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Feature - June 2007
Dying of Thirst:
Los Angeles and Its Watery Past
by Michael Cervin
"There it is. Take it," Los Angeles Water and Power Superintendent William Mulholland yelled to a crowd of 40,000 gathered on November 5th, 1913. By all accounts, it was a sweltering day at the "Cascades," an agrarian spot near Sylmar in the San Fernando Valley. Cars and buggies crowded the area, kicking up dust, while vendors sold everything they could to mark the historic moment, including small glass bottles of real Owens Valley water. When the signal was given, the floodgates opened (literally and figuratively) and water flowed into the Los Angeles basin from an outside source for the first time in history.
The redirection of water from the Owens Valley in Inyo County to Los Angeles, 230 miles to the north, promised to be a monumental event that would allow Los Angeles city to grow unfettered. Just how that water came to Los Angeles is also an epic tale of deceit, men of great vision, conspiracy theories, local and national politics, and an engineering feat that seemed impossible. It made some people very rich. It bankrupt others. It's no easy story. But then, Los Angeles is no easy town.
Eaton, Mulholland and the Thirst for Profit
To build a great city, you need financial enterprise, ideal location and plentiful natural resources- and the need for water to grow food, to hydrate livestock and for drinking trumps all others. These days, we take the availability of water for granted. Southern Californians see it on supermarket shelves, at gas stations and in drinking fountains. We take long showers, let it drain from the tap as we brush our teeth, and hose down concrete sidewalks, wasting the precious liquid. When L.A. was founded in 1769, the only water that existed was in the L.A. River, a meandering strip of water that barely fed the arid region. Sure, there were, and still are, underground aquifers that held water in reserve, but the lack of consistent rainfall (on average, less than 15 inches a year) has plagued Los Angeles for centuries. It's difficult to conceive of what Los Angeles was like back then. Our water, so copious now, ultimately came from somewhere else. And today, it still does.
In the late 1800s, before he became the mayor of Los Angeles, Fred Eaton routinely camped in the Owens Valley, which was and is a repository for water runoff from the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The melting winter snows streamed down the granite cliffs to the Valley near Bishop and Lone Pine on the Western embankment of the Sierras. Owens Valley sits at 4,000 feet and the Owens River leads a natural course down the state, decreasing in elevation along the mountain range.
At about the same time in history, the newly created Department of Water and Power (DWP) hired an Irish immigrant named William Mulholland as a ditch digger. Mulholland fled his native Ireland when he was just 15. Through hard work and discipline, he eventually became Superintendent of the DWP. The City of L.A. was hyped at the time as a place for easterners to relocate but it needed water to meet the growing demand of its increasing population. According to Abe Hoffman, author of Vision or Villainy: Origins of the Owens Valley Water Controversy, by 1920 the population of Los Angeles was a staggering 576,000, nearly twice as many as had been planned for. In 1904, Eaton and Mulholland traveled to Owens Valley in search of water to feed the deprived citizens of L.A.
A plan was conceived. The DWP would divert water from the relatively unpopulated Owens Valley to Los Angles creating a fertile land of milk and honeyŠand water. Eaton returned to the Valley and began to buy property (and water rights) along the banks of the Owens River. Unbeknownst to the local population who believed that Eaton was acting on behalf of a water project sponsored by the federal government's Bureau of Reclamation, and thus a credible cause, many Owens Valley residents sold Eaton their land. Eaton, however, was not acting on behalf of the federal government. He was acting on behalf of the City of Los Angeles. More to the point, he was ultimately acting for himself. In addition to purchasing land for the city, he also bought, out of his own pocket, the Long Valley Ranch in the Owens Valley. This was a crucial move, for Eaton planned on selling Long Valley back to the City of Los Angeles not as a ranch, but as the ideal spot for the city to build a much needed storage reservoir site. Any aqueduct demands water storage facilities in the event of lean years. Eaton was counting on this. Surely, the City of Los Angeles would pay him a handsome fee for the Long Valley property when the time was right.
When it was discovered that Eaton misrepresented himself, the small population of Inyo County pleaded their case all the way to the President of the United States. In response, Theodore Roosevelt, in his 1907 Congressional message, declared that the water of the Owens Valley should be used for "the ultimate greatest good for the greatest number." It was true that more people lived in the City of Los Angeles than Inyo County. To that degree, the greatest good theory makes civic sense. But the people of the Owens Valley didn't see it that way. They felt they had been lied to.
"No one ever held a gun to their head to sell their land," says Catherine Mulholland, granddaughter of William Mulholland, in a recent interview, echoing her grandfather's sentiments.
It was true that technically nothing illegal had taken place. Eaton, however, had acted duplicitously. Nevertheless, Owens Valley land became the property of Los Angeles. The aqueduct would be built, and Mulholland was the engineer to make it happen. The year was 1908 and Mulholland, a self-educated engineer, employed more than 2,000 workers to build the giant conduit. He devised a plan to use gravity flow to move water across barren desert, up mountain ranges and eventually into Southern California. Owens Valley residents cried foul. Their simple agrarian way of life was being threatened as L.A. "stole" their water. Today, the City of Los Angeles is the largest landowner in the Owens Valley, with title to approximately 400 square miles of land (about the size of Los Angeles itself).
Land Grab Galore
Meanwhile, the San Fernando––Valley was noted for one thing in the early 1900s dry farming. Key business leaders rallied around the need for water, including the owner of the Los Angeles Times, Harrison Grey Otis. They had the vision, some might say the ruthless cunning, to purchase the arid land in the Valley. They believed that once the water came, land there would become exponentially valuable. It made no difference that small ranchers were bought out under false pretenses. Two different land syndicates, the San Fernando Mission Land Company and the Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company, were formed in 1904 and 1909 respectively. The fact that Otis and one of his cronies, Moses Hazeltine Sherman, sat on both boards led many in Los Angeles to suspect that these men, along with a Who's Who of L.A.'s powerful civic leaders, were out for a land grab. And in fact, some of them became very wealthy speculating on the San Fernando Valley. There are no indications that Mulholland was in collusion with either of the syndicates, though he did travel in the same circles as these men and he did purchase a 700-acre ranch for his own family.
In the 1920s, Owens Lake began to run dry. In response, L.A. proposed to pump the underground aquifers in the Owens Valley. The result was that the Valley quickly became a desolate wasteland whose agrarian prospects dwindled as the water table receded. Without a viable economy based on agriculture, it became harder for Owens Valley residents to make ends meet. Fed up and frustrated, they took matters into their own hands. Between 1924 and 1927 there were 10 cases of sabotage and dynamiting along the aqueduct route. Armed guards were sent by Mulholland to protect the aqueduct. After the Owens Valley Bank collapsed, a bank that funded the majority of residents in the Owens Valley, the will to fight was gone.
Since Mulholland never paid Fred Eaton for his Long Valley reservoir site (Eaton eventually lost the site because he couldn't pay for it), Mulholland began building reservoirs close to home. One of these, the Saint Francis Dam, north of Santa Clarita, failed on March 12th, 1928. Approximately 500 people were killed as nearly 12 billion cubic feet of water burst forth, decimating families, ranches and cutting a swath of destruction all the way to the ocean in Ventura, 40 miles away. Recent research has concluded that Mulholland could not have known about the unstable conditions of the dam site with the technology available to him at the time. However, in 1928, he claimed responsibility for the failure and resigned as head of the DWP. Some still believe his arrogance and abuse of power led to shoddy construction. They state that had he paid Eaton for the Long Valley site, the Saint Francis would never have been built and an estimated 500 people, mostly working poor, would not have perished. Others believe that Owens Valley residents dynamited the dam as a final ploy to stop their valley from being destroyed, though there has never been any proof of that theory.
Still desperate for water, Los Angeles added an extension to the Owens Valley aqueduct that was completed in 1941. This time Los Angeles usurped the water from Mono Lake, 120 miles north of Owens Valley. After all, L.A. still had a burgeoning population. When those sources failed to meet expectations, water was diverted from the Colorado River.
L.A. was eventually taken to task for its complicity in its abuse of the Owens Valley. The dry salt lake in the Owens Valley became the largest source of particulate matter pollution in the US according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In 1997 L.A. began re-watering the lakebed, if only by a few inches. These "dust control measures" mitigated air borne arsenic, selenium and other toxic elements that blew off the dry lakebed and infected many Owens Valley residents.
In the case of the long-running tug-of-war between the urban need for water and rural retribution, there are no easy answers. But there is progress. The Owens Valley is now the gateway to Mammoth and the Sierra Nevada, a place still quiet and welcoming. Many of the tourists who stop for the night in Lone Pine or Independence off State Route 395 are from Southern California, seeking a vacation, a chance to get away from the insipid complexities of Los Angeles. As one long time Owens Valley resident told Catherine Mulholland, "Well, in a way, you did us a favor. You took the water, but you got the smog, the crime, the overpopulation; all the evils that go with growth."
L.A. continues to pursue other sources of water to satisfy the ravenous growth of its population of nearly 4 million people. And on December 6th, 2006, ninety-four years after the water first left the Owens Valley, it came back. Under court order, Los Angeles returned water to the lower Owens River. H. David Nahai, President of the Los Angeles Board of Water and Power Commissioners, turned to the small crowd that had gathered. As the water streamed back into the Valley, Nahai, reminiscent of Mulholland, said, "There it is. Take it back."