake, the terminus of the river, sat at an elevation of about four thousand feet. Los Angeles was a few feet above sea level. The water, carried in pressure aqueducts and siphons, could arrive under its own power. Not one watt of pumping energy would be required. The only drawback was that the city might have to take the water by theft.

During their years together at the Los Angeles City Water Company, Fred Eaton and Bill Mulholland became good friends, thriving on each other’s differences. Eaton was a western patrician, smooth and diffident; Mulholland an Irish immigrant with a musician’s repertoire of ribald stories and a temperament like a bear’s. Eaton thought so much of Mulholland that he groomed him to be his successor, and when Eaton left the company in 1886 to pursue a career in politics and seek his fortune, Mulholland was named superintendent. In the years that followed, Fred Eaton would become messianic about the water shortage he saw approaching. The only answer, he told Mulholland, was to get the Owens River. At first, Mulholland found the idea preposterous: going 250 miles for water was out of the question, and Mulholland didn’t much believe in surface-water development anyway. Damming rivers meant forming reservoirs, and in the heat and dryness of California, reservoirs would evaporate huge quantities of water. It made more sense to slow down the rainfall as it returned to the ocean and force more of it into the aquifer. Mulholland preached soil and forest conservation thirty years before its time. He wanted to seed the whole basin, and when he said that the deforestation of the mountainsides would reduce the basin’s water supply, everyone thought he was slightly nuts. He had his men filling gullies and installing infiltration galleries and checkdams all over the place. Everything he did, however, was nullified by the basin’s growth.

By 1900, Los Angeles’ population had gone over 100,000; it doubled again within four years. During the same period, the city experienced its first severe drought. Even with lawn watering prohibited and park ponds left unfilled, the artesian pressure, as Eaton had predicted, began to drop. Gushes became gurgles, then dried up. Pumps were frantically installed. By 1904, the pressure was low enough to prompt Mulholland to begin shutting irrigation wells in the San Fernando Valley, which lay across the Hollywood Hills and fed both the aquifer and the river. The farmers were furious, and Mulholland began spending a lot of time in court. The Los Angeles City Water Company was eventually taken over by the city, and Mulholland was retained in command. (The city didn’t have much choice in the matter. Mulholland was such a seat-of-the-pants engineer that the plan of the entire water system resided mainly in his head; the most elemental schematics and blueprints did not exist.) In late 1904, the newly created Los Angeles Department of Water and Power issued its first public report. “The time has come,” it said, “when we shall have to supplement the supply from some other source.” With that simple statement William Mulholland was about to become a modern Moses. But instead of leading his people through the waters to the promised land, he would cleave the desert and lead the promised waters to them.

There is a widely held view that Los Angeles simply went out to the Owens Valley and stole its water. In a technical sense, that isn’t quite true. Everything the city did was legal (though its chief collaborator, the U.S. Forest Service, did indeed violate the law). Whether one can justify what the city did, however, is another story. Los Angeles employed chicanery, subterfuge, spies, bribery, a campaign of divide-and-conquer, and a strategy of lies to get the water it needed. In the end, it milked the valley bone-dry, impoverishing it, while the water made a number of prominent Los Angeleans very, very rich. There are those who would argue that if all of this was legal, then something is the matter with the law.

It could never have happened, perhaps, had the ingenuous citizens of the Owens Valley paid more attention to a small news item that appeared in the Inyo Register, the valley’s largest newspaper, on September 29, 1904. The item began: “Fred Eaton, ex-mayor of Los Angeles, and Fred
[sic]
Mulholland, who is connected with the water system of that city, arrived a few days ago and went up to the site of the proposed government dam on the [Owens] River.” The person who took them around, the story continued, was Joseph Lippincott, the regional engineer for the Reclamation Service. It wasn’t so much this small piece of news that should have aroused the valley’s suspicions. It was the fact that Lippincott had already taken Eaton around the valley twice before.

The valley had no particular reason to distrust J. B. Lippincott, although a search into his background would have dredged up a revelation or two. As a young man out of engineering school, he had joined John Wesley Powell’s Irrigation Survey, the first abortive attempt to launch a federal reclamation program in the West, but had lost his job soon thereafter when Congress denied Powell funding. Embittered by the experience, Lippincott migrated to Los Angeles, where, by the mid-1890s, he had built up a lucrative practice as a consulting engineer. In 1902, when the Reclamation Service was finally created, its first commissioner, Frederick Newell, immediately thought of Lippincott as the person to launch its California program. He had a good reputation, and he understood irrigation—a science few engineers were familiar with. The post, however, meant a substantial cut in salary, and Lippincott insisted on being allowed to maintain a part-time engineering practice on the side. Newell and his deputy, Arthur Powell Davis (who was John Wesley Powell’s nephew), were a little wary; in a fast-growing region with little water, a district engineer with divided loyalties could lead the Service into a thicket of conflict-of-interest entanglements. The centerpiece of the Service’s program in California was to be the Owens Valley Project, and there were already rumors that Los Angeles coveted the valley’s water. One of the Service’s engineers, in fact, had raised this issue with Davis; with Lippincott, a son of Los Angeles, in charge, a collision between the city and the Service over the Owens River might leave the city with the water and the Service absent its reputation. But the Service’s early leadership, unlike those who succeeded them, suffered from a certain lack of imagination. “On the face of it,” Davis scoffed, “such a project is as likely as the city of Washington tapping the Ohio River.”