Rivers in the Desert

by Margaret L Davis

  I will never know a minute’s peace on earth till I have his little body and lay it tenderly and peacefully away beside his little sister, although we know their little souls are resting with Jesus in heaven. I am asking, begging and praying that you will help us in this search for our darling.…

  I will not give up hope, our darling baby lies buried in sand or debris and I must find him. Will you help us Mr. Mulholland? We have a clue and if you promise us either with funds or men and tractors to comb the river bed where we think our baby lies buried.

  You no doubt are a kind and loving father, do you remember when your children were babies? Can’t you still feel their little clinging arms around your neck and their loving kisses?

  In God’s name remember them and then think of me, empty arms, my broken heart and the long and lonely days and nights ahead of me, I’m not trying to blackmail you Mr. Mulholland, I have simply opened my heart to you asking for help, will you help me?

  The Bible says, “Ask and ye shall be forgiven, Seek and ye shall find.”

  After reading it, Rose sat down and wept. Her tears were a prologue for the many she would shed for her father in the coming days and months.

  14

  Breath of Vengeance

  These be the days

  of vengeance.

  LUKE 21:22

  IN THE IMMEDIATE DAYS after the failure of the St. Francis, there was scarcely a man or woman in Los Angeles who did not have his her or own theory on why it had happened. A minor earthquake in Santa Barbara three days before created speculation that the earth’s movement had weakened the dam’s foundations, which were rumored to be built on a fault line. Dynamite blasts by Department of Water and Power road workers near the dam the day before the disaster kicked off further speculation. Ten days before the break, residents living below the dam reported seeing what appeared to be leakage at the base. A theory offered by Mulholland supporters strongly suggested that the dam was sabotaged by vengeful Owens Valley insurgents.

  But to many grim-faced Santa Clara Valley mothers and fathers who in the aftermath of the flood formed a seemingly unending parade through the makeshift funeral parlors and morgues, only one institution and one man was culpable—the Department of Water and Power and William Mulholland. These ranchers and farmers who had enjoyed one of the most bountiful areas in America were devastated, and feared that many of their kin and neighbors were forever lost in the wake of the watery holocaust. For the next fifty years there were periodic discoveries of grim remains that brought the death count to nearly five hundred.

  The altruism that encouraged Santa Clara Valley survivors to help one another also fueled the growing anger against Mulholland and the city of Los Angeles, the “criminals” the residents believed responsible for their plight. The basis for their seething emotionalism had originated years earlier in sympathetic response to the Owens Valley water wars. To the flood survivors, the reasons behind the dam break were immaterial. That it happened was merely a predestined outcome of the devious and ruthless duo of Mulholland and the city of Los Angeles in their constant, greedy quest for water. Twenty-four hours after the break, one incensed woman, who had lost her entire family, painted a sign which she hammered into the soggy ground before her destroyed home. On it in dripping red paint were the words, KILL MULHOLLAND!

  Reporting speculation on the causes of the catastrophe in fervent editorials, disaster-mongering newspapers pandered to inquisitive audiences around the world. Attention was fixed on the tragedy not only because of the magnitude of the destruction, but also because there had been relatively few cases of big dam failures anywhere, and the collapse of the St. Francis, less than two years old, astonished engineers and laymen alike. Growing accusations that Mulholland was responsible became the topic of the day. The news columns of Board of Control member Harry Chandler’s Los Angeles Times appeared to be sympathetic to the beleaguered Mulholland but were thinly veiled accusations that the city and the board’s rapidly tarnishing hero were at fault.

  “Mulholland’s Heart Torn By First Disaster,” read the Times’s subtle headline as early as the day after the flood, and reported:

  Chief Engineer William Mulholland was a pitiable figure as he appeared before the Water and Power Commission yesterday afternoon to make his report on the visit to the scene of the disaster. His figure was bowed, his face lined with worry and suffering. As he told the commissioners of his trip his voice was broken. Every water commissioner had the deepest sympathy for the man who has spent his life in the service of the people of Los Angeles, administered the Water Department from village days to the present and made the Los Angeles of today possible by building the Aqueduct and furnishing a supply of water for a city of 2,000,000 persons. In all his career of handling great projects he is facing the first disaster to any of his achievements. For his Irish heart is kind, tender, sympathetic, and the tragedy for the people in the canyon and the Santa Clara Valley is the tragedy of William Mulholland.

  However, the ubiquitous Board of Control, knowing only a clean sweep of all those responsible for the building of the doomed St. Francis would pacify an outraged public, dropped the political hot potato into eager but far less sympathetic hands.

  “Resign—Now!” demanded the muckraking Los Angeles Record’s blatant headline, sparing no words. “The St. Francis dam failed—and 400 people died—because of the engineer who built it …” led off the fiery front-page reproach that further demanded the resignations of R. E. Del Valle, president of the Board of Water and Power Commissioners and commissioners J. R. Richards, William P. Whitsett, John R. Haynes, and Will E. Keller. Calling for Mayor Cryer to kick them out by legal means and by force of public opinion if they did not quit on their own, the Record charged the commissioners had abetted in the disaster through their “stupidity, incompetence and arrogance.” “They are the men who allowed William Mulholland, ignorant of modern, big dam engineering, to build this flood peril, without check or guidance from expert, disinterested engineers and geologists.…Mulholland must quit, but if he quits alone it will be a disgrace to the city of Los Angeles. It will be terribly unfair if he is made an official goat for the deadly blunders of his immediate bosses.…”

  Like good salesmen, the Board of Control knew that its dazzling new product—the city of Los Angeles—had to be continually publicized in order to be sold. Clowns on stilts and nubile beauties in skimpy bathing suits lured in the crowds and sold neckties and automobiles. But to sell the fabled City of Angels, stupendous events were needed to continue to bring in the millions of eager-to-be homeowners seeking utopia in the rapidly rising housing tracts of the San Fernando Valley, their pockets burning with cash hard earned in the wheat fields, coal mines, and steel mills of America. The Board was quick to realize that unlike the magnificent opening of the Grand Cascades and the flower-strewn dedication of Mulholland Drive, the collapse of the St. Francis was detrimental to their cause.

  In a benefit for the victims of the disaster, a glittering array of movie stars appeared in a midnight gala at the Metropolitan Theater. One city block between Broadway and Hill at Sixth Street was illuminated by sixteen searchlights, donated by Adolph Zukor, president of Paramount Studios. Staged by Syd Grauman of the famous Grauman chain of theaters, the event featured six masters of ceremonies and a star-studded lineup of talent including Jack Benny, Gloria Swanson, Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Buddy Rogers, Fay Wray, Sammy Cohen, Glen Tyrone, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Irving Berlin, Jack Dempsey, Tom Mix, and the Ziegfeld Ingenues.

  However, one important celebrity was missing from the dazzling affair. For the first time since the opening-day ceremonies of the aqueduct, William Mulholland’s illustrious presence had not been requested to glorify a civic event by the city’s fathers. Secluded in self-imposed isolation, Mulholland remained entrenched inside his St. Andrew’s Place home. Listening to the NBC broadcast of the benefit, Rose Mulholland quickly switched off the radio when she heard her father’s footsteps as he entered the livi
ng room. His face was lined with grief, as it had been in the previous nights since Van Norman first told him the news that the dam had burst. Since then, racked by a black, all-enveloping sorrow, he had not slept more than a few hours and Rose knew that tonight, despite the goings-on downtown, would be no different. If anything, news of the benefit only added to his despair.

  Rose went to the kitchen and returned with his favorite late-night snack of cold roast beef and potatoes, and poured him a tumbler of whiskey. Ignoring the food, Mulholland took the whiskey and retreated into his wood-paneled study and closed the polished doors. He remained there alone with his despair until dawn. That night, Rose knew still another disaster lay ahead for her seventy-three-year-old father to bear. He had received a subpoena from the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office; after more than fifty years of public service and national fame, the great visionary and engineer was now under investigation for manslaughter.

  WITH UNPRECEDENTED SPEED, by the weekend of the break eight separate investigations were under way by city, state, and federal authorities to probe the causes of the disaster, prompting Los Angeles District Attorney Asa Keyes to announce his intention to file criminal charges against the person or persons responsible for the catastrophe. The legal battles surrounding the collapse of the great dam were set in motion, and a coroner’s jury was scheduled to begin deliberations the following week.

  For the time being, the facts surrounding the failure of the St. Francis Dam were now buried beneath tons of broken concrete and mud. As young Assistant District Attorney A. J. Dennison resignedly pointed out, the dam break and ensuing flood had committed the perfect murder—no living eyewitness and complete obliteration of the physical evidence. But his boss, Asa Keyes, thought differently. Hoping to add a final building block to his lofty political ambitions, Keyes moved quickly to pounce on the public’s outrage over the St. Francis disaster, just as he did in the 1924 outrage over the aqueduct bombings. He and Mulholland were united against the Owens Valley insurgents, but now Mulholland was the accused and Keyes his righteous accuser. In the immensely adored William Mulholland, Keyes had a much larger trophy to add to his political mantel than the heads of a group of rag-tag dissenting farmers and ranchers.

  The coroner’s jury was instructed to merely ascribe the cause of death and attribute blame without legal effect, but Keyes knew these inquests were notorious for swaying public opinion, and the circumstances surrounding the collapse of the St. Francis with its bitter emotionalism and political fallout were ideal for exploitation.

  The public was demanding a head to fall and Keyes would give them Mulholland’s on a platter. Keyes’s plan was to exploit the tragedy by attacking the aging engineer with the zeal of an overpaid press agent, all the while displaying his fearless district attorney’s courtroom demeanor and his well-known penchant for expensive clothing.

  Days before the inquest began Keyes staged highly visible press conferences blaming engineer Mulholland’s incompetency and criminal neglect for the disaster. Creating further public outcry and panic, he insinuated that Mulholland’s nineteen other dams and reservoirs were possibly on the verge of bursting.

  In 1928, by law in Los Angeles, a coroner’s inquest was required in all cases of death except those attributed to natural causes. “If it is possible for the jurors to place the blame for the collapse after they have heard all the testimony,” Asa Keyes firmly told reporters, “I will demand that they do so, justice must be served!” On March 20, exactly eight expedient days from the collapse, a mob of eager spectators and witnesses surrounded the city of Los Angeles’s ornate Hall of Justice and the nine formally dressed members of the jury entered the barrel-vaulted entrance foyer accompanied by deputy sheriffs. In the small Coroner’s Inquest Room, the hundreds who poured in to watch the proceedings could not be accommodated, and once the last seats were filed, the deputies locked the doors.

  Inside sat Harvey Van Norman, W. B. Mathews and several members of the Board of Control, and the Board of Water and Power Commissioners. According to the custom of the time, Bessie Van Norman, dressed in black, sat with the few women present in the back row. Only a handful of the dozens of journalists that had descended to cover the story could be accommodated, and the others stood noisily in the hallways with the crowd.

  The solemn-faced jurors had been selected for their training and background in matters of engineering, science, and business, and were considered impartial. Keyes’s booming voice opened the proceedings by calling the first witness, autopsy surgeon Jonathan Webb. Improving on the age-old adage that a picture was worth a thousand words, Keyes, to start the proceedings, had bailiffs push a gurney with a sheet-shrouded body into position where it could clearly be seen by jury members. The noisy chattering in the room suddenly fell silent.

  “Did you, Dr. Webb,” Keyes asked, pointing dramatically to the gurney, “make an autopsy on the body of Julia Rising?”

  “I did.”

  “Will you state your findings, please.”

  “The autopsy was made on the fifteenth of March, 1928. The body was a female of the white race, aged twenty-nine years and five months, height five-foot five-inches, estimated weight 175 pounds, dark brown hair and light complexion. Examination showed numerous superficial scratches, punctures and bruises scattered over the body, the face and the limbs. There was a deep gash three inches long from the center front of the left leg and a laceration on the right forehead. The lungs were red, inflamed and contained water—the trachea and stomach were filled with a considerable amount of silt,” declared Dr. Webb in grisly, impassive detail.

  “And, Doctor, did you reach a conclusion as to the cause of death?” boomed Keyes again, his eyes now firmly fixed on the figure of William Mulholland seated among the witnesses.

  “From these findings,” Webb said, “the deduction was made that death was due to drowning.”

  Asa Keyes now called for a witness to identify the body. All eyes turned to the widower, Ray Rising. Dr. Webb pulled back the sheet from the face of the corpse and Rising beheld his wife for the first time since she had slipped away from his grasp in the deadly current. After identifying her, Rising testified that he was a city worker living with his wife and three children, Adeline, twenty-two months old, Dolores, three years old, and Eleanor, ten years old, near Powerhouse Number Two, one and a half miles below the dam. He had worked for the Department since 1923, planning to be a bureau employee until retirement. Rising sobbed as he recited his family’s names, and bit his lip to fight back the tears.

  Asa Keyes declared that the body of Julia Rising represented sixty-nine others from Los Angeles county who had perished in the flood. He somberly intoned into the record the long list of names of the victims and physical descriptions of two unidentified dead. He then asked for the next witness, calling out the name with a tone of controlled indignation. A murmur filled the room, as William Mulholland stood to be sworn in. Old friends and associates seated in the room whispered to one another that the Chief looked like he had aged ten years since the disaster.

  Mulholland had already faced the grim reality of the morning with bitter news of the discovery of more bodies, those of a baby boy and a middle-aged woman still unidentified. Their discovery now brought the death total to date to 277, with an estimated 500 still missing. Observers noted that during Rising’s testimony, Mulholland stared only at his thick, workman’s hands folded in his lap.

  Dressed in black mourning attire, double-breasted wool coat, high collar, and silk cravat, Mulholland unsteadily took the witness stand and, raising a trembling hand, swore to uphold the truth.

  With the audience straining to hear, patiently, quietly, and directly he began to answer the many questions put to him by the sundry members of the inquiry. But thoughts of the magnitude of the great tragedy had overwhelmed him and occasionally his answers strayed into revealing self-pity.

  “On an occasion like this, I envy the dead,” he muttered almost inaudibly to no one in particular at one po
int during the proceedings as if to sum up the depths of his despair.

  Mulholland’s revelation of his pain had no place in Keyes’s sense of compassion and he rolled his eyes mockingly for the benefit of the jurors at Mulholland’s words. Seeing a clear-cut vision of a grandiose life in the governor’s mansion on the Sacramento River, Keyes began his interrogation, or “inquisition” as Mulholland supporters reported later. With theatrics that even the most over-melodramatic silent movie star would envy, Keyes played to the jury and audience, punctuating each question and answer with facial gestures ranging from incredulous surprise to moral outrage.

  Although Mulholland had enjoyed the immense fame that was heaped upon him since the completion of the aqueduct, he was by nature reticent to “flair in the limelight,” and Asa Keyes’s courtroom histrionics deeply galled him. All of his life, Mulholland had had a workman’s distrust of “properly educated types.” He despised men like Keyes who used their position as an elected city official to further their own gains, and like many others considered him a “scavenger.” To Mulholland’s engineering mind, Keyes didn’t build or create anything; he only shuffled papers back and forth while languishing on the city payroll, using the misfortune of others as a rostrum for his own political agenda, all the while espousing advocacy for law and order.

  Armed with a briefcase full of corroborating affidavits from key witnesses who were now ready to testify on behalf of the state that the dam as late as one day prior to the break was leaking, and leaking badly, Keyes was sure their testimony would prove the cause of the break. Department of Water and Power workers also knew of the leakage and this included engineers of the dam. More important, Keyes intended to prove that William Mulholland himself also knew of the leakage. In fact, Keyes would reveal that Mulholland was so concerned about the leakage, that after the dam keeper reported a new subsequent leak, Mulholland left immediately from Los Angeles accompanied by his aide Van Norman to inspect it himself on the eve of the break.