Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles

by Standiford, Les

  While modern readers possibly view water meters as being as inevitable as death and taxes, the devices were still somewhat newfangled at the turn of the twentieth century. The concept of metering water by volume was kicked about in Roman times, and Leonardo da Vinci designed a prototype in the sixteenth century. But it was 1855 before the first US patent for a reliable device was issued to a man named Henry Worthington, and, according to a staffer at the Smithsonian, one hydraulic engineer was complaining in the pages of Scientific American as late as 1870 that “Measurement of water flowing through pipes, under any and all circumstances of position, pressure, and velocity, has, perhaps, more difficulties than any other with which the modern mechanic can grapple.”

  Mulholland was resolute regarding the need for a metering system, however, in large part because he was convinced that the devices would in the end reduce consumption, which in 1902 stood at 267 gallons per person daily (the city’s first water meter had actually been installed at Stern’s Winery by Thomas Brooks in 1889). Based on the rate of current population increase at that time, Mulholland estimated that demand would rise to 27 million gallons daily, while only 23.5 million were available from present sources. He planned to make up for some of the shortfall from the new subterranean reservoir already under construction, and he could always pray for rain, but finding a way to reduce the city’s thirst, and certainly its waste of water, was paramount.

  Mulholland was well aware of the natural limitations against which he labored. There was no dependable snowpack feeding the 834-square-mile watershed of the Los Angeles River, and the long-term drought in the region showed no signs of abating. There had been steady decreases in the flow every year since 1893, he wrote in an early semiannual report, and in 1902 the river was carrying less than half of the volume it had in 1893.

  W. C. Mendenhall, an official of the US Geological Survey, had opined in the late 1890s that the waters stored in the natural reservoir beneath the San Fernando Valley were sufficient to supply the city with water for seven years if not a single drop of rain was to fall in all that time. However, the population had doubled since the time those brave words were uttered. With more than 100,000 in Los Angeles and no end of settlers in sight, a huge shadow had drifted over the prospects for the boundless development foreseen by Fred Eaton and others.

  Still, Mulholland spent the first four years of his tenure with the newly christened water department doing what he could. Following up on his conviction regarding water meters, the department reduced rates by 50 percent to every customer who agreed to such an installation. As a nod to the notion that the water company stockholders had been riding the coattails of taxpayers for too long, rates were reduced 10 percent across the board, with no evident ill effects upon the department. After paying all operating expenses, including the interest and principal on the bonds for the purchase, the department had realized a net profit of $1.5 million, which, much to Mulholland’s satisfaction, was plowed back into operations instead of stockholder profits. In addition, the installation of the meters had also reduced per capita daily consumption, which had previously risen to among the highest in the nation at 300 gallons daily, by one third.

  Accolades flowed Mulholland’s way, with one writer declaring, “Superintendent William Mulholland, who had spent most of his mature manhood in the employ of the Water Company, has been a veritable tower of strength, giving to his duty without doubt far more freely from his energy of mind and body than he could possibly have done if he had owned the whole plant with the profits flowing into his own pockets.” But nothing seemed sufficient to meet the ever-growing demand. Mulholland had in his early days with the department estimated that at maximum efficiency and minimum waste, all the water resources of the existing watershed would be able to support a population of 250,000. When he made that prediction, he assumed that it could be well into the second decade of the century before a final solution would have to be addressed. But as 1905 approached, the city had nearly doubled in size again.

  Meantime, the city charter was amended to provide that the five-member board of water commissioners be appointed by the mayor instead of being elected, a step that was seen as a protection against politics intruding in issues impacting the city’s water supply. However, there were unintended consequences, for the amendment gave the commissioners virtually free reign over the water department and its finances. At the same time, another amendment to the city charter was enacted that prohibited the sale or transfer of any right to water “now or hereafter owned or controlled” by the city without a two-thirds vote of the citizenry. While the intent of the amendment was to ensure that the city’s water supply would never again fall into private hands, it too would prove far more significant than the city fathers could have foreseen.

  All the while, speculators continued to invest in outlying lands and planned developments, thereby ensuring that the problems facing Mulholland and his new department would only escalate. In April 1903, Theodore Roosevelt, who had assumed the presidency when William McKinley was assassinated in 1901, came to the city to proclaim it “a veritable garden of the earth.” In September of that same year, a syndicate that included General Harrison Gray Otis of the Los Angeles Times, as well as streetcar magnate Henry Huntington, Union Pacific mogul E. H. Harriman, and other influential Los Angeles businessmen, announced the purchase of the 16,540-acre ranch of George K. Porter, a tract that constituted nearly 10 percent of the lands in the San Fernando Valley. The acquisition was described to the Times as being made for the purposes of developing the property, though without access to water, substantial development seemed unlikely in that far-flung, north-central section of the valley.

  Meantime, through the remainder of 1903 and well into the normal rainy months of 1904, the drought persisted. The Geological Survey’s Mendenhall reported that underground resources were drying up at catastrophic levels. Lands where wells could be successfully dug in the San Fernando Valley had decreased by one-third, and one major source—the Bouton Well—which in 1899 had produced 4 million gallons a day, had dropped to less than 800,000 gallons. The water level in a major well near Anaheim, located above the largest underground reservoir in Southern California, had plunged from 23 feet below the surface in 1898 to 52 feet in 1904.

  Cattle were starving on ranches in the Antelope Valley, Lake Elizabeth had dried into a mudflat, and by July the city was consuming more water than was flowing into the storage reservoirs. Mulholland declared a ban on watering lawns and turned off the flow to the ponds in the city’s parks, all the while spurring his men to bring the pumps at the new underground reservoir above the Glendale Narrows on line. Once those pumps were feeding the system and providing additional waters to be stored at the Buena Vista Dam, Mulholland believed the city, with its thirst risen to 33 million gallons per day, would make it through the crisis.

  Finally, in July, the new pumps were brought on line, but Mulholland quickly noticed something odd. Within two weeks, and despite all ongoing conservation efforts, the city’s consumption had risen to more than 40 million gallons per day. Even at night, when consumption was normally at its lowest, the reservoirs were failing to refill. Somewhere, something had gone very wrong.

  Though it took a week’s investigation, the answer finally became clear. The water being sucked up from the new underground gallery and packed into the aging reservoirs as excess was being discharged through faulty gates and valves into the system’s overflow sewer lines, Mulholland told reporters. Nine million gallons of water each day were lost through the Cudahy Sewer (draining the Boyle Heights district) and others in the aging sewer system. (Using storm drains to dump water into the ocean would become a central plot device in Chinatown, where the “loss” was portrayed as purposeful, part of a plan to panic citizens and drive support for the building of a new dam.) Though he was able to put a stop to the leaks and a freak summer rainstorm brought some relief to the city, Mulholland was nearing the end of his rope.

  Though he had turned do
wn the commissioners’ suggestion that he take a vacation earlier in the year, in September he asked for a leave of three weeks, a request that the commissioners, grateful for his stolid service, were happy to grant. If any member of the board was suspicious of the true purpose of the Chief’s request, no mention was made.

  ROAD TRIP

  MULHOLLAND HAD ALREADY CONFIDED TO ASSOCIATES that the Los Angeles River, whose resources he had been so confident of just three years before, would essentially be tapped out, and soon, at a flow of 46 million gallons per day. Per capita water consumption had been reduced to 144 gallons daily, less than half of what it had been when he took over, but he despaired of being able to improve much upon that figure. Further, he estimated that the rise in population had far outstripped his estimates. In four years, there were already more than twice as many residents as there had been in 1900. There would be a quarter million by 1905, nearly half a million by 1915, and 700,000 residents by 1925.

  As he liked to joke, they could either kill Frank Wiggins, principal spokesman for the development-happy Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, or face the facts: the river was outmatched and the city would either have to accept a cap on population, or it would be forced “to supplement its flow from some other source.” The burning question was what that source would be.

  With the assistance of engineers J. B. Lippincott and O. K. Parker, Mulholland had completed an exhaustive survey of all existing water resources in Southern California. It was his conclusion, issued as a part of his “Fourth Annual Report of the Water Commissioners,” that any attempt to develop storage and supply facilities on any stream that flowed anywhere south of the Tehachipi Mountains, that is, the northernmost boundary of distant Antelope Valley, would in essence rob water from the watershed of the San Fernando Valley. Some advocated building a reservoir to capture floodwaters of the San Gabriel River in the southern part of the county near Azusa, but Mulholland doubted that there was a viable site for a reservoir there, and Mendenhall’s calculations indicated that this intermittent source would fall far short of what was needed.

  Others suggested tapping the Mojave River, another intermittent stream on the northern side of the San Bernardino Mountains, but again Mulholland cited an insufficient rate of flow and an inordinately high cost of impounding and pumping these waters to the city. Either such source would provide only about one-tenth of what would be needed to support the city’s growth to 1 million, a figure that he believed to be a farsighted benchmark for the future. But there simply was no such source of water available in Southern California.

  The city was indeed in a quandary, one that finally led Mulholland to send a long-delayed message to Fred Eaton. The Chief was following up on a matter that Eaton had been floating for years; it had been conveyed to the former mayor in September 1904. Perhaps it was an idea whose time had come.

  The story of exactly where and under what circumstances Eaton and Mulholland met to discuss the Owens River possibilities in 1904 has been told and retold many times, including various versions from the principals themselves. But all agree on the key points, and Mulholland was ever generous in crediting Eaton with the germination of the idea. “Thirteen years ago Fred Eaton first told me that Los Angeles would one day secure its water supply from the Owens Valley,” Mulholland told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times in an interview shortly after the project was announced. “At that time the Los Angeles River was running 40 million gallons of water daily and we had a population of less than 50,000. I laughed at him.” By Mulholland’s reckoning at the time, the Los Angeles River was capable of supplying the city for a half-century to come.

  But Eaton told Mulholland he was being shortsighted. “You have not lived in this country as long as I have,” he said. “I was born here and have seen dry years, years that you know nothing about. Wait and see.”

  Well, Mulholland told the reporter, he had waited and he had seen. “Four years ago I began to discover that Fred was right. Our population climbed to the top and the bottom appeared to drop out of the [Los Angeles] river.”

  When the two met in September 1904, Eaton reiterated his long-held certainty that the solution to the water problems of Los Angeles was to be found in the Owens Valley; shortly after that meeting, Eaton and Mulholland hired a mule team and a buckboard, and with that legendary cache of whiskey packed among their supplies, they set out on a 250-mile trek that would change history.

  Aside from the discarded whiskey bottles that purportedly marked their trail, the pair did not closely document the original trip from Los Angeles to the Owens Valley that they took in September 1904. However, Eaton did take notes on a follow-up fact-finding mission about a year later, one that would have followed an identical route. Eaton also took a number of pictures of the rugged trail and settlements along the way and included them in a commemorative album of which he gave Mulholland a copy that is still in Department of Water and Power files.

  The second time around, Eaton had in tow reporters from the Times, the Express, and William Randolph Hearst’s new Examiner, founded to help advance Hearst’s presidential ambitions in 1903. Also along for the trip were the city clerk and six Los Angeles councilmen—all in all a cadre whose support for the notion that Eaton and Mulholland had agreed upon at the end of the previous year’s trip was essential.

  While it is not certain that Mulholland and Eaton began their journey in the same way, it seems only logical that they would have. On November 7, 1905, Eaton notes, the party—sans Mulholland on this occasion—traveled the hundred or so miles from Los Angeles to Mojave aboard the Southern Pacific’s Owl, the night train leaving at 5:00 P.M. for Oakland and San Francisco. They spent the night in Mojave and set out the next morning in five wagons northward along the Owens Valley Stage Road, stopping for lunch at scenic Red Rock Canyon, later putting up camp for the night at Coyote Holes, having covered another forty-eight miles that day. They set out for Haiwee at 8:00 A.M. on the third day of the journey, taking eleven hours to cover forty-five miles of rugged canyon road. On Friday, the fourth day, they were through the pass and on to Olancha above Owens Lake by 10:00 A.M., and by 6:00 that evening they had covered another thirty-four miles to Lone Pine.

  On Saturday morning, the party set out from Lone Pine at 7:00 A.M., and by 1:00 P.M. they had traveled another nineteen miles to Independence, where for the first time they encountered the object of their journey, the Owens River, crossing it at a point where, according to Eaton’s notes, the water was sixty feet wide and five feet deep. It was there, Eaton said, that they “rested the remainder of the day.”

  The latter part of their route, Eaton said, was “frequently crossed by creeks and irrigating ditches, carrying beautiful streams of mountain water.” At dinner that night, Eaton described the conversation as “a resume of the trip this far . . . the sentiment being thoroughly unamious [sic] that the City of Los Angeles was, by its wise action . . . causing our city to enter upon a new and unheard of era of prosperity, by securing this adequate and inexhaustible supply of pure mountain water.”

  Eaton’s enthusiasm could be accounted for in part by the time that it had taken him to convince anyone in authority of the validity of a plan that he had hatched as early as 1892 and perhaps even before. As part of a land-owning family with sizable holdings in Pasadena, Eaton had heard talk of the Owens Valley since his youth. It was described as a bounteous pastureland in summer, the place where Los Angeles ranchers had driven their herds when the Southland was baking and dry. A family friend, J. H. Campbell, recalled as a thirteen-year-old taking a trip with Fred Eaton and his pioneering father, Benjamin, an attorney and former district attorney, to the Owens Valley in 1880, a visit during which the elder Eaton “took measurements of water on all the streams,” with an eye toward somehow transporting it to the family vineyards in Pasadena.

  Later, in 1892, Eaton spent a summer in the Owens Valley, where he saw vast untapped potential in harnessing the typical flood runoff from Bishop Creek and other tributaries of t
he Owens River. The Los Angeles Herald reported on July 10 of that year that he had joined with three other partners from Los Angeles and the Owens Valley to form the Olancha Land and Irrigation Company in order to “acquire and improve desert land.” As he would later tell reporters, he had gone to the Owens Valley “to study the water situation with a view to colonizing the valley, having heard a great deal about the magnificent water supply of that region.” The more utopian aspect of his vision did not survive, Eaton said, for, “After studying the situation carefully, I was convinced that a colonization project was not practicable . . . and I abandoned the idea.”

  Still, he had seen for himself those “magnificent” waters, and the memory never left him. As early as July 1892, he described the immense possibilities of bringing the Owens River water through the ancient blockade at Haiwee Pass and down Nine-Mile Canyon as least as far as the area around China Lake. “I saw more water going to waste in the Owens River than is contained in all the streams and rivers of San Bernardino, San Diego and Los Angeles counties combined,” he said. “These great resources must be developed in the near future. The cost of diverting the Owens River and conduction [of] its waters upon the lands south of Owens Lake will be trifling when it is considered that more than 250,000 acres of magnificent land [in the desert north of Mojave] will be opened up to settlement.”