Cross was eloquent in his recollections of his time on the job at the Jawbone. He alighted from the Southern Pacific’s Owl in Mojave on a July night in 1908, stepping out onto the platform in the midst of a gale whipping down from the Tehachapi Pass, paper alligator-hide suitcase in hand. Hardly had the brakemen called out to the departing passengers, “Hold on to your hats!” then Cross felt his brand-new five-dollar Stetson lift off his head and go wheeling into the moonless desert.
He made his way to the nearby Harvey House where the barmaid gave him a knowing look as he slid onto a stool. “So you donated a hat to the Hat Ranch,” she said, wiping the bar before him. “You know, that’s how the Indians around here get their hats.”
If it was the first jibe he would have to endure as a tenderfoot, it would scarcely be the last. “Being able to adjust an instrument or throw a chain into a perfect circle,” as Cross would soon learn, “did not guarantee acceptance” by the old-timers on the job. The surveying crew that he joined up with at Cinco contained a motley collection of sun-bronzed veterans and immigrants—including a significant number of Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Swiss, and Mexicans—who had worked railroading and mining jobs throughout the West from the days when army troops had to be stationed to prevent Indian attacks. One earned one’s spurs among such men by lugging heavy surveying gear up a desert hillside without constant canteen breaks, being willing to dangle from a rope off the side of a hundred-foot cliff with seeming indifference, and maintaining a passive face at the poker table, even with aces in the hole.
For his work, Cross drew a monthly paycheck of seventy dollars, with thirty of it deducted for food. He sent another thirty dollars home to his mother, which left, as he put it, “ten to spend on shoes and riotous living.” But the food was good, he said, at least in the surveying camps. At the larger mess halls along the line run by Joe Desmond’s company, however, the fare tended more toward the dismal. Starches formed a disproportionate share of the food triangle there, and the meat was always tough. A favorite complaint of the tunnel men was that at Desmond’s mess, “the pies have a pay streak that’s too thin.”
While Cross was a slight grade above the bottom in classification, it was nonetheless the “stakemen,” or laborers, who formed the backbone of the effort up and down the line. They loaded or “mucked” rock onto cars, then pushed them out of the tunnels, cleared the surface route of creosote bush and cactus, and followed like drones in the wake of steam shovels, using picks and pry bars and hand shovels to shape the ditches. By the end of March there were nearly 3,000 men at work on the aqueduct, most of them working hard for their $2 per day.
Project statistics show that the average laborer did not stay on such a demanding job for more than two weeks at a time, however. Since bonuses were paid out in ten-day increments, that payout was usually the occasion for a significant number of men to simply walk off the job, headed either for Mojave or for one of the so-called rag camps, or tent saloons, erected by entrepreneurs in the intervening stretches of desert. It was a standing joke among foremen on the line to regularly report having “one crew drunk, one crew sobering up, and one crew working.”
Mulholland once allowed that it was the rare laborer who would endure the conditions for long “if whiskey didn’t keep him broke,” an observation that young surveyor Cross seconded. He had often seen a man take his pay and strike off southward, vowing that he was done forever with work on the blasted aqueduct. In a week or so, the man would return, begging for his job back, having made it only as far as Mojave or the 18-Mile House, a saloon erected hastily in the desert near Cinco. As Cross put it, such a ‘‘hard rock” was not ordinarily a gambler as well. “He just wanted whisky. It made him forget for awhile.”
Cinco, the staging area for work in the Jawbone Division, sprang up along the rail line where there had been nothing but jackrabbits and creosote bush before. Erwin Widney, who signed on the project as a timekeeper shortly after his high school graduation, pointed out that something might indeed come from nothing, for Cinco was now “a great concentration camp for men and materials, both for the aqueduct and railroad.” When he stepped down from his car the morning of his arrival on the job, he saw nothing for hundreds of yards in every direction but stacks of ties, rails, crated spikes, spurs lined with tank cars, flat cars, and ore cars piled high with rock and gravel.
Out into the desert stretched an assemblage of quarters-tents, larger mess tents, rough-boarded shops and storage buildings. Men were busy loading mule-drawn freighter wagons with gallon cans of black powder, crates full of dynamite, feed, kerosene, picks and shovels, and all manner of supplies for satellite camps and work stations arrayed in the distant hills, where the flat line of the distant aqueduct was just visible from where he stood.
Though the work would prove rugged and beyond taxing, there were also the elements that form part of the enduring intrigue and exoticism of the West. For all the hardships, surveyor Cross spoke of the beautiful side of life on the Jawbone: “A windless night seemed to bring the stars closer; the full moon gave light enough to read newsprint” (newspapers were generally two to three days old, arriving on the same thrice-weekly schedule as the mail). No matter how hot the day had been, Cross added, sundown in the dry desert always brought with it relief.
“There were quail, dove, cactus wren and raven,” Cross remembers, “jack rabbit, tortoise, coyote, chuckawalla (lizards), and the ubiquitous rattlesnake—both diamondback and sidewinder.” On one occasion, Cross and his companions came across a huge beehive nestled into a crevice in an otherwise barren cliff side, providing them with a cache of sweet wild honey the likes of which they hadn’t had for months.
Widney recalls the vivid sight of the first mule skinner he encountered on the line, a man in his fifties, handsome “in a renegade and dissipated way . . . a man anyone would turn to look at a second time.” The man seemed called out of Central Casting in a day before Central Casting existed, dressed in the height of skinner fashion, including a large Stetson with a silver-studded leather band, a blue denim shirt, and bright scarf, and “a beautiful silver-studded leather vest and cuffs to match, the latter reaching from the wrist nearly to the elbow.”
In new blue denim pants and napa leather boots, the skinner stood watching a pair of helpers carry out the loading, occasionally calling out a bit of advice. This was a man too well dressed to be a “common” mule driver, Widney thought, noticing that he also seemed to be “pleasantly under the influence of liquor.” In time, Widney would learn that the driver he saw that first morning on the Cinco platform was indeed a legend among his peers. Though most of the skinners dressed modestly, did their own loading, and stayed sober, at least during working hours, this man could handle a team of fourteen mules with ease and was unfazed by running his wagons over treacherous mountainside roads to the highest camps, including certain routes that no one else was willing to brave. “He does it drunk better than sober,” one of the other skinners told Widney, and thus he was left alone, “to do very much as he pleased.”
Because of its location, Cinco was something of an anomaly. Much more typical of the work camps was that known as 30-A, a few miles south of Little Lake, where Widney was permanently assigned. That camp consisted of a half-dozen boxcars that had been converted into a combination bunkhouse/kitchen/dining room/storehouse/commissary, one corral for mules, and an adjacent tent that was the blacksmith shop. The “bunkhouse” was frigid in winter and an oven in the summer, though on mild nights, many of the men took their cots up to the running boards atop the cars. (Men provided their own cots, pads, and blankets.) “There is no place as fine as a high desert plateau for surveying the celestial kingdom,” Widney recalls, “and lying on your back on a comfortable cot with no enclosure but the great limitless universe is the most pleasing manner to enjoy it.”
Despite the occasional diversions, the divisions where Cross and Widney were assigned were doing the most difficult and dangerous work. Inside the tunnels the
mselves, three shifts worked steadily at their tasks in the light thrown by candles made of stearic acid. There would be nine holes drilled with the proper spacing, a stick of dynamite inserted in each, fuses run, then lighted.
“Fire” was the call as everyone ran to the portal to wait. When the explosions came, the men counted the number carefully. As Cross put it, “No man wanted to drop a pick into a live stick of dynamite.” The moment the air cleared, the ore cars were run back in, and the muckers began shoveling. It was a laborious process, one that repeated itself endlessly. While the holes for charges were initially bored by hand, and muckers themselves pushed the rock-laden cars up the exit tracks, the arrival of electricity in the various locations speeded up the process considerably. For the men themselves, power drills and motorized cars transformed the basically intolerable to the merely exhausting.
As challenging as the tunneling was, so was the work to build the massive steel siphons used to carry the water across certain of the deep canyons, including the most formidable at Jawbone Canyon itself. (There would be twenty-three siphons constructed in all, eight built of reinforced concrete, the rest—except for one at Sand Canyon—of steel plate, ranging in thickness from ¼ inch to 1⅛ inches.) First, the siphons had to be carefully designed in accordance with length and distance and rate of drop and rise, and even then there was a certain amount of dead reckoning going on, as Mulholland admitted. He thought these structures would work, but nothing of such scale had been done before.
The Jawbone Siphon itself was drawn up to be a little more than 8,000 feet long and 10 feet in diameter in places, and to operate under a pressure of 365 pounds per square inch (water pressure in a typical modern home comes out of the faucet at 50 pounds per square inch). In some places, the walls of the canyon slope upward at a grade of 35 degrees (by contrast, the maximum grade allowable on the US Interstate Highway system is 6 percent). That all might sound daunting enough to the nonhydraulic engineer, but to Mulholland, the principal issue was to come up with a siphon light enough to be held in place as it traversed such terrain yet still strong enough not to rupture under pressure.
“Theoretically,” he said, “the most economical pipe . . . would be a tapering one, the large diameter at the top, where there is no pressure, and the small diameter at the bottom.” While it was impossible to construct such tapering pipes at the time, Mulholland got around the problem with a design that stepped down the diameter of the pipe at several places where the Jawbone Siphon descended the canyon wall. As the pipe went up the other side, it would increase in diameter correspondingly.
Once all the calculations were made, drawings were sent to foundries in Pennsylvania and New Jersey for fabrication. Sections of pipe would be freighted by flatcar to Los Angeles in minimum lots of 30,000 pounds, then sent on up the new aqueduct supply line to be stored at the appropriate siding.
It was at that point that matters became tricky: How to transport a section of steel pipe 37 feet long and 1⅛ inches thick, weighing 52,000 pounds, up several miles of dirt road? In that particular case, it was a section of pipe to be used in the Jawbone Siphon, its size outstripping even the abilities of the caterpillar engines. Mulholland and Harvey Van Norman finally managed it the old-fashioned way, devising a pair of huge wagons with tires two feet wide pulled by a team of fifty-two mules.
Once at the work site, however, the difficulties continued. How, for instance, to lift a twenty-six-ton section of pipe up the side of a thousand-foot cliff, maneuver it into near vertical position, then rivet it to the previously installed section? At Jawbone Canyon and others of the most difficult locations, incline railroads were built to haul the pipes up to otherwise unreachable spots, and aerial platform and gondola lines were erected in order to carry workmen between cliff top and desert floor. A system of winches and heavy rope was used to lift and hold dangling pipe sections while they were being riveted into place.
Even the riveting process itself was laborious. While the rivet holes had been punched at the foundry and carefully matched up prior to shipment, each rivet could be as much as an inch and a half in diameter and weigh up to five pounds. Each had to be set by hand and driven in place by an electrically powered compressor hammer, a process difficult enough when pipe was lying horizontally on solid ground, let alone dangling on the side of a cliff. Along with the development of a workable tunnel-drilling routine, an efficient riveting process was crucial to bringing the project in on time and within budget. Accordingly, Mulholland instituted the bonus system for riveting crews as well, and the ever cost-conscious Chief was happy to report that crews working under the bonus schedule were able to increase their average process from 7,725 rivets a month to 11,459.
Joining the sections of siphon and pipe was arduous, but keeping them in place, even for the horizontal sections of pipe, proved to be another problem. On the desert floor, where the grade was reasonable, Mulholland first tried burying the pipe in trenches, but the cost of excavation—as much as $10 a foot—proved to be prohibitive. There also proved to be another issue: given the high mineral content of the soil and the inevitable leakage at joints, buried pipe rusted more quickly and, of course, could not be easily spotted, repaired, or recoated.
In the end, Mulholland decided that nearly all of the steel pipe used along the line would have to be laid above ground, on supporting piers, with a typical span averaging about twenty-four feet, an approach that in the end proved far cheaper than trench digging. But the pier system also involved a bit of trial and error. Initially, it was thought necessary to extend the supports in a semicircular fashion, cupping the pipe to a point about halfway up the sides—almost like a series of concrete, metal, and wooden hands cupping the pipe as it crossed the brutal terrain. The first such system was constructed at the Nine-Mile Canyon Siphon in the Grapevine Division to the north.
However, when a section of the pipe there was filled in order to test the strength of the arrangement, there came an unexpected result. The supports proved sufficiently sturdy to hold up the load, but the pressure of the water on the sides of the pipe was so great that it flattened and bulged outward, distorting what had been a circle of steel plate into an oval. The tops of the cupping supports were sheared off in an instant, catapulting pieces into the surrounding desert.
Even at age fifty-four, Mulholland realized, there were always things to be learned. Following a survey of the wreckage, he said, the supports would be built only as high as what the grade called for. Once the pipe had been assembled atop the supports and filled with water, and only then, would the support sides be added, thus acceding to the final shape that the pipe itself had taken. Man would have to adapt to the will of the iron pipe, not the other way around.
Even with such setbacks, Mulholland was happy with the way the steel piping process shaped up. He would be paying the mills a little less than two cents per pound for the pipe, and even with transcontinental freight, plus the freight bill for hauling up to Cinco by the Southern Pacific, plus the cost of mules, wagons, and hay, and with engineering, equipment, and general field overhead also figured in, he calculated that he was laying pipe over some of the most god-awful country in California for a total of four cents per pound. In contrast, commissioners had let a private contract for two small siphons in the Saugus Division for five cents a pound. Just more proof in Mulholland’s eyes that in aqueduct matters, they would do better to listen to him.
While the difficult and tedious laying of pipeline continued in the Jawbone and elsewhere, some of the most spectacular work in 1909 was within the tunnels all along the route. In August 1909, crews set a world record for soft-rock tunnel driving in Tunnel 17 at Jawbone, cutting through 1,061 feet of sandstone in a month. Earlier, a crew at the Elizabeth Tunnel broke an American record for hard-rock tunneling by boring through 604 feet of granite in a month.
Such accomplishments, Mulholland was quick to remind anyone who would listen, were attributable to the effects of the bonus system. When he was hauled before the ci
ty auditor to explain why the November bonus payrolls were so large, Mulholland patiently explained. His men had dug a total of 9,131 feet of tunnels during the period, almost twice the normal amount. The total wages paid amounted to $9.87 per foot. If there had been no bonus system in place and had the men dug only what they were required to by contract, the city would have paid out $13.80 per foot. Not only had the bonus system saved about $4 a foot in costs, it was driving construction forward at record rates. The groundbreaking system not only underscored Mulholland’s ingenuity, it also exhibited his ability to adapt and to maintain the loyalty of a huge workforce despite grueling conditions. He was not slave-driving his men, but rather was making them masters of their own destiny, an approach that would mitigate against labor problems for the life of the project.
Much of the encouraging news had been passed along to the citizens of Los Angeles by newspapers, including a two-page splash in the September 9, 1909, Los Angeles Times by Allen Kelly, who had been covering the project for the paper from the outset. Kelly, who worked as an engineer’s assistant early in his career, accompanied Mulholland on a trip along the route before construction began in 1907. At that time, he said, there was nothing more than a camp or two in the mountains, and he repeated a common theme when he wrote that it was “a notable feat of the imagination to call up anything like a credible mental picture of a great stream of water flowing across those vast stretches of desolate plain and under leagues of jumbled mountains.”
By the fall of 1909, however, all had been transformed, Kelly said: “That vast region of solitude and desolation has been converted into a humming hive of human industry.” He doubted that he could do more than hit the highlights, Kelly said, but he gave it his best. Though nearly all was preparatory work in the year between approval of the $23 million bond issue and October 1908, Kelly reported that in the eleven months since, there had been twenty-two miles of tunnel dug, sixteen miles of concrete-lined canal finished, and four miles of headwaters ditch dug in the Owens Valley. As a result, he said, there would be Owens Valley water flowing to the San Fernando Valley by 1912, a year ahead of schedule.
Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles Page 14