Rivers in the Desert

by Margaret L Davis

  Mulholland’s last public speaking appearance was the ceremony for the commencement of construction on the Colorado River Aqueduct at its starting point in Cabazon, near Banning, California. Although still living down the disgrace of the St. Francis dam collapse, he was, by all accounts, the symbolic father of the project, and in attendance were many national public officials and prominent citizens who applauded him profusely when he was asked to speak. Walking with difficulty to the microphone and in his rugged, deep voice he greeted the audience in typically terse Mulholland fashion.

  “Well, anything I might say here would be pretty old stuff. I’ve tramped over these hills since ‘77 … and I’m getting along. I am glad to be of service to you and to this community forever!”

  On July 22, 1935, a little over a year after the death of Fred Eaton, William Mulholland died at the age of seventy-nine. His death had been expected for several weeks. Prior to his death, Rose had found her father murmuring in delirium, and asked her brother Perry if he could understand anything he was saying.

  After a few minutes, Perry said, “Why, he’s giving orders on a ship; he’s a sailor again.”

  At his bedside were sons Thomas and Perry, daughters Rose and Lucille, and his attending physician, Dr. F.L. Anton. Mulholland died quietly in his sleep. Death was attributed to arteriosclerosis, which had caused a severe stroke the past October.

  Asa Keyes died three months later at his Rodeo Drive home, three years after his release from San Quentin prison. He was fifty-seven. Harvey Van Norman, possibly the man who knew William Mulholland best, and assuredly Mulholland’s most devoted disciple, died in 1954 of a heart attack at seventy-five, only eight weeks after the death of his beloved wife Bessie. They had been married forty-seven years. Van Norman had ultimately built the dam at Long Valley, completed in 1941 with the storage reservoir that sits behind it. Dr. Raymond Taylor, who died in 1958, was the one who lived to see the greatest transformation in the character and beauty of their cherished city.

  AS FOR THE BOARD OF CONTROL, whose members profited most from Mulholland’s and Eaton’s dream, Harry Chandler, who succeeded his father-in-law Harrison Gray Otis as publisher of the Los Angeles Times, lived on until 1944. In later years he became known in Los Angeles as “the Archcapitalist.” It is rumored that he ordered his personal papers and those of Harrison Gray Otis destroyed a few years before he died. H. J. Whitley invested most of his money in oil in the late 1920s, and purchased forty-eight thousand acres in Central California to begin drilling. The stock market crash of 1929 ruined his fortunes; he suffered a stroke soon thereafter and died June 3, 1931 General Moses Sherman died in 1932. Otto Brant passed away in 1922.

  Catherine Mulholland summed up their place in history, writing that Mulholland, Eaton, and the members of the Board of Control represented a blend of spirit, ambition, and idealism, and although found unsympathetic at times, “still one must also acknowledge, however grudgingly, their practical vision, their extraordinary energy and drive, and, finally, their large measure of civic devotion and commitment to their adopted city.”

  Unlike Fred Eaton, Mulholland on his death left no debts and no unfinished business, and for all the accusations of profiteering from the aqueduct, Mulholland’s entire fortune, as revealed in his last will and testament, derived from his earnings as a salaried employee for the city of Los Angeles, lucrative free-lance consulting work, and prudent investments in real estate—not from land speculation linked with the members of the Board of Control.

  His estate, valued at $700,000, consisted of the 640-acre Mulholland Ranch in what is now called Chatsworth, forty-eight hundred shares of capital stock of the Mulholland Orchard Company, various oil leases, stocks, bonds, and real estate in Montebello and Los Angeles, including the St. Andrew’s Place home, which he left to his eldest daughter, Rose.

  Mulholland’s estate, held carefully controlled in an elaborate trust, provided handsomely for each of his five children. When he died, inside the pocket of his trousers was five thousand dollars in cash tied in a rubber band. His most cherished possession was his inscribed gold retirement watch, worth thirty-five dollars, a gift of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

  When news of Mulholland’s death was received, the army of engineers and workmen laboring on the construction of the Colorado River Aqueduct ceased work for ten minutes in silent tribute. The flow of water in the Owens River aqueduct was stopped briefly as it came from the intake in Owens Valley. Then the great clamor of earth, machines, and men took up again, inexorably advancing the hard-won water toward the thirsty city of Los Angeles.

  Epilogue

  Verdict Re-examined

  THE VERDICT AGAINST William Mulholland in the collapse of the St. Francis Dam remained unchallenged for sixty-four years. In October 1992, a new examination of the dam’s failure concluded that, given the geological knowledge of the time, Mulholland was innocent of professional negligence in the dam’s construction. Findings published by the Association of Engineering Geologists reveal that Mulholland went to his grave shouldering far too much blame for the catastrophe.

  After studying the dam for nearly fifteen years, J. David Rogers, a distinguished consulting engineer who investigates dam failures, concluded that the dam collapsed because its eastern edge was anchored into an ancient (paleolithic) landslide impossible to detect. On the night of March 12, 1928, the slide partially reactivated, plowing into the structure like a bulldozer blade, causing a rapid chain-reaction.

  Rogers gained a critical piece of the puzzle when he uncovered the testimony of the two mystery eyewitnesses who remembered driving on the dirt canyon road near the dam less than one hour before the collapse and noticed that the road had dropped “at least twelve inches, just upstream of the dam’s east abutment.”

  “When I read that, I came out of my seat,” Rogers said. “That tells you the abutment was beginning to drop and thrust against the back of the dam, causing the dam to tilt.” The ominous sounds of a landslide heard by motorcyclist Ace Hopwell, who had stopped on the road that night, and the “extra-normal sounds of high water discharge” that awakened Ray Rising minutes before the dam’s collapse also substantiate Rogers’s eastern abutment landslide theory. If Rogers’s newest assessment is correct, the dam fell because of an ancient landslide, a condition predicated on geological principles not yet formulated. The tragedy was caused both by an undefined geological condition and an act of God.

  Had Mulholland’s exoneration come during his lifetime, he would have moved into semi-retirement, world-famous and content, adopting the role of senior statesman whose opinions would have been widely sought. But the phone calls, letters, requests for speeches, invitations, and consulting fees stopped suddenly and irrevocably in March 1928, and a satisfying retirement following a life devoted to public service was denied the chief engineer.

  Mulholland was a giant of American engineering who played key roles in the construction of three of America’s seven wonders of engineering as defined by the American Society of Civil Engineers: the Colorado River Aqueduct, the Panama Canal, and Hoover Dam. Mulholland’s water projects continue to function and serve their purpose years later, probably the greatest testimony to his abilities.

  Some argue that Mulholland was guilty of believing in his own infallibility, corrupted by a false sense of power and authority. Some have argued that city officials entrusted him with so much power due to his earlier successes that there were no critical evaluations of his plans. “By that time,” commented one member of Mulholland’s family, “he felt he had a special dispensation that he’d always be right…”

  Whatever the truth behind the failure of the dam, one fact is abundantly clear. He was a man of legendary accomplishments, and his downfall, when it came, was of equal magnitude.

  Ironic End to the Water Wars

  SINCE THE LATE 1930s, the water wars between the city of Los Angeles and the people of the Owens Valley have been the backdrop for novelists, screenwriters, and f
ilmmakers. In fictionalized form the story is already well-known to millions as the basis for the 1974 Academy Award-winning film Chinatown, in which character Hollis Mulwray—whose name is a play on Mulholland—is murdered for his honesty in a complicated plot involving water dumping, incest, and land speculation. The brilliant film is probably responsible for misinforming the public about the chronology of events and promoting the lingering widespread belief in an aqueduct conspiracy.

  Historian John Walton observed that Chinatown may have contributed to the refueled protest against the city of Los Angeles that broke out in the Owens Valley in the 1970s. Violence returned to the Alabama Gate on September 16, 1976, when an explosion near Lone Pine ripped apart a spillgate of the aqueduct, forcing a shutdown of the system for two full days. The explosion was allegedly in response to a heated dispute between Owens Valley residents and the Department of Water and Power over diversion of water through underground pumping. Mirroring the events decades earlier, the dynamite blasts again made the front pages of Los Angeles papers. In a macabre form of protest in 1978 an arrow tied with sticks of dynamite pierced the breast of a commemorative statute of William Mulholland in a Los Angeles park.

  Twenty years after the completion of Mulholland’s aqueduct, the farming region of the Owens Valley had turned into a desolate, high-desert environment. Sagebrush replaced once-vibrant wetlands, and alkali dust drifted across the dry bed of Owens Lake. The Owens River that thundered southward during Mulholland’s buckboard trip with Fred Eaton in 1904 was reduced in places to a small stream. Although the population of the Owens Valley dwindled, a few stubborn ranchers held onto their land, and with equal stubbornness continued their legal search for the justice they felt was due them. Their lawsuits and legal tactics were thwarted at every turn by the considerable political and legal resources of Los Angeles and the Department of Water and Power.

  Then, finally—and unexpectedly—in the 1980s, the delicate Mono Lake ecosystem, a wildlife sanctuary north of the Owens Valley, began to disintegrate, prompting a far-ranging debate. As a result of national attention coming in an era of ecological concern, a new agreement was reached. As Mulholland had feared, the valley residents managed to close off a large portion of the flow of the Owens River to the aqueduct to Los Angeles.

  On October 16, 1991, after years of haggling and bitter litigation, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power signed an agreement with the Inyo County Board of Supervisors that limits, once and for all, the amount of water that can be pumped to Los Angeles. The historic agreement requires Los Angeles to pay Inyo County two million dollars a year to help mitigate earlier environmental damage and offset low tax assessments on local land owned by the Department of Water and Power. The agreement also requires Los Angeles to spend ten million more to re-establish a trout fishery in nearly fifty miles of the lower Owens River. In exchange, Inyo County has dropped its challenges to Los Angeles’s water rights.

  The significance of Chinatown, John Walton wrote, is that despite factual inaccuracies, it captured the “deeper truth of the rebellion”—the belief that metropolitan interests illegally and immorally appropriated the Owens Valley for their own expansionary purposes. The film’s incest subplot was a metaphor for the perceived “rape of the Owens Valley,” and sexual symbolism for the “vile association of money and political power.”

  The truth, garnered from examination of Department of Water and Power records and Mulholland’s personal papers, reveals no grand conspiracy or contrived drought. Los Angeles voters overwhelmingly approved the aqueduct bonds ten to one. The Board of Control’s land syndicate did purchase real estate in the San Fernando Valley and later profited handsomely, but their acquisitions were common knowledge, and apparently ignored by the public who shared in the booster spirit of Los Angeles in those early years. J. B. Lippincott’s clear conflict of interest between the city and valley interests as an official of the Federal Reclamation Service and Fred Eaton’s unsuccessful speculation at Long Valley were noted and questioned at the time.

  The crime Mulholland may have been guilty of was unyielding stubbornness in response to great provocation. By staunchly refusing to give in to Fred Eaton’s extortion and by refusing to acknowledge the rightful fury of the Owens Valley people, he effectively set the stage for his own undoing—the tragic collapse of the St. Francis Dam in 1928. If a settlement, even a profitable one for Eaton, had been hammered out in the early years and the reservoir constructed at Long Valley, not only would the Owens Valley have prospered, but the urgent need for a southern storage reservoir built on the unstable rock of the Santa Clara Valley would have been eliminated. Mulholland’s intractable position was understandable, but ultimately disastrous.

  A dam at Eaton’s venerable Long Valley was, eventually constructed, supervised by Harvey Van Norman in 1941, after both William Mulholland and Fred Eaton were dead. The reservoir, impounding 163,000 acre feet of water, was named Lake Crowley in honor of the desert padre, Father John J. Crowley, who devoted much of his time to healing the division between the northern desert towns and the city to the south.

  Mulholland’s Prophecy

  WHAT IS THE LEGACY of William Mulholland? Critics argue that Los Angeles would have been better off had the population and prosperity envisioned by Mulholland never been promoted. There is some support for this view. Today, Mulholland’s tree-lined home at St. Andrew’s Place is in the center of a run-down urban expanse, a stone’s throw from the site of looting and arson in Korea Town during the 1992 civil disturbance in Los Angeles. The Mulholland Orchard in the San Fernando Valley no longer exists; in its place is a Kmart discount department store. Because of smog, the magnificent vistas from the twisting Mulholland Highway can be seen only on a few clear days each year.

  But there is another side to the legacy. The cup is overflowing in America’s second city as never before. Tides of immigrants from other parts of the world have forever altered its social landscape. Foreign investment is soaring, and Los Angeles County, previously not considered an industrial stronghold, now leads the nation in manufacturing exports. The city is a leader in architectural innovation, education, and the arts. The phrase “melting pot” has now been revised by city leaders who speak of a “giant salad bowl,” of trade, capital, labor, and cultures. Futurists place Los Angeles at the epicenter of the Pacific Rim—a key zone for international trade in the next century.

  Mulholland’s ingenuous masterpiece, the Los Angeles Aqueduct, did indeed make possible the waves of immigration that brought the burdens and costs of a city growing too fast for its planners, but the resultant diverse population will prove an advantage in the global village of the future.

  Without Mulholland’s aqueduct, Los Angeles would have been limited in growth, to probably not more than 250,000 people. The aqueduct made possible a metropolis where natural conditions forbid it. The annexation of the San Fernando Valley, a direct result of the aqueduct, instantly made Los Angeles the largest city in the world in terms of geographic size, and from that moment forward, as Mulholland predicted in his celebratory toast in 1913, the citizens of Los Angeles were to be a people “doomed to success.”

  Mulholland’s malapropism was prophetic—eight decades later, the sprawling giant has grown to a region over 100 miles in diameter sustaining a population of 14.5 million and the city of Los Angeles is expected to match the population of America’s largest city, New York, near the year 2010. But the promised success now decays under the burden of urban sprawl, violence, unbreathable air, and rationed water.

  The Los Angeles populace enters 1993 facing a seventh year of drought and a further decline in their quality of life. Even in wet years the region is dry, receiving on average one-third the amount of rain as New York and half that of Chicago.

  In May 1990, Los Angeles instituted mandatory water rationing, requiring households to cut water use by ten percent. In spite of rationing, and even with the possibility of a new aqueduct, it is unlikely the region’s critical water probl
ems can be solved. As the twenty-first century approaches, the same problems that challenged William Mulholland confront the city again.

  Present sources of water are not adequate and will be further reduced as Arizona and Nevada exercise their legal rights to Colorado River water in coming years. In addition, the problem of drought years has never been adequately addressed. Los Angeles faces long- and short-term water problems of confounding complexity.

  The city of Los Angeles, one researcher commented, “Would do well to relinquish its tropical self-image and come to terms with its arid climate.” Enforced conservation is likely to become the only solution. Even when the drought ends, Los Angeles will have to endure restrictions on lawn-watering, and car-washing, and will have to forego the luxury of abundant swimming pools, lush landscaping and other water extravagances. Conservation devices in addition to the low-flow faucets, toilets, and shower heads already required will be mandatory. Water bills will increase, and penalties for overuse will stiffen. A massive education program is needed to teach consumers to adapt themselves to a desert environment.

  The populace, baffled by the complexity of water issues and misled by public leaders enamored of ever-expanding development, is prone to insist no water shortage exists. The history and fable of Los Angeles’s water campaigns has left the public suspicious, uncertain of the truth and leery of scare tactics. What is needed is another visionary Mulholland to genially deliver the bad news and rally support for a creative solution, for there are no more rivers to bring to the desert.