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

by Standiford, Les

  The effect of the current drought cycle, with Sierra Nevada snowfall less than 40 percent of what is normal, on the “limitless” Owens Valley Watershed is reflected in the following DWP statistics: from July 1, 2011, to June 30, 2012, the Los Angeles Aqueduct supplied 266,700 acre-feet of water, or 49 percent of the city’s supply; in 2012–2013, that figure dropped to 113,400 acre-feet, or 20 percent of what the city consumed; in 2013–2014, the aqueduct carried only 61,000 acre-feet, about 10 percent of the 580,000 acre-feet used.

  During a February 14, 2014, appearance in drought-stricken Fresno, President Obama called upon an end to battles between the interests of Northern and Southern California and between agricultural interests and those of the cities. However, even he steered well clear of taking any specific sides in any water dispute for, as he said, he “wanted to get out of California alive.”

  Though some today lament the fact that no compromise was reached that could have somehow served the interests of both the Owens Valley and the City of Los Angeles, that view disregards any number of realities of the time. And it might also be noted that hindsight is always amazingly keen.

  Certainly, if there had been a Reclamation Service project undertaken in the Owens Valley and if all the waters of the Owens River had been diverted to that use in 1905, there would be a great deal more alfalfa being grown north of Big Pine today, and there would likely be a fair amount of vegetable farming and orchard tending going on in the valley as well. In an 1892 interview with a Riverside newspaper, Fred Eaton presented a dazzling view of the agricultural possibilities: “There is an orange orchard doing well in the lower valley,” he said, “and tomatoes ripen through the winter. I found all of the varieties of deciduous fruits, berries and grapes. . . . Cherries are also successfully grown. Apples, raisins, prunes and almonds excel, and I ate peaches of unusually fine flavor.”

  Had that reclamation project trumped Mulholland’s, there could well be three or four times as many residents in the Owens Valley as are there at present, or even more, along with a corresponding greater number of schools, housing developments, and big-box retailers. But it is equally easy to argue that had William Mulholland not fought for and built the Los Angeles Aqueduct, Southern California as we now know it would not exist.

  In the end, it seems that only one thing is inarguable: conflicting passions that swirl in the wake of William Mulholland and the building of the aqueduct will never be resolved. Given the ultimate scope of his achievement and the outsize nature of his personality, the fuel of controversy is inexhaustible. Mulholland himself must have surmised something of the complexity his legacy would entail, though it is an open question just how much he would have agonized about it.

  Unquestionably, Mulholland was no ordinary civil servant, and as engineers go, he scarcely represents the norm. He took on an impossible project and brought it to fruition without the lure of a penny beyond his stipulated pay, largely because, as one writer put it, “to his simple and rugged heart, a great Los Angeles meant a big Los Angeles.” What he sought was work that mattered, and those seeking to understand what drove him might consider a statement he once made to a reporter looking to learn what made Mulholland tick. “Damn a man who doesn’t read books,” he said. “The test of a man is his knowledge of humanity, of the politics of human life, his comprehension of the things that move men.” Uncharacteristic sentiments for a civil engineer perhaps, but therein may lie his secret.

  In that brief autobiography sketch written in February 1930, not long after his retirement as chief, Mulholland spoke proudly of his accomplishments. “We began with three or four men, and we now employ some three thousand,” he said, still identifying himself as an employee of the water department. “Daily I receive letters from water works men all over the country inquiring how things are done here and how we keep up with the ever increasing rapid expansion,” he said, before adding with no apparent irony, “I seem to have more of a reputation outside of the City of Los Angeles.”

  In defense of his reputation, Mulholland had a few things to say: “No politics ever got into this office. I have had to be rather firm in dismissing councilmen seeking positions for friends or henchmen,” he declared. “I had no personal interest in politics but I had good staunch friends who, knowing that my sole object in life was to make things go right in this Department, devoted themselves to keeping things off my back.” (A coworker recalls Mulholland’s response to one brick maker who appealed endlessly to have his materials purchased for use on the aqueduct: “After mature thought on the matter,” Mulholland finally wrote the brick maker, he had decided to build the aqueduct “of leather.”)

  In sum, it seems he felt there was little to apologize for. “No other single man in a single life time has built such a water department as we now have here in the City of Los Angeles. I have served the city for 52 years, and am the oldest in service in the State of California.” So far as he was concerned, his life was an open book. “I belong to several professional organizations,” he said, “but I never have been a member of any secret order. Although never a soldier I have devoted most of my life to the service of the City of Los Angeles, the County of Los Angeles and the State of California.” The words were the definitive close for consulting engineer William Mulholland.

  In that characteristically terse summation of his life’s work, there was only one reference to the building of the aqueduct: “After a few years of drouth which began in 1895 the city was compelled to go to the Owens River in Inyo County, California for its water.” Not long after he had delivered this model of understatement, Mulholland agreed to lead a visitor about the area near where Mulholland Memorial Fountain now stands, with its plaque reminding visitors of the foresight, vision, and engineering ability of the man who “made possible the rapid growth and industrial development of this community.”

  Mulholland had in tow his first biographer, the young USC graduate student Elizabeth Spriggs. Not far from the site of the shack where he lived when he received his promotion to foreman of the ditch-tending gang, Mulholland stopped the history student to point out a two-foot-thick live oak growing near the intersection of Riverside Drive and Los Feliz Boulevard.

  It was the morning of March 22, 1930, when they took their stroll, Ms. Spriggs recalled, but Mulholland began to describe with remarkable clarity a day some fifty years before, when he was shoveling out the channel of a ditch that once ran where they were now standing. That oak tree was a three-inch sapling at the time, Mulholland told her, and had been about to topple into the water where he was making his cut.

  Mulholland described stopping to take up the sapling. He climbed out of the ditch and walked a few steps to a spot he thought would make a suitable spot for a tree to grow. He replanted the sapling there and tended it for as long as he lived nearby. And a half-century later, there it was still, he pointed out, now a towering tree. Mulholland pressed his palm against the oak’s thick trunk, Spriggs says, and gave her an inquisitive look.

  “I saved its life once,” he told her. “I wonder if it is conscious of my presence today.”

  He was speaking of a tree, but his words might as easily have been directed at a place.

  NOTES

  As this is not a work of traditional scholarship, and in the interest of avoiding distraction for the general reader, I have dispensed with the use of footnotes in the text itself. Much of the story is drawn from contemporary newspaper accounts and LADWP documents, though these materials have often been previously reported piecemeal and in varying contexts, according to the overriding thesis of an individual volume. The attempt here is not one of historical archaeology, though certain heretofore unexamined materials play their part. Nor is there any political agenda intended. The goal is to trace a factual story of remarkable, other-era accomplishment with a somewhat larger than life individual as protagonist. Still, in order to aid those interested in further reading, I have endeavored to give appropriate credit to sources, either in the text, or, where singular c
ontributions seem to merit it, in the following notes. Any oversight in this regard is unintentional.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The original Mulholland Drive ran from Calabasas to Cahuenga Pass near the Hollywood Bowl (a kind of dogleg off today’s US 101 through the Santa Monica Mountains) and was actually christened “Mulholland Highway” in December 1924. The most popular leg of today’s Mulholland Drive is the 10.5-mile stretch between I-405 and the Hollywood Freeway. Completed later was a 35-mile section westward from Calabasas, crossing Topanga Canyon and terminating at the Pacific Coast Highway at Leo Carillo State Park. It is known today as Mulholland Highway. The entire route is sometimes referred to as the Mulholland Scenic Corridor, though one section between Calabasas and the 405 is an unpaved fire trail open only to hikers and bikers.

  The material regarding Mulholland Drive as a trysting place is drawn from the introduction to Catherine Mulholland’s original manuscript, “William Mulholland and the Making of Los Angeles.”

  Ms. Mulholland’s comments regarding previous biographies of her grandfather are found in the preface to her original manuscript.

  Ms. Mulholland’s remarks on Chinatown and other personal experiences as a Mulholland are found in the introduction to her original manuscript. The much-reduced published version of the original manuscript is entitled William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles, here-after referred to as WM&RLA.

  In WM&RLA, Ms. Mulholland cites a “lead article” in the New York Times of May 1, 1991, in regard to Chinatown as documentary. This author finds two New York Times articles, both by Robert Reinhold, that contain nearly identical references to Chinatown as a virtual documentary chronicling the alleged nefarious practices of Los Angeles officials. One piece on April 23, 1991, concerns the water-supply difficulties facing Las Vegas; the other, on May 18, 1991, concerns a settlement pertaining to Mono Lake with Owens Valley officials.

  This writer is greatly indebted to Christine Mulholland, niece of Catherine, for her insight into her aunt’s devotion to chronicling the Mulholland legacy. Christine Mulholland’s brother, Tom, a San Joaquin Valley rancher, is the lone surviving male bearing the family name.

  An appreciation of Mr. Kaplan’s career is included in an obituary published by the New York Times on March 4, 2014.

  1. HOW DREAMS MIGHT END

  Hopewell’s account is found in “Transcript of Testimony and Verdict of the Coroner’s Jury in the Inquest over Victims of St. Francis Dam Disaster.”

  Details of the dam’s collapse are drawn principally from contemporary issues of the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Herald. Outland’s Man-Made Disaster and The St. Francis Dam Disaster, edited by Doyce Nunis, are illuminating book-length treatments.

  The report of the workers’ lunch atop the St. Francis Dam the day of the collapse is from an interview with DWP engineer Clark Keely, in Matson, William Mulholland, page 54.

  Mulholland’s comments are drawn from contemporary news accounts and from the transcript of the coroner’s inquest.

  2. DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO POINTS

  Details of the modern-day motor route tracing the path of the Los Angeles Aqueduct are drawn largely from the author’s notes from a trip made in January 2013.

  LADWP spokesman Fred Barker estimates that Owens Lake regeneration efforts have reduced the dust pollution by about 90 percent over past decades.

  Mulholland’s sobriquet for the river is noted in Layne, “Water and Power for a Great City,” page 7. Layne’s work, informative though scarcely to be found, was commissioned by the Department of Water and Power at the time of its fiftieth anniversary.

  The trip undertaken by Fred Eaton and William Mulholland to the Owens Valley in late 1904 is originally referenced in multiple news accounts published in Los Angeles newspapers in 1905, attendant to public announcement of the Los Angeles Aqueduct project. It has been embroidered upon in countless retellings since.

  3. LUCK OF THE IRISH

  Mulholland’s claim regarding his vote for Tilden comes from his “Sketch,” page 1. His oft-repeated quote regarding the ease with which he made $25 walking across Panama also derives from the “Sketch.”

  DWP engineer and unofficial department historian Fred Barker once ran across information that suggested that the original San Pedro grantee never had children—it was likely his brother whose grandchild was Manuel Dominguez, the man who offered William Mulholland his first job in “water.” When Fred Barker informed Catherine Mulholland that she might have made a mistake, she was unfazed. “That’s hardly the only mistake in that book.” Given that her original manuscript totals more than 1,000 pages and was planned as a two-volume study by Ms. Mulholland, one might be inclined to forgive the slip.

  4. IN MYSTERY IS THE SOURCE

  Census figures throughout—except for those cited by individuals in news stories, reports, and the like—are from the US Bureau of the Census.

  The stories are recounted by Lippincott in “William Mulholland—Engineer, Pioneer, Raconteur,” his two-part appreciation of his former supervisor.

  The oft-repeated anecdote regarding the incident that determined Mulholland’s choice of career appears originally in Prosser, “The Maker of Los Angeles,” page 43.

  The often cited recollection from Mulholland’s former roommate Brooks is contained in the LADWP Historical Records files: Ephemera, Box II:8.

  The familiar riposte concerning Mulholland’s qualifications comes from an interview with Allen Kelly, published in the Los Angeles Times on July 7, 1907.

  The recollections regarding the Zanja Madre are found in Mulholland’s “Sketch.”

  One can have a look at the original water main by peering over a balcony into the basement of the Avila Adobe in the Los Angeles Plaza Historic District. Americans with Disabilities Act requirements have resulted in the closing of the staircase leading down to the main itself, but a visit to this site gives some sense of what the city must have seemed like during Mulholland’s early days in “water.”

  The story of Brooks’s stepping aside for Mulholland is from Layne, “Water and Power for a Great City,” page 54.

  The Times account of the threat to the city’s water supply and Mulholland’s stalwart actions was published on July 16, 1890.

  The material concerning Mulholland’s wife and his mother-in-law, Frank, as well as other family matters, are drawn from Catherine Mulholland’s original manuscript, “William Mulholland and the Making of Los Angeles,” chapter 13, “Marriage.”

  The ground floor of today’s DWP offices in the Ferraro Building on North Hope Street in downtown Los Angeles (surrounded by—not unexpectedly—an expansive water feature and fountains) contains a sizable exhibit on matters Mulhollandian. One of the more interesting items is an imposing longcase or “grandfather” clock that Mulholland gave his wife, Lillie, on their tenth anniversary. LADWP’s Fred Barker makes a weekly descent from his office to wind the device, which bears the discernible imprint of the Chief’s thumbnail from his own years of tending to the clock.

  5. WHOSE WATER IS IT ANYWAY?

  A clear picture of Los Angeles in the 1890s may be drawn from a glance at the pages of the newspapers of the day, accessible online and in various Southern California library holdings.

  Intricacies of the bargaining over the city’s acquisition of the water company were reported in news accounts of the day; the matter has been carefully detailed in Kahrl, Water and Power; Hoffman, Vision or Villainy; Catherine Mulholland, WM&RLA; Nadeau, The Water Seekers; and Ostrom, Water & Politics, among others.

  Mulholland’s observation on office detail is from McCarthy, “Water,” December 18, 1937, page 28.

  The “mighty memory” anecdote that is often retold may be in some ways apocryphal, says LADWP spokesman Fred Barker—detailed records for the location and size of mains, hydrants, and so on, go back well into the 1870s. On the other hand, and given his disdain for the sort of inquiry being made of him, Mulholland might well have enjoyed
sketching out the information for bureaucrats on the spot.

  The tale concerning Mulholland’s advice to the water company’s attorney comes from part II of Lippincott’s “William Mulholland—Engineer, Pioneer, Raconteur.”

  6. A CIVIL SERVANT BORN

  The information concerning the family’s view of Fred Eaton’s political motivations comes from a 2014 interview with Harold “Hal” Eaton, Fred Eaton’s great-grandson.

  For Eaton on the source of underground water, see the Los Angeles Times, March 23, 1900.

  For Mulholland’s visit to the summer home of I. W. Hellman, see Spriggs, “The History of the Domestic Water Supply of Los Angeles,” pages 57–58.

  Mulholland’s public comments on the value of the private water company may be found in Mulholland, Office Files, Speech to the Pasadena Board of Trade, April 6, 1904; Speech to the Sunset Club, April 1905.

  For public perception and passage of the water company acquisition bond issue, see the Los Angeles Times, August 11, 1901, and August 29, 1901.

  On city attorney Mathews and the role of the Eastern bond markets, see Tzeng, “Eastern Promises,” pages 42–43.

  Mulholland’s comments about his reliance on Mathews and his status among of the chattels of the water company have been passed along by many chroniclers, including Kahrl, Water and Power, page 23; Catherine Mulholland, WM&RLA, page 90.

  Information on early water meter matters was passed along by Deborah Warner, chair of the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Those interested in the subject might begin by browsing the Smithsonian’s website.

  The location of the city’s first water-meter installation is from Layne, “Water and Power for a Great City,” page 55. Three years after he had stepped aside for Mulholland, Brooks was in 1890 promoted to assistant superintendent of the Los Angeles City Water Company.

  A survey of Mulholland’s office files reveals that, contrary to some contentions, Mulholland had been concerned with the cycles of drought in Los Angeles for a number of years. See Mulholland office files, DWP 04-22.5.