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

by Standiford, Les

  Indeed, as W. A. Chalfant, chronicler of early Owens Valley history observes, as much as 20,000 to 30,000 “inches” of water, or about half again as much as Mulholland hoped to find for his city, went to waste when spring runoff overflowed the stream banks and flooded the Upper Owens Valley. (An “inch” or “miner’s inch” was a commonly employed term, generally agreed at the time to constitute a flow of one-fiftieth of a cubic foot per second, or about 13,000 gallons of water per day, when the average per capita consumption in Los Angeles was in excess of 150 gallons per day. Today, water supply is more commonly measured in terms of acre-feet, a unit equal to a flow of 326,000 gallons yearly, or about 893 gallons per day—Los Angeles Department of Water and Power estimates current per capita consumption at 105 gallons per day.) Though by late summer, the Owens River might be running nearly dry at its headwaters, if that wasted runoff water had been impounded during the spring, it would constitute a valuable resource.

  The concept of a vast cascade of sparkling mountain water was one that Eaton could never get out of his head, and when drought struck Los Angeles before and during his term as mayor, he worked on the refinement of his plan for Los Angeles to make use of all that wasted water. “My idea was to organize a strong company which should develop the great water power of the streams which pour down from the high Sierras and then combine with the electric feature,” he explained to a reporter for the Los Angeles Express in 1905, “bringing the water to the San Fernando Valley . . . and from the sale of the electricity and water I was satisfied the project would be an inviting one.”

  Though he had mentioned the possibilities to others before his conferences with Mulholland and city attorney William B. Mathews (Mulholland would also testify before a panel of inquiry that Eaton had been in his ear about the idea since the early 1890s), one federal government engineer spoke for most when he noted that the idea seemed about “as likely as the City of Washington tapping the Ohio River.” But in 1899, while Eaton was still in office, a development took place that would re-energize Eaton, when Congress passed the legislation that would create the US Bureau of Reclamation (it was formally the Reclamation Service, a subdivision of the US Geological Survey until 1907), with the charge of “investigating the extent to which the arid regions of the United States can be redeemed by irrigation.”

  When Owens Valley citizens became aware of the possibilities created by the new Reclamation Service, they were quick to press their desire for a serious irrigation project upon their government. In April 1903, before the Reclamation Service was officially open for business, new director Haynes Newell contacted the service’s West Coast Chief of Operations Joseph B. Lippincott to see if he thought the Owens River Valley was worth inspecting. As Chalfant observes, the stated purpose of any such survey was, by law, to determine the feasibility “for construction and maintenance of irrigation works for the storage, diversion and development of waters for the reclamation of arid and semi-arid lands.”

  Lippincott, who had been employed by the US Geological Survey since 1889 and was recognized as an expert in matters of hydrology about the region, had also been employed in various capacities as an engineering consultant for the City of Los Angeles, including appointment by then Mayor Eaton to the board that quizzed Mulholland prior to the city’s acquisition of the private water company. In response to Newell’s inquiry, Lippincott dispatched a young engineer named Jacob Clausen to look around the Owens Valley.

  Clausen’s opinion was formed almost immediately: the valley was in fact an ideal candidate for consideration of an irrigation project of the sort envisioned by the agency, and he recommended to Lippincott that all public lands in the valley that could be benefitted by such a project immediately be “withdrawn” or protected from any claim by private interests in order to prevent speculators from acquiring and driving up the price of lands that could be improved for the good of the general public.

  The development of a Reclamation Service project would mean the end of Fred Eaton’s plans for a joint public-private venture involving valley water rights; when he got wind of the service’s interest, he hurried to the Owens Valley in April 1904 while Lippincott was inspecting a site at Long Valley where employee Clausen had recommended placing the principal storage dam for the service’s proposed project. Though Lippincott and Eaton knew each other well, both would maintain to the end of their days that Eaton made no mention of what was brewing in his mind.

  At the end of August, the two returned to Long Valley on an ostensible vacation expedition for a group that included Clausen. Clausen later contended that all the while Lippincott waxed fulsomely upon the government’s plans for the project in the valley. “Lippincott and I were talking all the time and Eaton was listening to everything we had to say,” Clausen said, “and this probably was what Lippincott wanted to be done.”

  Whether Eaton had been tipped off by Lippincott has never been established. However, no one has ever questioned the fact that shortly after Eaton’s return to Los Angeles, he and William Mulholland were riding a buckboard through the desert, all the way to Independence.

  It was there at a lonely ford in the shadows of the Sierra that Eaton delivered on Mulholland’s request to “show me that water source you have.” The banks might have been less than bursting at that time of year, but Eaton was a respected fellow engineer, not simply a city booster. He would have most certainly passed along the service’s estimation that the Owens River on average carried more than ten times the average summer flow of the Los Angeles River. It was an amount that surpassed the Chief’s most dizzying estimates of need by two and a half times.

  One can only imagine what Mulholland thought and felt as he stood by the Owens River, listening yet again to Eaton’s urgent narrative of possibility and the need for the city to act quickly, before the Reclamation Service took over the river forever. Mulholland may have gazed out over the vast expanse of scrub and pasture that surrounded him and felt a certain regret, or at least a sympathy for the ranchers and farmers and merchants who were counting on the federal government to bring prosperity to this isolated place, for the beauties of the wilderness, even its desolation, were not lost on him: “Some men look and see only sand and rock, stretching endlessly,” he once wrote. “Others gaze on the desert scene and read a sermon in the sand, the cactus and the flowers. Silence everywhere—majestic, wonderful.”

  Mulholland was neither a steamrolling developer nor a hardhearted bureaucrat, but an individual possessed of keen intelligence and wry humor, much favored by the press, the citizens of Los Angeles, and the men with whom he worked. To those who served under him, his advice was as simple as it was welcome: “When the whistle blows, shut and lock the office door, leaving all worries and shop troubles behind that locked door. Then go home and have a pleasant time with your family, remembering never to cross your bridges until you get to them.” Mulholland was by all accounts a sensitive man. But he was also driven by the logic of the utilitarian credo—the greatest good for the greatest number—and by his loyalty to his adopted place.

  He and Eaton had spent some time taking measurements and elevations along the way to Independence, and he would spend more time in the region surveying and evaluating. But ultimately, he would agree that the waters by which they stood would provide all that Los Angeles needed and then some, and that, furthermore, it would be possible to move them 235 miles to the city, using only gravity to send them there.

  He had wrestled with an imponderable question for a number of years, and he had finally encountered the solution. It would not be easy to carry out the project, but he welcomed the challenge. His city was counting on him.

  DOWNHILL ALL THE WAY

  IT WAS AN ARTICLE OF FAITH AMONG READERS OF THE Donald Duck comics series in the mid-twentieth century that all knotty problems standing in the path of human ambition could be overcome by a consultation with the Junior Woodchuck Manual. Donald himself disdained the Manual, but his nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, swore by it. They
once saved Scrooge McDuck’s fortune after the Manual guided them in the repair of a geological fault threatening to swallow the gajillionaire’s underground vault. Another time they found the answer to an equally grave question: How could they run away from overbearing Uncle Donald and an insufferable existence in Duckburg to a life of pleasure on the beaches of Florida?

  The Manual gave them the answer. As a map in that volume made clear, Duckburg lay at the very top of the chart, somewhere in a spot vaguely corresponding to the American Midwest. Florida, of course, was at the very bottom. Thus, the solution was obvious. They could get on their bicycles and simply coast to Florida. It was downhill all the way.

  Readers may be amused by duck ingenuousness, but, according to family history, it was essentially that very vision that had overtaken Fred Eaton on a day in 1893 when he stood atop Mount Whitney, above the Owens Valley, and glanced southward toward the city that he would one day serve as mayor. Why stop with the notion of taking Owens Valley water to the Mojave? It was indeed a long way from these parts to Los Angeles, he told his oldest daughter, Helen Louise, who had accompanied him on that day’s climb, but it was downhill all the way.

  The basic premise had never left him, and while Eaton often said that he had gone so far as to commission his own preliminary survey of an aqueduct to Los Angeles, he had never been able to convince anyone that the idea held merit. In the brook-no-obstacles Mulholland he had finally found his man. To Mulholland, the waters coursing the banks where he and Fred Eaton stood represented the solution to an insoluble problem. All that was needed was to connect one half of the equation with the other, and Mulholland believed he could do just that.

  The waters of the Owens River flowed through the valley at more than 4,000 feet. Los Angeles was a city that hugged the sea. Of course there were a few mountain ranges and impassable canyons that intervened along that 250 miles or so of “downhill all the way,” but as Mulholland and Eaton had lurched and heaved their way from Los Angeles to Independence, Mulholland’s practical engineering mind had been at work, making use of crude barometer measurements to estimate elevations, using a quarter-century of water master’s experience to estimate stream flows. (A French physicist by the name of Louis Paul Cailletet had developed a barometric altimeter in the late 1880s, but the instruments as we know them would not come into widespread use until the 1920s.) In the end, Mulholland was convinced that all physical obstacles could be overcome and that a practical route for an impossible aqueduct was possible.

  Though he would work out the details of the plan in the weeks and months to come, Mulholland intuited during that first trip that Eaton’s idea was not a phantasmagoria, and that by combining a system of storage reservoirs, tunnels (more than fifty miles of them, including a five-mile bore beneath Lake Elizabeth), inverted steel siphons (twelve miles of these, perhaps the most dramatic features of the proposal), and stretches of canal, lined channels, and nearly a hundred miles of covered culvert, he could move the river they were looking at to Los Angeles. He had a sketch of his plan ready shortly after he returned to the city.

  In Mulholland’s mind, the real problem lay in finding the money to secure the necessary water rights and rights-of-way, and in doing so before the Reclamation Service could block them. While Eaton and Mulholland agreed that the Owens River could save Los Angeles, there was one feature of the ex-mayor’s vision that Mulholland did not share. Eaton had been trying to convince Mulholland that the project should be developed as a public-private partnership.

  Eaton’s idea was to raise the funds necessary for acquiring the water rights to the Owens River from a group of private investors. In turn, the private consortium would sell or lease half the water rights to the City of Los Angeles while retaining the rights to the other half as well as the right to develop hydroelectric power along the course of the river and its tributaries. The city could do as it liked regarding the acquisition of the water and the funding of the enormous aqueduct project, but meantime Eaton and his investors would tie up the water rights and continue with the development of lucrative power plants. Eaton understood that the huge aqueduct project would necessarily have to be a public undertaking, but he was also convinced that, having conceived of the possibility to begin with, he was entitled to a proper businessman’s return on all activities connected to the venture.

  Now that the practical-minded Mulholland had determined that an aqueduct project was feasible, Eaton wanted to return to the New York offices of Dillon & Hubbard, the attorneys who had facilitated the city’s takeover of the water company, to proceed with the formation of a private consortium. Mulholland, however, was not sympathetic to any private involvement in the ownership of Owens Valley water. He had been caught between such forces in his early days as superintendent of the private water company, and his experiences since the city had taken over showed him that taxpayers were best served by public ownership of the utility. He was also politically astute enough to realize that any hint of a collusion with private interests would likely stop the project dead. Given the Reclamation Service’s stated interest in the same water, the issue could well come down to a standoff between the federal government and the city. If private interests were seen to be in league with the city, politics might override all logic.

  Though Eaton was not happy, he reluctantly agreed to Mulholland’s terms as spelled out by city attorney William Mathews. Acting as the city’s agent and receiving an appropriate commission, Eaton would proceed to buy up options on about fifty miles of lands along the Owens River to establish the necessary riparian rights, as well as the lands farther north in Long Valley that would be needed for a storage reservoir. It would be Mulholland’s immediate task, meantime, to complete the survey work necessary for the refinement of construction plans and to convince the water commissioners to come up with $150,000 for the options. All this work would have to be done in secret, for if word of the city’s intentions got out, speculation would cause the price of the Owens Valley lands to skyrocket. (Reclamation Service engineer Jacob Clausen had estimated the prevailing costs of the land for the 140-foot-high reservoir he proposed for Long Valley Reservoir at about $21.58 per acre.)

  It is not clear who told J. B. Lippincott what Mulholland and Eaton had in mind regarding the Owens Valley, but on September 17, 1904, even before the pair took their legendary journey, Lippincott wrote a letter to his superior in the Reclamation Service regarding the city’s intentions: “I find that they are looking towards the Owens River for a solution.” It was enough to bring Haynes Newell all the way to Los Angeles for a meeting between himself, Lippincott, Mulholland, and Mathews. Clausen was clamoring for the Reclamation Service to undertake a reclamation project in the Owens Valley, Newell told Mulholland, and there was a petition on his desk signed by 400 Owens Valley residents demanding that his agency proceed with all possible dispatch. Just what exactly were the city’s intentions? Newell asked.

  Mulholland replied that the city had not yet formulated a firm intention, but any detailed information in the service’s hands that could help in making that decision would be welcome. Given that Clausen’s report was a public document, Lippincott replied, he would have a copy sent over. It might be presumed that this meeting could not have gone better for the city, though as Lippincott would later testify, it was made clear that the Reclamation Service would never agree to step aside in deference to the city unless any proposed aqueduct “was public owned from one end to another.”

  By February 10, 1905, Lippincott had followed up on the matter to his superior Newell. “There is the possibility of our not constructing the Owens Valley project, but of our stepping aside in favor of the city,” he wrote, though he did suggest that the agency should attempt to dun the city for some of the work completed in surveys and core drilling to determine the feasibility of the dam site at Long Valley.

  Though he would always contend that he had never conspired against the interests of Owens Valley residents and only followed the path of securing “the
greatest good for the greatest number” in making all his policy decisions, Lippincott was at the same time collecting substantial consulting fees from the city ($2,400 for his part in the survey of Southern California water sources at a time when his annual salary from the Reclamation Service was $4,200). If this was not enough to cast him as a devil in some quarters, other evidences of his connections to Eaton would damn him forever in certain eyes.

  In the spring of 1905, Lippincott wrote Eaton a letter asking for his help evaluating the merits of various applications for rights-of-way across public lands in the Long Valley area that had been filed with the service. According to Lippincott, no one knew the merits of the land in that area better than Eaton, and no one would be better qualified to determine whether these applications could potentially interfere with any irrigation project that could one day be undertaken by the service.

  Eaton in turn used Lippincott’s letter to obtain detailed maps of the proposed irrigation project, which served as a convenient guide in selecting the properties he was buying up for the city. In addition, it was said by Chalfant and others that Eaton bandied Lippincott’s letter about to give landowners the impression that he was in fact representing the Reclamation Service. Some residents also complained that Eaton was not above dropping hints that those reluctant to sell would have their lands condemned by the federal government or would find their lands crossed off the list of those slated to receive the forthcoming irrigation waters. “Sell out or dry out,” was the implication.

  Eaton did not need to use subterfuge in many of his dealings, which were centered farther south in the valley near Independence, where the land was ill-suited for irrigation and owners were happy to learn of an eager buyer. Moreover, it is questionable whether Mulholland had any immediate intention of building a dam at Long Valley above Bishop, where fertile pasture and farming land abounded. His primary concern was to divert the water from its course at a narrow point in the valley just above Independence, and, for the time being at least, store the waters farther south along the route to Los Angeles. However, if the city gained control of any potential dam site crucial to irrigation in the upper Owens Valley—the most obvious site being that in the Long Valley area—then the service would be unable to proceed with its irrigation project.