Kelly went on to detail how $8 million had been expended to date, about half on the preparatory work and much of the rest spent over the previous year. One of his more poetic descriptions was of the Chief’s pet dredges at work on the big ditch in the Owens Valley, making them sound like creatures out of H. G Wells: “They float in the canal, cave down the ground with hydraulic nozzles, discharge the mud on both sides, and walk along on spud legs, towing transformers behind them.”
Kelly noted that with the completion of the Division Creek and Cottonwood Power Plants under engineer Scattergood’s supervision, the city was now paying for project power only on the Saugus and Elizabeth Divisions. And he shared Mulholland’s observation regarding the unexpected ease with which the tunneling through the Jawbone Division had been proceeding: at the rate things were going there, the Chief had told him, and if it had been sandstone underground all the way between the Owens Valley and Los Angeles, the entire line of the aqueduct could have been made of one great tunnel, and for less money than was budgeted in the bargain.
In the difficult Saugus Division, two and a half miles of tunnel work had been completed, and a shaded alpine settlement of several hundred had grown up near the South Portal of the Elizabeth project, where electric power was now being used to haul the blasted rock out of the bore. All twenty-eight of the caterpillar traction engines were now in place along the route, though 650 mules also shared the work of hauling.
All the progress was due to “the creative genius and engineering skill of Mulholland,” said Kelly, adding that Mulholland’s method of supervision also seemed remarkable. “I have seen him sketch with a stick in the sand the outline of a piece of work or a mechanical device for the man selected to do the work and then leave the man to work the thing out in detail.” According to Kelly, Mulholland’s elaborations were simple: “There is the principle. Apply it in your own way.”
Kelly claimed never to have seen the superintendent with a notebook in his hand. He had never seen him make a written note or consult a document when asked to provide a statistic. Yet he could break out almost any cost detail of the project for the Board of Public Works: of the untold thousands of rivets to be driven into pipe along the route, Mulholland said, small ones could be set for five and two-thirds cents apiece and large ones for twenty-seven cents. Likewise, he could translate the cost of a bale of hay into the number of feet that a mule who had eaten that hay was able to pull a pipe-laden wagon. The instruments he used to survey and plot the original 235-mile route of the aqueduct consisted of a pocket compass and an aneroid barometer. If he’d been born in another time or place, the reporter theorized, Mulholland might have been a general and achieved “prodigies of destruction instead of construction.”
With the work finally well underway, J. B. Lippincott arranged a kind of summit meeting of the various division supervisors to facilitate the exchange of ideas, and as could have been expected, the assistant arranged for his Chief to deliver the keynote. Those present included W. C. Aston, the grumpy foreman who was less than happy to welcome Dr. Taylor into his Elizabeth Tunnel camp, Harvey Van Norman, in charge of the Owens Valley Division, and Tom Flanigan, whose crews had set the soft-rock drilling record in the Red Rock Division. Mulholland’s charge was to speak to his managers on “The Organization and What Is to Be Expected of It.”
Mulholland rose, glanced about the room, and began, “I have got what I expected of the organization: loyalty and efficient work.” He nodded for emphasis, then continued. “When I have been impatient and have criticized you in my rude and rough way, your work has rebuked me.” With that, he thanked the group, and sat down, his “speech” having exceeded the length of its title, but not by much.
J. Waldo Smith, who was supervising the building of New York City’s 163-mile-long Catskill Aqueduct, came out for a look at what Mulholland was doing and confided to reporter Kelly that he had expected little. Though he had heard something of the project, Smith attributed most of it to California “brag and boom talk.” After his inspection, however, Smith admitted to being he saw, especially the courage of the men undertaking such work through such a forbidding region.
In the final analysis, and as an engineer well accustomed to the Tammany Hall quid pro quo system of inducements, Smith was most profoundly impressed by the fact that a municipality was handling the work “with its own force instead of by contract and doing it economically, efficiently and without graft or suspicion of graft.” In Mulholland, Smith added, “they had the good fortune to find the right man and the good sense to trust him.”
FAIR MONETARY RECOGNITION
ON OCTOBER 18, 1909, WITH WORK APPARENTLY going swimmingly on the aqueduct, the Board of Water Commissioners met and voted to raise Mulholland’s salary, which had climbed to $10,000 over the years, to $15,000, bringing it equal with that of J. Waldo Smith, chief engineer of the Catskills water project. As one editorial noted, it was recognition of the services Mulholland had provided both as superintendent of the water system and as chief engineer of the aqueduct. His counterparts involved in similar projects elsewhere “usually command much greater salaries,” the writer contended, and the raise was “only a fair monetary recognition of the services he is performing for the city.”
In early November 1909, Mulholland spoke at the University of Southern California to announce that work on the aqueduct was virtually “half finished.” In terms of mileage, the Chief clarified, only a quarter of the 233 miles were completed, but given that the most difficult work, that of tunneling, was almost finished, half of the work was behind him.
Mulholland did not tell the story on that day, but one notable incident had taken place during the summer’s tunnel work on the Jawbone Division. Mulholland had come up the line for a consultation with division supervisor A. C. Hansen, an able engineer and manager, but well known as a man lacking in humor. Mulholland listened patiently as the dour Swede ran down the list of operations, drilling rate, and progress, then finally interrupted.
“How about the Pinto Tunnel?” Mulholland asked.
Hansen glanced up from his figures, clearly discomfited. “The Pinto’s fine,” he said. Then after some paper shuffling and throat clearing, he added: “Though we do have a man caught in there.”
Mulholland stared back. “Is he dead?” the Chief asked.
“No,” Hansen said, explaining that the man had been cut off from the surface by a cave-in. They were hard at work at the very moment boring a tunnel that would reach him. Meantime, crews had managed to drive a two-inch pipe through the muck that carried fresh air down to the trapped miner while they worked. “We’ve been talking to him through it,” Hansen said.
“How long has this been?” Mulholland asked.
“Three days,” Hansen said.
Mulholland, who’d heard nothing of all this, was astonished. “He must be nearly starved to death,” the Chief said.
Actually he wasn’t, Hansen said. “We’ve been rolling hard boiled eggs to him down the pipe.”
Mulholland considered this with the same apparent gravity Hansen had used to deliver the news. “Well then,” Mulholland asked finally, “have you been charging him for his board?”
“No,” the concerned Hansen said. “Do you think I ought to?”
The unfortunate miner was eventually rescued, but thus was born another story illustrating a legendary temperament. Mulholland was not a man who asked to be pleased by others; on the contrary, those who worked with him enjoyed his company and wanted to please him. A good part of it had to do with his pragmatic, get-the-job-done approach. As he once told John Gray, superintendent at the Elizabeth Tunnel, “I’d rather get a shovelful of muck out of the tunnel than all the cost reports on the job.”
Whatever was to account for his ability to motivate men, the pace of the work continued to accelerate. On December 1, 1909, Mulholland appeared before a joint meeting of the City Council and the Board of Public Works to announce a formal revised completion date of May 1, 1912, a full
year earlier than originally estimated. While he had surmised as much earlier, owing to the intricacies of the project’s financing, Mulholland had waited to make a public announcement before the council.
In order to meet that revised deadline, more men would have to be put to work, and cement and steel and other supplies would have to arrive more quickly. Thus, the rate of bond sales would have to increase as well, with the entirety of what was left needing to be sold a year sooner than planned. This would mean paying out $250,000 more in interest in 1911, Mulholland pointed out, an amount that would have to be raised through an increase in taxes. In the end, the money would come back to the city in the form of revenues from water sales that would begin a year sooner than expected, but meantime, the city would have to authorize the added expenditure. And, more significantly, buyers for the bonds would need to be found quickly.
As difficult as it may be to believe from the present-day perspective, no one expected a great deal of resistance to this proposed tax hike. But the issue of bond sales was a more ticklish matter. By this time, William Mathews had resigned his post as city attorney to devote his full energies to the legal affairs of the aqueduct. His attempts to convince the Kountze-Leach syndicate in New York to accelerate any advances on the previously determined schedule of bond payouts fell on deaf ears. Bond sales in general had slowed, the investment bankers said; thus, they could not issue advances for sales they saw little likelihood of making any time soon.
As a result, Mulholland was not only unable to add to the work force—but he also faced the agonizing prospect of laying off men who were making such remarkable progress. There were 3,600 men at work through the first quarter of 1910, but by May, the money to pay them would be gone. According to his reckoning, 2,700 men would have to be let go. In desperation, Mulholland traveled to New York with Mathews in April, but even the Chief couldn’t change the minds of the bankers, and with the work stymied, the dreaded layoffs had to be made.
Andrew Carnegie had recently appeared at a Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce banquet where Adna Chaffee announced his intention to see a bronze tablet erected in recognition of Mulholland’s efforts, and when Carnegie, then seventy-four, rose to speak, he echoed Mulholland’s frustrations with a financial system that seemed at times to be opposed to the very notion of progress. Carnegie, the steel baron who had always railed against companies whose chief product seemed to be the issue of stock certificates, told the Chamber of Commerce, “The men at the head of things, such as railroads and other great corporations—the real ‘doers’—are poor men.” Carnegie proclaimed, “In time the stock gambler and the parasites of Wall Street and their ilk will not be recognized as men by men.”
It was a sentiment that Mulholland shared. Though he could not know the true reasons for the failure of those in what he had come to call “the halls of Mammon” to advance funds to the city, it was his certain feeling that the inaction was “calculated to seriously embarrass the city in its efforts to keep construction work going on the aqueduct.”
Upon his return from New York, a frustrated Mulholland laid out a dire scenario: “We will have to do something immediately. . . . We must shut down all work and discharge all of the men employed on the aqueduct except for a few . . . or the banks of Los Angeles will have to invest in our bonds. We have a vast amount of expensive machinery which would stand idle; we have about 600 head of horses which must be fed, and we have a large amount of equipment representing considerable daily expense, whether idle or in use.”
Los Angeles Mayor George Alexander opined that local power companies, backed by Wall Street interests, had worked behind the scenes to quash the advances on bond sales, but in the end it seemed that Mulholland and Mathews had been more convincing with the Eastern interests than they first believed. On July 19, papers, including the Los Angeles Herald, carried the news that the Kountze-Leach syndicate had found buyers after all: the New York Life Insurance Company was taking $500,000 of the bonds, and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was buying another $500,000. In addition, the syndicate itself was purchasing $530,000. Finally, with the coffers refilled, Mulholland was able to put 2,000 laid-off men back to work.
A reporter once declared that “if Mulholland told people he was building the aqueduct out of green cheese, they’d not only believe him but take an oath it was so.” If it was overstatement, it was only moderately so, for ultimately it was the demonstrated progress on the route as well as the sound financial track record of the water department that convinced the Eastern interests that the aqueduct bonds constituted one “California boom and brag” investment that was sound.
Shortly after Mathews and Mulholland returned from their unsuccessful trip to Wall Street, the National Geographic published a long article in its July 1910 issue, accompanied by a number of dramatic photographs, highlighting the progress on the project—one hundred miles of aqueduct completed by June 1, with thirty-six of them tunneled, it was claimed—emphasizing the fact that the city, with Mulholland at the helm, was in control of its own destiny. Given the efficiency with which the work had advanced to date, there was no reason to doubt that it would be completed in accordance with the revised schedule and would begin paying for itself within two years.
“This is a public work without any politics,” the piece pointed out. “There are no men on the payrolls who have outlived their usefulness, or have been failures in life and have found a berth because of friendship at the city hall. . . . Every man in a position above that of day laborer received his certification from the City Civil Service Commission.”
The city’s average daily consumption presently stood at about 35 million gallons, the piece went on to say, and it was projected that the figure would rise to about 110 million by 1925. The new aqueduct would deliver 260 million gallons per day all by itself. In addition, the story pointed out that voters had earlier in the year approved an additional bond issue of $3.5 million to be used for development of powerhouses along the route of the aqueduct in the San Gabriel Mountains. Mulholland estimated that power sales alone could net the city about $1.4 million per year. The added cost was well worth it, he said, an investment that would within twenty years “turn back into the city treasury the entire $24.5 million provided for the construction of the aqueduct, with interest.”
Over the previous decade, the total manufacturing output of Los Angeles had grown from $5 million in 1900, to $30 million in 1905, and was predicted to top $75 million by the end of 1910. Given a burgeoning cotton-growing industry in the Imperial Valley, the outlook for milling operations in Los Angeles seemed bright, the piece asserted. Though the story was written by Burt Heinly, Mulholland’s secretary, the statistics seemed to speak for themselves. What was costing Los Angeles $23.5 million, Heinly insisted, would have required $40 million if contractors were doing the work, and that presumed the unlikely prospect of no contractor cost overruns—none of which had been encountered thus far on the project.
Whether it was the persuasiveness of Mulholland, Mathews, or such encomiums, including those of Catskills project chief J. Waldo Smith, or Panama Canal engineer John Freeman, another $1.5 million had flowed in, and work was back on track. Though some of the 2,000 who were laid off had drifted to other work, a raise to $3 per day in the miners’ pay had many skilled workers hurrying back eagerly.
On the night of October 1, 1910, however, the attention of the city was diverted from aqueduct issues, when the notoriously anti-labor Los Angeles Times was bombed during a campaign to organize local workers by the International Ironworkers Union. Since 1906, the union had carried out a series of more than a hundred such bombings at steel works around the nation, intending to force management to the bargaining table. Though, as was usual, the saboteurs’ intent was to be more provocative than deadly, they inadvertently placed their dynamite charge in a suitcase in an alley outside the Times building just above a spot where the gas mains ran. In addition, and unknown to the bombers, the building was full of employees hard at work
on an Extra edition.
The explosion took out one wall of the building, and the resulting fire destroyed it and the neighboring printing plant, killing twenty-one inside the building and injuring more than a hundred. Though the Ironworkers Union and Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, immediately denounced the action and disavowed any connection with it, most assumed that labor organizers were responsible.
The furor delayed an excursion of Chamber of Commerce and City of Los Angeles officials intended to mark the virtual completion of the Southern Pacific’s line through the Owens Valley, but, finally, on a Saturday morning, October 29, Mulholland and Mayor Alexander led a procession of twenty-five automobiles northward out of Los Angeles. The group stopped for a tour of the works at the South Portal of the Elizabeth Tunnel and pressed on through the San Gabriel Mountains, with Mulholland at times guiding the motorcade in surreal detours through some of the tunnels that would one day be full of aqueduct water. By nightfall, the group reached Mojave, where, given that there were nearly a hundred people in the party, they were put up in a series of Pullman cars on a rail siding instead of at the Harvey House.
The following day, the party was off from Mojave, bound for the foot of the Owens Valley, where they would spend the second night. Along the way, Mulholland diverted the procession to view a section of covered aqueduct crossing the upper stretches of the Antelope Valley. From that point all the way to Haiwee Pass, a distance of nearly a hundred forlorn miles, there remained only twenty-three miles of aqueduct to be completed, Mulholland told them.
Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles Page 15