by Jon Wilkman
It was no coincidence that another ambitious project was under way beneath the Hollywoodland sign in adjacent Weid Canyon—a new dam and large reservoir, designed to supply water to Hollywood and the expanding western areas of Los Angeles. Since the planned base of the dam was located in the hills above the city, it was positioned to make gravity distribution easier, a special advantage for high-pressure fire mains. Increasing real estate value wasn’t part of William Mulholland’s plan, but the promise of a new man-made lake enhanced the appeal of Chandler and his partners’ Hollywoodland investment properties.
Recognizing that the name Mulholland was almost as well known in Los Angeles as the glamorous image of Hollywood, the Times publisher and other L.A. entrepreneurs came up with another idea: a roadway that started at a cliff not far from the Hollywoodland sign, then headed west, winding along the crest of the Hollywood hills and the Santa Monica Mountains. The new twenty-four-mile “highway” was named after William Mulholland. When the Chief cut the ribbon to open the narrow dirt road in 1924, surrounded by dignitaries and a gathering of “motion picture and theatrical stars and artists,” some dressed like Mexican señoritas, Mulholland Highway led nowhere. But Harry Chandler and his associates knew that the name of the man responsible for the Owens River Aqueduct suggested the future. They also were prepared to acquire acres of undeveloped land along the route.19
In the celebrity-enthralled 1920s, the business leaders of Los Angeles promoted the Chief as more than a hydraulic engineer. With the opening of Mulholland Highway, his reputation was gilded with another title, “The Modern Mohomet!” A tribute in a San Fernando Valley newspaper gushed:
He Saw the Mountain and Cut It Away.
He Is Los Angeles’ Master Mind of Progress.
He Is the Locomotive of Mental Energy.
He is the Gate-Builder of a New Empire of Wealth.
He Is the Living Monument of Opportunity.
He Came. He Saw. He Conquered.
He Is William Mulholland!20
Mulholland Highway was one more honor for the Chief, but the reservoir under the Hollywoodland sign was something new. It was made possible by the first of two Bureau of Water Works and Supply concrete dams. Concrete dams were more expensive, but they were stronger and could be built higher. Higher dams allowed for larger reservoirs, just what William Mulholland needed and wanted.
In 1924, dams constructed with concrete were considered the state of the art, but the art was evolving. At the time of its completion in 1909, the Austin Dam in Potter County, Pennsylvania, built by a paper and pulp company, was the largest in the state. It replaced an aging barrier erected with older methods and materials. During heavy rains in January 1910, less than two months after the dam was filled for the first time, ominous leaks appeared, enlarging existing cracks in the concrete. The builders considered these fissures part of the normal concrete drying process. To alleviate the engineers’ concerns, dynamite was used to blast a spillway at the top of the structure, allowing water to escape. The level of the reservoir went down eight feet, reducing hydrostatic pressure.21
All was considered secure—until Saturday, September 30, 1911. It was a warm Pennsylvania afternoon in Austin, population two thousand. Citizens were shopping and casting votes in a local primary election. At 2:15 P.M., sirens upstream began to wail. At first, only a few people were concerned. There had been tests and false alarms before. This time the danger was real. The Austin Dam had slipped on its foundation and opened like a pair of French doors. A slow-moving fifty-foot-high flood, roiling with pulpwood and debris, rumbled down a narrow valley called Freeman Run. Before it reached Austin fifteen minutes later, there was time for some residents to escape, but others were overwhelmed. The official death toll was seventy-eight. One fifth were children.22
The Chief certainly was aware of the Austin Dam disaster, but in 1911 he was more concerned with completing the dams and reservoirs needed for the Owens River Aqueduct, and by 1923 safety standards and building techniques had improved. Mulholland didn’t doubt his ability to supervise the design and construction of a concrete dam, even if he hadn’t done so before. After all, before 1913, the Chief hadn’t completed a 233-mile-long aqueduct, either.
Beginning on April 20, 1922, acquiring the land for the Weid Canyon Dam was relatively easy.23 Finding a second site was more difficult. The Chief’s first choice was Big Tujunga Canyon in the San Gabriel Mountains, northeast of the San Fernando Valley. He had chosen Big Tujunga as the original terminus of the Owens River Aqueduct, before the independent panel of engineers recommended San Francisquito Canyon as a more direct route with greater hydroelectric potential.
When city purchasing agents made inquiries to acquire land in Big Tujunga, alerted property owners escalated prices. The city offered $12,000. The owners wanted $500,000.24 After spending $30,000 to $40,000 on surveys, Mulholland was frustrated and impatient. He turned to his second choice, San Francisquito Canyon, where there were only a few relatively small ranches to acquire. The rest was public land, available by application to the federal government.25 The landowners were willing to sell, but they wanted assurances that the city’s proposed dam wouldn’t interfere with their water needs. It took a court case, but eventually an agreement was hammered out.26 The Chief faced another source of opposition, and it was closer to home. Ezra Scattergood, Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Bureau of Power and Light, didn’t want a reservoir intruding between the BPL’s two electrical generating operations, Powerhouses 1 and 2.27
To the public, BPL and BWWS were indivisibly linked with an ampersand, but the two agencies were rivals, too. Water sustained life, but electricity produced more profit. Scattergood was convinced a San Francisquito Canyon reservoir could interfere with the flow of Aqueduct water used to drive his Department’s two powerhouse turbines. Every time water was diverted, Scattergood claimed BPL’s income could be reduced by as much as $100,000.28 As an alternate dam site, he proposed adjacent Bouquet Canyon, but Mulholland considered the space inconvenient and too small. As usual, the Chief got his way. He would build his second concrete dam in San Francisquito Canyon.
As Mulholland worked to increase water storage closer to Los Angeles, he was struggling again against his oldest adversary, the weather. The period 1923–24 was among the driest in recorded Los Angeles history. Only 6.67 inches of rain fell, less than half the normal amount.29 To gather and store as much water as possible, the Chief was especially eager to complete the large dams in Weid and San Francisquito Canyons. Preliminary surveys for the St. Francis Dam and reservoir began in September 1922, and preconstruction work, mainly surveying, site preparation, and roadwork, were under way less than a year later.30 At the same time, leading the way, progress in Weid Canyon moved ahead quickly.
The St. Francis Dam site (marked by the letter A), 1925 (Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society)
In the Owens Valley, Mulholland’s efforts to acquire more water rights continued to meet resistance, but the city’s aggressive acquisition tactics were having an effect. Focusing on key pieces of land and willing or vulnerable sellers, purchases increased from 104 parcels in 1923 to 250 in 1924.31 To fight back, the Watterson brothers and their allies organized landowner “pools.” But a family rivalry got in the way. The brothers’ uncle, George Watterson, along with attorney Leicester C. Hall and rancher Bill Symons, gained control of a major upstream irrigation ditch. When the three men announced they were willing to cut a deal with the city, they were denounced as traitors.32
The Watterson brothers’ leadership enjoyed widespread support, but as other neighbors decided to sell, holdouts felt angry, betrayed, and increasingly helpless. Los Angeles was mostly interested in land for water rights, not the fate of towns like Bishop and Independence. Just as L.A. and Inyo County were engaged in an urban vs. rural struggle for water resources, in the Owens Valley there were conflicting points of view between the economic interests of small-town businessmen and those of some of the less affluent farmers and rancher
s. A special Los Angeles investigation committee summed up the tense environment: “The valley people are suspicious of each other, suspicious of newcomers, suspicious of the city men, suspicious, in short, of almost everybody and everything.”33
Wilfred and Mark Watterson may have been suspicious, but they were far from unsophisticated. Along with outraged Inyo County newspaper editors, they understood the power of the media, and they knew how to wield it. Just as Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler used the Los Angeles Times to roar about the magnificence of Mulholland and the wonders of his Aqueduct, newspapermen in the Owens Valley railed against the city’s “theft” of their land and encouraged opposition to virtually anything L.A. proposed.
Urban vs. rural hostilities, and anxiety about big-city imperialism, brought statewide and national attention. Articles like “Owens Valley: Where the Trail of the Wrecker Runs,” a series in the Sacramento Union, hurled biblical invective and allusions to a lost Garden of Eden. The Aqueduct was described as “an evil serpent, bringing ruin as another serpent did in the earliest valley in human history.” The arid Owens Valley was “a fairyland of beauty.” Bill Mulholland was characterized as the chief architect of “a policy of … ruthless and sharp practices which leads crooks to jail or makes them fugitives from justice.”34 The writing may have been overwrought, but the images stuck, and would continue to do so.
As negotiations with the city remained deadlocked, Valley leaders concluded that angry editorials and lawyerly negotiations were not enough. They plotted direct action. It was a strategic shift activists hoped would shame and intimidate Los Angeles into cooperation and compromise. It’s been claimed that these more aggressive tactics were encouraged by a revived Ku Klux Klan.35 True or not, there was plenty of rage to go around, and like the attack on the Los Angeles Times building in 1910, enough dynamite to express it.
Shortly after one A.M. on May 21, 1924, years of mutual distrust and failed negotiations took a violent turn. At Aqueduct spillway gates near the quiet town of Lone Pine, an enormous explosion shattered the night. Chunks of concrete were blasted into the predawn dark. Telephone and power lines were downed and severed. Debris blocked much of the Aqueduct flow from escaping, but the damage was done. In the Owens Valley, local newspapers excused the destruction as justified. Mulholland’s longtime nemesis, the Los Angeles Record, blamed the attack on the Chief’s unwillingness to compromise. In a modern context, some might consider the attack an act of terrorism, but popular opinion in 1924 was largely sympathetic.
A dynamited section of No Name Sag Pipe (J.E. Phillips)
Mulholland was furious, but other city leaders hoped to prevent more violence and find a negotiated settlement. Pressing their advantage, the Watterson brothers and other Owens Valley militants pushed the city to buy their unfunded irrigation district, leaving thirty thousand acres permanently “green” for agriculture. They also demanded reparations for losses to the local economy—claims that would eventually escalate to more than $17 million.36
To Los Angeles negotiators, preserving some irrigated land was a possibility, but reparations were a nonstarter. They argued that as a result of the city’s purchases, local property values had increased since 1907, not declined. It was a marketplace with dueling price tags. The city made offers based on the value of water rights in the rural Owens Valley. The Wattersons and their allies wanted to base negotiations on the worth of Valley water to the economy of Los Angeles.37 “Buy us out or leave us alone,” they demanded.
When protests in the north turned from tough negotiations to dynamite blasts, Mulholland changed his plans for the St. Francis Dam. At the same time, a continuing surge in L.A.’s population was a reminder that the city’s future could be transformed at any moment. The Chief decided to increase the capacity of the St. Francis Reservoir by building a low wall, or wing dike, on the west side of the structure, raising the overall height of the dam by ten feet.
Closer to Los Angeles, with the newly erected Hollywoodland sign in the background, construction in Weid Canyon, which had begun in July 1923, pushed toward the completion of what would be called Mulholland Dam. Summarizing his plans for new dams and reservoirs, in the July 1, 1924, Annual Report to the Board of Water and Power Commissioners, the Chief declared, “When these facilities have been put into full commission, the whole City will have been safe-guarded by a [sic] storage at or near the south end of the Aqueduct, with a full year’s supply of domestic water.”38 In a letter to the City Council a month later he boasted, “The accomplishments of the Department in the past three years are without precedent in the annals of water works construction of any city on the American continent.”39
As negotiations remained unresolved in the Owens Valley, anger was directed at the big city to the south, but also toward locals, including George Watterson, Bill Symons, and L.C. Hall. On August 27, 1924, Hall was having breakfast in a Bishop café. Four men with hoods covering their faces burst in. They grabbed the stunned attorney, shoved him into a waiting car, part of a caravan of other vehicles, and raced away. When Hall’s captors stopped in an isolated grove of trees, he was convinced he was about to be lynched. As a last resort, he turned to fraternal allegiances. As one old-timer remembered: “Because he was a Mason, he gave the Mason sign for ‘distress.’ It must have reached the conscience of some Mason who was in the group, for one of the men released him.” In the days before and after, there were attempts to intimidate George Watterson. Whenever Bill Symons went into town he carried a loaded shotgun.40
With hostilities growing in a divided Owens Valley, the Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works and Supply was quiet about developments in San Francisquito Canyon. On August 17, 1924, the first concrete was poured for the St. Francis Dam. Mulholland considered new dams and reservoirs as insurance against uncertainty. Many residents of the Owens Valley were uncertain, too. As their water drained away, would they survive?
On November 16, 1924, a caravan of Model T Fords rumbled to the Aqueduct control gates at the base of the Alabama Hills, near the town of Lone Pine. Led by Mark Watterson, sixty to seventy angry men surrounded a surprised guard. The intruders opened the gates and released a torrent of water toward the parched Owens Valley riverbed. By noon the next day, a jubilant crowd of men, women, and children had gathered for a barbecue. The Alabama Hills were a popular location for Hollywood film crews. Cowboy movie star Tom Mix, who was shooting a Western in the area, sent a band of musicians to enliven the festivities.41 The press arrived and issued battlefield bulletins from “California’s Little Civil War.” Mixing revolutionary analogies, articles also equated Owens Valley activists with the Boston Tea Party patriots of 1773.
On November 20, Wilfred Watterson returned to the Owens Valley from Los Angeles with news that the city was willing to renew negotiations. The occupation of the control gates came to an end. It was valiant Owens Valley “Rebs” vs. L.A. “Yankee” invaders. Water returned to the Aqueduct, but the insurrection produced a flood of positive publicity for the people of the Valley and their cause.
During the next few months, open rebellion gave way to arguments about reparations, while BWWS Right of Way and Land Division agents pursued Owens Valley properties and gathered personal and financial information to identify landowners who might be open to the city’s sales pitch. At the same time, private detectives from the John N. Pyles National Detective Agency, headquartered in Los Angeles and hired by the city, searched for dynamiters. These open and covert activities only added to Owens Valley resentment and distrust. Many believed that city leaders, especially William Mulholland, couldn’t have cared less if they lived or died, and they were unconvinced by L.A.’s attempts to find an equitable solution through arbitration, as well as the city’s offers to pay for a highway that would encourage tourism to enhance and strengthen the local economy. In the under-siege Owens Valley, such talk was considered more hot air in the midst of a drought.
Mulholland’s experiences in the Owens Valley taught him to avoid unwanted public
ity. Although work had been under way on the St. Francis Dam for more than six months, the first public announcement was made in January 1925. The dam was no secret to San Francisquito Canyon residents. They had gone to court to assure access to the water they needed. Some found work at the construction site, while others were annoyed when city supply wagons commandeered narrow dirt roads. Farther west, however, in the agricultural communities of the Santa Clara River Valley, few knew about L.A.’s plans for a twenty-story-high concrete wall.
The city’s belated public announcement raised concerns. The creek running through San Francisquito Canyon was a tributary of the eighty-three-mile-long Santa Clara River, which originated in the San Gabriel watershed and wandered west toward the Pacific Ocean—past small towns, orchards, ranches, and oil fields. Like others in California, citizens in towns such as Piru, Fillmore, and Santa Paula knew about the Little Civil War in the Owens Valley. They wondered: was Los Angeles planning to “steal” their water, too?
The Santa Clara River Protective Association was formed in 1924 after residents of the nearby Ojai Valley announced plans to divert water from Sespe Creek, a tributary of the Santa Clara River.42 They undoubtedly heard about the court case involving the ranchers in San Francisquito Canyon. On March 6, 1925, anxious about the newly revealed St. Francis Dam, the Protective Association asked one of California’s outstanding engineers, sixty-eight-year-old Carl Ewald (C.E.) Grunsky, to take a look at what Bill Mulholland was up to in San Francisquito Canyon.
Educated in Stuttgart, Germany, Grunsky had been the first City Engineer for San Francisco and a consultant to the U.S. Reclamation Bureau and Panama Canal Commission during the time Mulholland was planning and building the Owens River Aqueduct. In 1924, the San Franciscan was president of the American Society of Civil Engineers.