A payroll for a thousand men loomed due on July 1, and there was another $1 million due to various creditors. In the meantime, there had been a new chairman appointed to the Board of Public Works, Adna R. Chaffee, a retired general and longtime friend of Harry Chandler, son-in-law of Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis (and whom Otis had appointed general manager of the paper). Chaffee had accompanied Mulholland on a March 9, 1908, inspection of the project reported on by the Times, which included a stop at the daunting tunnel at Lake Elizabeth. Things were going well there, with almost a thousand feet of granite excavated by hand in the three months the work had been underway. Based on that progress, and with electrical power soon to reach the tunneling site, Mulholland told Chaffee that this crucial part of the project could well be completed ahead of schedule and nearly $700,000 under budget.
At the time Mulholland was delivering this news to Chaffee, the inspection party was standing at the end of a five-mile city-built road off the main grade through the San Gabriels, outside the entrance to the tunnel at about 2,900 feet of altitude, with the crest looming another 1,000 feet above them. Mulholland bent to pick up a fragment of rock that had been recently chiseled out. “We’re lucky,” he told the group. “This is gneiss rock. I don’t think we’re going to hit any real granite in there.”
Mayor Arthur Harper, who was along for the trip, took the fragment from Mulholland and hefted it. “Very nice rock,” he repeated, clearly bewildered.
Mulholland smiled. “That’s g-n-e-i-s-s, Mr. Mayor.” The superintendent went on to explain that gneiss was a striated formation, much easier to cut through than solid granite, which is essentially solidified lava.
Chaffee was duly impressed with Mulholland’s projections, but his mind was on something else. He had noticed a miner with his foot wrapped in a towel, the victim of an accident in the tunnel earlier that day. As former chief of staff of the US Army, Chaffee was attuned to personnel matters related to demanding engineering projects.
If the City of Los Angeles was going to put hundreds or perhaps thousands of men to work under difficult conditions, he believed there should be doctors in place to look after them. One of the commissioners piped up in agreement: perhaps they could station a doctor in Mojave and provide him with a motorcycle with which to ride between the camps, checking on the men.
But “to depend on a fellow with a motorcycle when human limbs and lives are in the balance” was hardly what Chaffee had in mind. There would have to be a physician and proper treatment facilities on-site. Accordingly, Chaffee asked that Mulholland, in addition to everything else he was faced with, see to the establishment of a Medical Department for the project, with medical tents placed at every encampment and permanent hospital buildings erected at each Division Headquarters.
The city would provide the tents and buildings to this Medical Department, Chaffee decreed, as well as offer transportation and basic support services such as water, power, and phone. However, the responsibility of providing the medical care and staffing was contracted to former Los Angeles County Hospital Superintendent Dr. Raymond J. Taylor. Taylor would in time come to oversee medical care for more than 10,000 men who worked for the project. In addition to supervising a medical staff and the treatment of sick and injured workers, his department was also responsible for oversight of their diet and nutrition, sanitation, disease prevention, mental health counseling, and more.
The contract called for workers making more than $40 a month to have $1 withheld from their wages, and those making less than $40, 50 cents, these sums diverted directly to Taylor and his partners. In turn, the men would be assured medical, hospital, and surgical coverage, “except for venereal disease, intemperance, vicious habits, injuries received in fights, or chronic diseases acquired before employment.”
While there had been numerous suggestions that the city subcontract virtually all the work on the aqueduct, Mulholland had insisted from the beginning that he would be far better able to manage the costs of the undertaking by overseeing his own workforce. Ultimately, save for a short section of conduit in the Antelope Valley, the contract let to Taylor for the Medical Department and another to a man named Joe Desmond for commissary services constituted the only significant work on the entire line not done by Mulholland and his men.
According to Taylor, the arrangement between himself and the city ran smoothly, though his opinion that Desmond, just twenty-eight at the time, was more of a promoter than a commissary man would prove to be accurate. At the outset, Taylor repeated an observation regarding his operations that could have been the refrain for the project as a whole: “This was more or less of a gamble on our part as none of us knew very much, nor could we learn very much, about this sort of thing.” The closest such undertakings had been army campaigns and the forging of railroad extensions through wilderness over the previous half-century, but nothing with the complexity of Mulholland’s project had ever been tried.
Taylor’s first task in mid-1908 was to make an inspection trip all the way up the line, one that was still about as difficult as it had been when Mulholland and Eaton had traveled it in 1904. There were still no paved roads north of Mojave, just a wagon track that was of little practical help to the newfangled automobiles that tried to make the trip. The first Model T had rolled off the assembly line in 1903, and by 1904, there were said to be 1,600 cars cruising the streets of Los Angeles, where the maximum speed limit was 8 mph in residential areas and 6 mph in business districts.
The Chief himself was not unfamiliar with such conveyances, for he had been a passenger in one of the early Oldsmobiles driven by George Read, chief of the water-meter division. According to Read, Mulholland had suggested they take a spin in Read’s new contraption after work one evening and invited another department engineer, Fred Fischer, to ride along. As Read’s narrative bears out, even at six miles an hour, the appearance of such a vehicle on the streets could create havoc.
“As I was driving around the Plaza,” Read said, “a tall lanky fellow riding a bicycle approached us. I honked the horn, and not getting the fellow’s attention, applied the brakes. I had just about stopped when he banged into the front of the car.”
As Read described, the bicycle stopped, but its rider kept going, over the dashboard of the Oldsmobile, finally sprawling across the three of them jammed into the car’s only seat. A shaken Read was concerned that the man might be hurt and that an intervention by police could be next.
Mulholland, however, was unfazed and fixed the man with a stare. “What the hell are you doing in here?” Mulholland demanded. In seconds, the man gathered himself, jumped back on his bicycle and rode away without a word.
Mulholland might have been adept with solving certain issues regarding urban auto travel, but there was little he could do about the obstacles to auto travel between Mojave and the Owens Valley. As Taylor pointed out, wagons were built with their wheels spaced sixty inches apart. Automobile axles, however, were only fifty-four inches wide. That meant that while one rubber tire could easily course along a rut formed by a wagon wheel, the other was traveling on top of an untended median. In muddy areas, the second auto tire was always bogging down, and in rocky terrain the ride became teeth shattering.
Even getting out of the San Fernando Valley was a chore in itself, as Taylor made clear. The unpaved San Fernando Road through the Newhall Pass rose at a twenty-six-degree grade and was full of stones and ruts carved by occasional cloudbursts. He could get up that hill only by periodically jumping out of the car to block the wheels from sliding backward, then gunning the engine into another lurch forward.
When they finally got over the pass and descended into Saugus, Taylor found that Mulholland had already seen to the erecting of a wooden hospital building at the project’s southernmost division headquarters, near the Southern Pacific railway station. From there, Taylor and his men traveled up the San Francisquito Canyon Road, crossing the creek “about forty or fifty times” as they climbed. Eventually, just south
of the crest of the San Gabriels, they reached the camp at the South Portal of the Lake Elizabeth tunnel, still in much the same rugged condition that Chaffee had observed. An encounter with the belligerent foreman on the site suggested to Taylor that it wasn’t of much interest whether medical facilities were established there or not, but in the end Taylor says, he “got a first-aid man in there who got along with him.”
From the South Portal, it was a relatively easy drive over the crest of the San Gabriels and down across the Antelope Valley to Mojave, where he found a settlement similar to those depicted in contemporary Westerns. There was a Southern Pacific station on one side of the tracks and one of the familiar Harvey House hotels next to it. On the opposite side of the tracks were several saloons, a number of billiard parlors, two general stores, and a pharmacy, the latter run by what Taylor described as the only “medical man” in those parts at the time.
The pharmacy’s proprietor had practiced medicine at one time, Taylor said, but “he was no surgeon.” If anyone in Mojave were to be seriously injured, “they either died on the spot” or got sent on a train up to Bakersfield, about sixty miles to the northwest. The Harvey House was about the only place between Los Angeles and Independence where a decent meal was available, and it also featured clean beds, which at the time was no insignificant feature. There were rooming houses in Mojave, Taylor said, but all were vermin infested and none of his men ever stayed anywhere but the Harvey House if they could help it.
If Mojave was rough at the time of his first inspection, it only got rougher as the pace of work on the aqueduct grew and more and more men tumbled into the only settlement between Los Angeles and the Owens Valley. On payday, as any number of accounts testified, it was common for a digger to show up at a Mojave saloon with his paycheck, anxious for a drink and a good meal. It might be suggested at that point that there was not enough in the till to cash said paycheck, but the barkeep would be happy to keep it safe and simply deduct what had been consumed by the time the check could be cashed. Such an arrangement of course often led to the consumption of great quantities on the part of the digger, quite often leading to a state of unconsciousness sometimes assisted by the application of a blackjack or cudgel.
If a digger thus taken advantage of was fortunate enough to wake up—often in an alley somewhere—he was likely to learn that he had somehow managed to drink up the value of his entire paycheck, or that he had in fact forgotten that he had cashed it and must have subsequently been robbed. In time, Taylor would install a doctor at the headquarters camp just outside Mojave. This practitioner reported being called into town three or four nights a week to stitch up a fractured skull or pronounce someone dead. It was less than welcome duty for the attending physician, but as Taylor wryly pointed out, there was often a little something extra provided by a hotelier or saloonkeeper who just wanted help in “getting rid of the carcass.”
About twenty miles north of Mojave lay the settlement of Cinco, where the headquarters of the rugged Jawbone Division would be located along the line of the new railroad. In order to maintain the proper level of descent toward Los Angeles, however, the aqueduct itself would be located in the steep hills several miles west of the rail line. Ultimately, Mulholland would have to build roads from the rail line up to the work camps, but, meantime, staging facilities had to be constructed at Cinco. Because of the complicated nature of the tunnel and siphon work required to move the aqueduct through this area, more men would work here than at any other place along the line, and eventually Cinco would operate the largest of Taylor’s hospitals, twice the size of any other.
At another spring and former stage stop, Coyote Hills, Taylor met a settler named Freeman Raymond, a man in his sixties who said he had left the camp only twice in twenty-five years, once to get married. Coyote Hills lay at the foot of the last pass through the Sierra Nevada until one traversed the Owens Valley, and the camp was to become a favored stop for Taylor. There was enough water for Raymond to keep cows, and there were always eggs, ham, bacon, and chicken for Sunday dinner. With clean beds and cool water, Coyote Hills was a virtual oasis along the route.
From just above Coyote Hills, Taylor and his party were within view of the Sierra Nevada for the remainder of their survey trip, now past what would be the site of the big Sand Canyon Siphon, then up the gentle slope of the Rose Valley, and finally encountering what he described as nearly twenty miles of the worst sandy road along the entire route, “almost impossible to get through.”
The only way to make progress at that juncture, Taylor said, “was to run your car as far as it would go, and when you got to a point where your wheels were beginning to slip . . . but before you killed your engine, you stopped, reversed, and backed up in the tracks you had made.” Thereupon, one had to gun the engine and plow forward again, which might gain another stretch of fifty or seventy-five feet. Only in that way did the party finally reach Olancha, above the salty Owens Lake, which was about twenty miles long and ten miles wide at the time.
At nearby Cottonwood Creek, a sizable tributary of the Owens River, engineer Harvey Van Norman had already commenced work to construct a power plant to feed aqueduct construction. The work had been going well enough for Van Norman, though it was a continuing struggle to bring in supplies. The Southern Pacific’s arrival in the valley was still a distant dream, and he had to rely upon the existing narrow gauge from the north that terminated at Lone Pine, sixteen miles away. The only means of carrying freight from that point was by mule team over a sandy road not much better than the one Taylor and his group had struggled over from the south.
The supply issue was one thing, but of much greater importance to Van Norman at the time was the question of what had happened to his wife. The two had only been married three weeks, Van Norman explained, and J. B. Lippincott had promised that the city would provide proper quarters for his new bride at Olancha. However, she had not yet arrived, and there had been no word from Lippincott as to her whereabouts.
Thus, Van Norman wanted Taylor to carry a message to Lippincott upon his return: if his wife hadn’t shown up within a week, Van Norman would be down to hand in his resignation. “He was mad, and he would have done it,” Taylor observed.
Luckily, however, Taylor and his men were to encounter the new Mrs. Van Norman making her way up the Nine-Mile Canyon during their return to Los Angeles, and, accordingly, the matter passed. Not only did Van Norman—a self-taught type in the mold of the Chief—continue on in the department’s service, he would one day come to succeed Mulholland as chief engineer.
Before returning, however, Taylor and his party had traveled all the way up the Owens Valley to Division Creek, near the diversion point of the aqueduct. After a night’s sleep atop a billiard table in an otherwise louse-infected ranch camp, Taylor made arrangements with the only physician in that part of the valley to care for the aqueduct men in Divisions One and Two, though the process of convincing “Doc Woodin” of Independence was not terribly difficult. Woodin was an old-timer who never gave anybody a bill, according to Taylor. Before his contract with the aqueduct, “If Woodin needed some money he’d just tackle somebody who owed him and tell him to dig up.”
Woodin’s idea of patient confidentiality was also less than delicate. “I’ve heard him holler at a farmer who had driven up on the other side of the street,” Taylor recalled, “and ask him how his wife was and whether that last medicine he sent up did her periods any good.” Another time, Taylor heard Woodin call after a new party of workmen as they were walking down the street, “Boys, Doc Taylor tells me to take care of you and send him the bills. But, don’t forget, no clap—clap’s barred.” Given Woodin’s capabilities, it was the sort of thing Taylor let go.
FIRST SPADE
TAYLOR’S COLORFUL ACCOUNTS UNDERSCORE NOT only the challenges associated with the project but the can-do attitude that came to characterize every phase of it. In short order, he hired physicians for hospitals at Saugus, Fairmont, and Cinco, and went to work staffing t
he lesser installations with what were called hospital stewards, most former army medics who had administered first aid in similarly primitive conditions. They could ride a horse, minister to colds and constipation, and even splint a fracture when they had to. In all, there would be six hospitals with physicians attending and sixteen first-aid stations manned by stewards, along with sixteen horses and two motorcycles at Taylor’s disposal. If any truly serious case cropped up, a sick or injured workman could be put aboard a train and carried to California Hospital in Los Angeles for treatment, a process that became increasingly efficient as the Southern Pacific Line pushed northward out of Mojave.
Meantime, with medical matters attended to, Mulholland was anxious to begin work in the Jawbone Division, where the task would be as challenging and time consuming as tunnel work at Lake Elizabeth. However, until the bonds could be sold, there was no money to pay for workmen or supplies.
Though the City Commission had authorized city attorney Mathews’s suggested increase in the bond rates from 4 to 4½ percent, San Francisco had an issue of $18 million at 5 percent still begging for takers, and New York City had upped its rate on a $20 million issue to 5 percent as well. Finally, an offer came to the city from one local firm willing to purchase $2 million of the bonds, followed quickly by an identical offer from another local, N. W. Harris, purchaser of the initial bond offering of 1905. While the city pondered these stop-gap offers, city attorney Mathews returned from New York with the welcome word that a syndicate headed by Kountze Brothers and A. B. Leach & Company had offered to buy $4 million of the bonds outright and take up an option on the remainder.
As the Los Angeles Times reported, the City Commission voted its approval of the sale on July 10, 1908, the largest such offering in its history. Chaffee told reporters that it was “a lucky sale, all things considered,” adding, “Now we are going to show you how to make the dirt and rocks fly.” For his part, Mulholland pledged, “the waters of the Owens River will be flowing into the San Fernando Valley by July, 1912.”
Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles Page 12