Cadillac Desert (17 page)

And Los Angeles loved Mulholland even more than the men, because its reward would be infinitely greater than theirs—to the thirsty city, he was Moses. And he was that greater rarity, a Moses without political ambition. When a move was afoot a few years later to run him for mayor, Mulholland dismissed it with a typical bon mot: “I would rather give birth to a porcupine backwards than become the mayor of Los Angeles.” But nothing that William Mulholland ever said or did quite matched the speech he gave when, on November 5, 1913, the first water cascaded down the aqueduct’s final sluiceway into the San Fernando Valley. It had been a day of long speeches and waiting, and the crowd of forty thousand people was restless. Mulholland himself was exhausted; his wife was very ill, and he had slept only a few hours in several nights. When the white crest of water finally appeared at the top of the sluiceway and cascaded toward the valley, an apparition in a Syrian landscape, Mulholland simply unfurled an American flag, turned toward the mayor, H. H. Rose, and said, “There it is. Take it.”

It was the high point of Mulholland’s life and career.

Very little of the water that was, according to Theodore Roosevelt, a hundred or a thousandfold more important to Los Angeles than to the Owens Valley would go to the city for another twenty years. All through the teens and early twenties, the San Fernando Valley used three times as much aqueduct water as the city itself, the vast part of it for irrigation. During one particularly wet year, every drop of the copious flow of the aqueduct went to irrigate San Fernando Valley crops; the city took nothing at all. Understandably, this news enraged the people of the Owens Valley. For Los Angeles to take their water to fill their washtubs and water glasses was one thing. For it to turn their valley back to desert so that another desert valley, owned by rich monopolists, could bloom in its place was quite another.

The teens and early twenties, however, were extraordinarily wet years—the same wet years that caused the Reclamation Service to overestimate dramatically the flow of the Colorado River—and there was water enough for everyone. The irrigated acreage in the San Fernando Valley rose from three thousand acres in 1913—the year both the completion of the aqueduct and the annexation of the valley occurred—to seventy-five thousand acres in 1918. Even so, the Owens Valley lost few of its orchards and irrigated pasturelands, and the new railroad to Los Angeles and the silver mine at Tonopah fed in enough wealth to allow the town of Bishop to build a grand American Legion Hall and Masonic Temple, those cathedrals of the rural nineteenth century.

The same uncharacteristically engorged desert river that was keeping the Owens Valley green was responsible, in Los Angeles, for the most transfixing change. Santa Monica Boulevard, once a dry dusty strip, became an elegant corridor of palms; in Hollywood, where the motion picture industry had risen up overnight, outdoor sets resembled New Guinea; and since most Los Angeleans were immigrants from the Middle West, every bungalow had a green lawn. The glorious anomaly of a fake tropical city with a mild desert climate brought people from everywhere. Dirt farmers came from Arkansas; Aldous Huxley moved from England. The Chamber of Commerce, an Otis creation, kept them coming. They arrived on the Union Pacific, a Harriman railroad, and once they were there, the
Times,
an Otis and Chandler newspaper, urged everyone to settle in the San Fernando Valley, an Otis and Chandler property. Few could afford automobiles, so they got around on Sherman and Huntington trolley cars between Sherman-and-Huntington-built homes and Sherman and Huntington resorts in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains.

As Otis never tired of saying, this was the promised land. All things were possible; anyone could get rich; the cardinal sin was doubt. During the nadir of the Depression, when the city was invaded by homeless Okies so destitute they sat hollow-eyed in the parks and gnawed on the crusts thrown out for the pigeons, the
Times
sent them this holiday greeting: “Merry Christmas! Look pleasant! Chin up! A gloomy face never gets a good picture. The great battles are fought by Caesars and their fortunes, by Napoleons and their stars. Faith still does the impossible! Merry Christmas! Catch the tempo of the times. You have your life before you, and, if you are growing old, the greatest adventure of all is just around the corner. Earth may have little left in reserve, but heaven is ahead! Merry Christmas!” The only greater fraud than such blather from Otis and Chandler’s newspaper was the overflowing desert river on which all depended.

In the West, drought tends to come in cycles of about twenty years, and the next drought arrived on schedule. The years 1919 and 1920 were a premonition; rainfall was slightly below average. It rose back to average—a measly fourteen inches—in 1921 and went slightly over that in 1922. Then it crashed. Ten inches in 1923; six inches in 1924; seven inches in 1925. In Florida, a seven-inch rainstorm may occur two or three times a year, but Los Angeles was trying to look like Florida, and grow even faster, on a fifth of its precipitation, and when the drought struck it kept going on a tenth. Mulholland had expected 350,000 people by 1925, but had 1.2 million on his hands instead. The city was growing fifteen times faster than Denver, eleven times faster than New York. And though the city at its core had become a metropolis, Los Angeles County led the nation in the value of its agricultural output. All of this agriculture depended on irrigation, which, together with the phenomenal urban growth, depended on a river draining Mount Whitney two hundred miles away.

As the drought intensified, the Owens River moved perilously close to overappropriation. The problem was not only that the river was small, but also that no carryover storage existed—nothing but some small receiving reservoirs around the basin and the snowfields in the Sierra. The Los Angeles Aqueduct was essentially a run-of-the-river project. If the river didn’t run, the city collapsed.

It the city and the Owens Valley were to continue sharing the river, carryover storage would have to be built; otherwise, one place or the other would lose its water during a drought. Mulholland, of course, knew this, but still refused to build the dam at Long Valley. He blamed it on the city’s fragile finances, but that was a poor excuse; the real reason was that he and his old friend Eaton had had a nasty falling-out.

Fred Eaton had not even bothered to attend the dedication of the aqueduct in 1913, though its existence was owed mainly to him. He had bought the initial water rights the city needed with his own money, taking a considerable risk; had the voters failed to approve the bond referendum, he would have been drowning in both unusable water and debt. The city had paid him quite adequately for the right, but it had not made him a multimillionaire. Originally, Eaton had hoped to operate the Owens Valley end of the aqueduct as a private concession, which could have made him incredibly rich, but Frederick Newell and Roosevelt had dashed that dream, insisting that the project be municipally owned from end to end. Eaton had also had some bad luck in the cattle business, and had to switch ignominiously to chickens. He was sixty-five years old; it was time things finally went right. The one item of real value Eaton owned was the reservoir site on the ranch he had purchased from Thomas Rickey. Ideally, a dam built at the site ought to be 140 feet high, the approximate depth of the gorge; that would create a reservoir large enough to provide for both the city and the valley during all but the worst droughts. A damsite of such importance to the city—a site which, if developed, would drown a good portion of his ranch—was worth a lot of money, as far as Eaton was concerned. When Mulholland asked him what his price was, Eaton said $1 million. Mulholland, who seemed personally indifferent to money (though he was reputedly the highest-paid civil servant in California), laughed him off. Time and time again he asked Eaton to accept a reasonable offer—$500,000, perhaps, or a little more—and each time his offer was more angrily refused. By 1917, the two old friends were no longer on speaking terms.

As the drought intensified, Mulholland begged the city fathers to end their abject deification of growth. The only way to solve the city’s water problem, he grumbled aloud, was to kill the members of the Chamber of Commerce. When he was ignored, he began to regulate irrigation practices in the San Fernando Valley. First he forbade the irrigation of alfalfa, a low-value, water-demanding crop; then he prohibited winter planting. When these measures proved inadequate, he swallowed his disdain for surface storage and began building reservoirs in the basin—first the Hollywood Reservoir, then a much larger dam in San Francisquito Canyon, a deep fissure in the shaky, shaly topography of the Santa Paula hills.

With the tens of thousands of people pouring in each year, everything was a stopgap measure. By the early 1920s, Mulholland was already lobbying for an aqueduct from the Colorado River. This, however, put him on a collision course with Harry Chandler, who owned 860,000 acres in Mexico that relied on the Colorado, and who was so greedy that, despite his enormous wealth, he put the interests of his Mexican holdings above the welfare of the city he had created out of whole cloth. Chandler’s opposition, together with fierce feuding among the Colorado River Basin states, kept the Boulder Canyon Project Act, which would create the storage reservoir that any Colorado River aqueduct would need, bottled up for years. Frustrated at every turn, Mulholland reached the end of his tether sometime in 1923. The only answer, he decided, was to do what Mary Austin had predicted the city would ultimately do—dry the Owens Valley up.

The trouble began where troubles usually begin, in the heart. Wilfred and Mark Watterson, the brothers who symbolized the Owens Valley’s mortmain and its success, had a young uncle named George, only ten years older than Wilfred. George’s attitude toward his nephews was less avuncular than competitive. Somehow, in competition, George always lost. When Wilfred and George had filed rival claims on a mining right, Wilfred won. George had always wanted to own the first automobile in the valley, but one day he looked down the street and saw Wilfred drive up in a yellow Stanley Steamer, mobbed by adoring crowds. Wilfred and Mark were treasurer of this, president of that; George Watterson was not even a has-been—he was a never-was.

George Watterson had an ally in bitterness. Some years earlier, a lawyer with an adventuresome bent named Leicester Hall had wandered into the Owens Valley from Alaska, taken one look at Wilfred and Mark’s sister Elizabeth, and fallen helplessly in love. Elizabeth, however, had spurned him and married Jacob Clausen, Lippincott’s former assistant—a symbol, like the Watterson brothers, of resistance to Los Angeles. The Owens Valley was a gossipy place, and the hatred that George Watterson felt for his nephews and the bitterness that Hall felt toward Jacob Clausen were well known. The city had its agents in the valley, and they had ears. When William Mulholland invited George Watterson, Hall, and their friend William Symons down for dinner at his club one evening, they were happy to come.

The tactic was the old reliable one: the lightning strike. Symons was the president of the McNally Ditch, which held the oldest and largest water right among all the irrigation cooperatives in the valley. Hall and George Watterson were officers in the Bishop Creek Ditch and the Owens River Canal Company. On March 15, 1923, the three men returned to the valley and went immediately to work. “Leave none of the ranchers out,” Mulholland had told them. “We want them all.” Within twenty-four hours, Watterson, Symons, and Hall owned options on more than two-thirds of the McNally Ditch’s water rights. They had paid as much as $7,500 per cubic second-foot of water, and the total cost to the city was more than $1 million—the price Fred Eaton had wanted for access to his damsite.

The size and length of an irrigation ditch depend critically on the number of people who use it. Since all the irrigators must spend a substantial amount of time maintaining it—clearing out weeds, desilting it, repairing earthslides—losing just a few farmers can put a terrible burden of responsibility on those who remain. So many farmers who belonged to the McNally Ditch had sold out that the cooperative was quickly put out of its misery; those who remained couldn’t possibly maintain it by themselves, so ultimately they would have to sell out, too. By the time the three men moved on the other ditch companies, however, pockets of resistance had formed, and they had to seek out the more avaricious or vulnerable souls. Hall had managed to raid the confidential files of the collective ditch companies, making off with critical information about who was in financial trouble, who was a poor farmer, who was inclined to move on. He and his collaborators, therefore, didn’t waste much time on people who were unlikely to yield to temptation; they knew who would. But their strategy—a strategy of division and attrition—was especially cruel, not only because it placed an even larger burden of responsibility on the farmers and ranchers who held out, but because it pitted neighbor against neighbor, wife against husband, brother against brother.

Meanwhile, the master strategist, off in Los Angeles, was sixty-nine years old and a changed man. Thirty years earlier, Mulholland had spent his idle hours in a cabin at one of the city’s outlying reservoirs, reading the classics and planting poplars. When the city had first talked about tapping the Owens River, his concern about the valley’s welfare led him to suggest that the city plant millions of trees which the residents could sell for firewood to the barren mining camps in Nevada—unti! someone informed him that so many trees would suck up enough groundwater to bleed the river dry. In his later years, however, the William Mulholland who had read Shakespeare and quoted Alexander Pope was hardly recognizable. No person ever put his imprint on an agency as strongly as Mulholland left his on the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and that agency was now using secret agents, breaking into private records, and turning neighbors into mortal foes. And, worst of all, Mulholland was ignoring a solution that would have satisfied everyone—a dam at Long Valley—out of petty niggardliness and almost fanatical pride.