by Jon Wilkman
Accusations of Mulholland’s use of shortcuts and nonstandard concrete dated from the construction of the Owens River Aqueduct, when the Chief decided to build his own mill and use tufa, rather than sign supply contracts with independent manufacturers and Portland Cement Company suppliers in Southern California. The fact that Mulholland’s Aqueduct concrete survived after fifteen years didn’t deter revived memories or fresh rumors about other dangers associated with the St. Francis Dam.
Another theory about the failure reflected fears from the Little Civil War in the Owens Valley. In an article in the Santa Paula Chronicle, a motorist recalled driving past the dam site with his family a short time before the collapse. When he was about two hundred feet beyond the crest, he encountered a crew of men who appeared to be working with dynamite. “I took the occasion to explain to my boy how they tamped the explosive into the holes to blow up the hill,” he told a reporter, adding, “I’m sure the blast was not set off within the hour, or we would have heard it.”22
In response to clashes of information and opinion echoing from all sides, a series of official investigations were announced to determine what happened to the St. Francis Dam and who was responsible. Just as Los Angeles was eager to avoid legal liability and control the cost of restoration and death and injury claims, the city hastened to gather the facts involved in the disaster in order to assist or possibly affect future investigations. A newfangled “photostat machine” was installed in the DWP engineering department to handle requests for records and drawings. An article in the Department employee magazine boasted that “without this machine it would have required days to obtain prints or photographs and at a much greater expense.”23
Reacting to an intensifying focus on the geology of San Francisquito Canyon as a factor in the collapse, the Bureau of Water Commissioners convened a special investigating committee, including three prominent consulting engineers, a noted consulting geologist, and a professor of geology from the University of Southern California. On March 15, the committee visited the dam site. The next day they began to write a report that was restricted to the private use of the Los Angeles Board of Water and Power Commissioners.24 Until the panel of experts completed this “secret” investigation, the Chief refused to speculate further about the failure.25
Others wondered, were there other secrets? In an affidavit gathered by the Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff, San Francisquito brothers-in-law Jim Erratchuo and Henry Ruiz told investigators that they had worked on the St. Francis Dam and could describe troubling aspects of its construction. They agreed to tell what they knew under oath.
Shortly after talking to investigators, Jim Erratchuo was with his brother-in-law in San Francisquito Canyon, herding cattle into a makeshift corral. Suddenly shots rang out. Erratchuo said he felt a bullet graze his temple. Convinced someone was trying to kill them, the two men quickly escaped. Frightened for their lives, they holed up in a Hollywood auto court. Later, when the two were walking down a Hollywood street, they heard more shots. Questioned by a deputy sheriff, Ruiz and Erratchuo refused to believe the sounds in San Francisquito Canyon came from police shooting animals crippled by the flood, or in Hollywood from a backfiring car.26
Attempts were made to sift rumor from fact, but some of the stories that emerged were too sensational to ignore. The afternoon of March 13, Dave Mathews, older brother of Carl, the Powerhouse 2 late-night operator who enjoyed building furniture for members of the Bureau of Power and Light community in San Francisquito Canyon, arrived at the makeshift morgue at Newhall. Wearing a khaki suit, he watched as canvas-shrouded bodies were placed on the wooden floor. “There for the grace of God I would be,” he said.27 Mathews had worked as a laborer at Powerhouse 2 but lived in Newhall, beyond the floodpath. Now his father, brother, sister-in-law, two nephews, and two nieces were dead.
Mathews was relieved to be alive, but furious at the man he held personally responsible—William Mulholland. Three days after the flood, he quit his job with the Bureau of Power and Light, claiming he was going to be fired because “he knew too much.” On March 12, after Mulholland and Harvey Van Norman accompanied Tony Harnischfeger to examine the new leak in the St. Francis Dam, Mathews said that he, Ray Rising, and Homer Coe were ordered to block the adit to the Aqueduct to prevent more water from entering the St. Francis Reservoir, and to open three gates to release flow into an overflow outlet below the dam. When they went to open the gates, the men couldn’t find the handle. Construction supervisor Harley Berry left to retrieve it from dam keeper Harnischfeger. Mathews said when he returned, Berry shared a terrifying secret. He had just learned the St. Francis Dam was unsafe.28 Berry said Tony Harnischfeger had been warned not to spread the news because it “would cause a terrible excitement around here.”29
Frightened, after he finished his shift around four o’clock, Mathews headed home to Newhall. On the way, he said he encountered his brother Carl, told him the secret, and pleaded with him to gather his family and escape from San Francisquito Canyon as soon as possible. According to Dave, Carl promised to do so the next day. Mathews admitted that he didn’t alert anyone else because Harley Berry had sworn him to secrecy.
The details of Dave Mathews’s story varied, sometimes referring directly to Mulholland and Van Norman’s visit and other times not, but in essence he accused William Mulholland of knowing the St. Francis Dam was about to fail. Even worse, when the Chief purportedly ordered the information kept secret, Mathews accused him of indifference to the lethal threat posed to thousands of human lives downstream. Aside from the Chief’s loyal assistant, Harvey Van Norman, the only corroborative witnesses, Tony Harnischfeger, Harley Berry, and Carl Mathews, were dead.
On Friday, March 18, a somber meeting of the full Los Angeles Board of Water and Power Commissioners came to an end. Five members remained for an executive session. City Attorney Jess Stephens was the only “outsider” in the room when William Mulholland rose to speak. Stephens remembered that the Chief began in a calm voice. The bent old man reviewed his years with the Bureau of Water Works and Supply and expressed his love for Los Angeles and his pride in the water department he had helped to create and build. Mulholland said he had recently considered a trip to his native Ireland to visit places he hadn’t seen since he was a fifteen-year-old boy who ran off to sea, eager to find a new life.
There was a pause. With quiet determination Mulholland continued: “I can no longer embarrass you men … and I now tender my resignation as Chief Engineer.” With that, Stephens remembered the once-proud Chief “sat or sort of slumped into his chair, buried his face in his folded arms on the table and sobbed like a broken-hearted child.” The others in the room looked on, stunned. Finally, someone spoke up and moved that the Board reject Mulholland’s request. The motion carried unanimously.30 Like an aging but determined general with one more battle to win or lose, the Chief accepted the decision.
To bring calm to the situation, an editorial in the Los Angeles Times appeared under the headline LET’S NOT GET RATTLED. The article cautioned, “As is always the case in the wake of a major disaster, the wildest rumors conceivable are in circulation with regard to the causes of the collapse of the St. Francis dam … The San Francisquito disaster is bad enough without any effort to make it worse by the circulation of unfounded rumors.”31
DWP Board Meeting. Counsel W.B. Mathews, far left; Mulholland, second from left; Ezra Scattergood, second from right (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power)
Eager to provide hard facts, California Governor C.C. Young convened a panel of “eminent engineers and geologists” to determine what happened. The chairman was Andrew Jackson (A.J.) Wiley, a sixty-six-year-old nationally respected consulting engineer based in Boise, Idaho. State Engineer Edward Hyatt described Wiley as “the most outstanding engineer in the United States on the design and construction of concrete dams such as the St. Francis.” The chairman was joined by three noted engineers, F.E. Bonner and F.H. Fowler from San Francisco and H.T. Cory, based in Los
Angeles. As a result of a strong suspicion that an understanding of geology was essential to the investigation, George D. Louderback, a professor of geology from the University of California, Berkeley, and F. Leslie Ransome, retired from the U.S. Geological Survey, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a recent addition to the faculty of Caltech in Pasadena, were also included on the panel.
Governor Young’s instructions were “to make a careful study of all the facts surrounding the St. Francis Dam … to establish as far as possible the cause of break.” The inquiry was to be “independent and purely technical.” The commission was told “not to enter in any controversial subjects or deal with personalities of personal responsibility.”32 That goal would prove to be easier written than realized.
During the following days, weeks, and months, more investigations and inquiries were launched. The Los Angeles City Council recruited Dr. Elwood Mead, Commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, to chair a nationally recognized probe. Los Angeles County District Attorney Asa Keyes (pronounced kize) assembled another panel of experts. Even George W.P. Hunt, the Governor of Arizona who was eager to derail plans for a large dam in Boulder Canyon, commissioned an investigation.
To the general public, the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Inquest attracted the most public attention. Coroner Frank A. Nance was no stranger to high-profile hearings. A former bookkeeper in the county auditor’s office, he was appointed coroner in 1921.33 The grim-faced Nance, who looked like a slightly pudgy Calvin Coolidge, described his plans to reporters: “there’ll be no time limit and we will keep on with it until we have finished.”
The implacable Los Angeles Record rejected all reassurances that the Inquest wasn’t going to be a whitewash. “We do know that tremendous pressure is being brought to bear to protect those who have in the past been faithful friends of powerful political and financial men of Los Angeles—the elements which profited by the expansion of water and land … We know that no gentle censure will satisfy the people’s demand for the whole truth about this grim business.”34
The San Francisco Bulletin was even more direct. A series of articles condemned Mulholland as “arbitrary, two fisted, [and] usually insistent on having his way.” The paper acknowledged the old man’s accomplishments but added, “from time to time [he] displayed open contempt for the newer science theories and experiments in his calling.” Echoing allegations that dated to the Owens Valley intrigues of 1905, the newspaper’s assault didn’t end there. “All that now remains officially, if the Los Angeles investigators want the real truth, is to go behind Mulholland to the real culprits he serves and who are now seeking to make him the sole ‘goat’—the law-defying, arrogant municipal ownership politicians.”35
Tough-looking L.A. County D.A. Asa Keyes wasn’t intimated by challenges from the press. He had an affinity for front-page cases and a preference for fast trials. He relished his participation in the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Inquest. Keyes had been in the district attorney’s office since 1923. By 1928, questions were being raised about the hard-drinking D.A.’s flashy lifestyle and incorruptibility, but he assured the public that he would follow the facts wherever they led, and invited anyone with information pertaining to the case to come forward, sign affidavits, and make themselves available to appear as witnesses.
As precedent for his promise to conduct a thorough investigation, Keyes recalled a case that began on New Year’s Day, 1926. A grandstand at the annual Tournament of the Roses Parade in Pasadena collapsed, injuring two hundred people and killing eight. The D.A. saw to it that the contractor who built the structure was convicted of manslaughter and sent to San Quentin. Keyes promised that if the Inquest found any evidence of defective construction in regard to the St. Francis Dam, he would ask the grand jury to return indictments charging murder.
The proceedings in Los Angeles couldn’t shake connections with another controversial investigation. The day the St. Francis flood ravaged the Santa Clara River Valley, the trial of confessed Aqueduct bomber Perry Sexton was under way in an Inyo County courthouse. The proceedings attracted national attention, and a prominent team of defense lawyers, including the former head of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service in Los Angeles. Besides Sexton, the local district attorney had issued arrest warrants for six other men and promised an even bigger “roundup” of suspects. An anxious part-time justice of the peace presided over a courtroom that one historian described as “packed with famous lawyers, wily bombers, and their vociferous supporters.”36
On March 20, the justice of the peace issued his verdict. “I don’t believe the story of Perry Sexton,” he declared. The Inyo County District Attorney said he was shocked and disappointed that the case was dismissed! but decided not to appeal. The other pending indictments were dropped. Whoever bombed the Owens River Aqueduct remained free.
The same day the Sexton verdict was announced, a stunning headline appeared on the front page of William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner (“A Paper for Those Who Think”). The Examiner announced the discovery of dramatic new evidence in the unsolved mystery of the St. Francis Dam disaster—the dam had been destroyed by dynamite! John R. Richards, a member of an investigating committee for the Los Angeles Board of Water and Power Commissioners, announced that dead fish found in shallow ponds below the Tombstone appeared to have been killed by a powerful explosion.
DWP Special Counsel W.B. Mathews immediately ordered a committee of ichthyologists and explosives experts to investigate.37 With fresh memories of repeated attacks on the Aqueduct, the Board of Water and Power Commissioners dispatched armed guards to protect city dams, reservoirs, penstocks, and “other vulnerable points” in the Los Angeles water system. The guards were ordered to remain on duty around the clock.
From day one, the BWWS suspected dynamite. Only hours after the floodwaters receded, investigators for the Department’s Right of Way and Land Division began a search for explosives. They found boxes of dynamite near the dam site and others stored in a Santa Clara River Valley warehouse, but they couldn’t establish connections to the St. Francis Dam collapse.38 Early rumors that city workers were drilling holes to set dynamite as part of repairs along the road above the reservoir were confirmed as true, but the DWP said there had been no blasts around the time the dam failed.
The day after the Examiner’s startling headline, the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Inquest was called to order as the local and national press was filled with more dynamite news. Reports described a sinister plot uncovered by detectives from the Pyles National Detective Agency and J. Clark Sellers, an investigator described on his business card as an “Examiner and Photographer of Suspected and Disputed Documents, Analyst and Microscopist.”39
An armed guard stands on the crest of Mulholland Dam above the Hollywood Reservoir. (Author’s collection)
The Pyles Agency and Sellers had been hired by Los Angeles to track dynamiters in the Owens Valley. Another article in the Los Angeles Examiner recalled the anonymous phone call received eleven months before, warning that bombers were on their way to the St. Francis Dam. The newspaper reported that during the Sexton trial, an informant told Pyles investigators that Los Angeles “might have something real to prosecute” if the city didn’t stop pursuing Owens Valley bombers.
The detectives said they had an affidavit signed by an employee of “a large public utility company” who claimed to have overheard a conversation between two men in a Bishop parking lot. The informant said the men were discussing the best way to set sticks of dynamite, and how to coordinate multiple explosions in different locations. Another affidavit was alleged to be even more shocking. It described a conversation with an Owens Valley man who talked about “drowning half the people of Los Angeles.”
Following information from these affidavits and other clues, Pyles detectives said they were led to San Francisquito Canyon and, unexpectedly, the streets of Hollywood. In the canyon, they reported finding a rope hanging from a bush high on a hillside overlooking th
e Tombstone. Board of Water Commissioners Chairman R.F. Del Valle described it as “similar in texture” to another rope associated with the attack on the No Name sag pipe along the Owens River Aqueduct. The investigators speculated that the new discovery was used to lower sticks of explosives against the base of the St. Francis Dam.
An even more intriguing clue was a scrap of brown wrapping paper found on Hollywood Boulevard. A passerby said he saw a man described as “6 feet in height, dressed in working clothing and wearing boots and puttees that were splattered with mud,” walking along the famous street near Bronson Avenue. When the man pulled out a large handkerchief to wipe his brow, the paper, apparently inside, fell to the ground.
When the passerby retrieved the brown scrap, he discovered it was covered with a crude drawing and a handwritten note. The Examiner published pictures of the alleged evidence. “Suspected and Disputed Documents” analyst J. Clark Sellers reported that the writing and drawing were similar to clues found after the No Name sag-pipe dynamite attack.
The note read: “Go up west side twill you find soft Place. Dig in furs you can. Shorty and me got dope planted HEER. GET DONE B 4 1 [interpreted to mean ‘finish by 1 o’clock’], Do a DAMgood job. DON’T USE flash MUCH.” It was said the nickname “Shorty” was the same as one used by a suspect in the Owens Valley bombing investigation. The drawing was a crude V or U shape that appeared to be a dam, with lines interpreted as approach routes and a mark that seemed to indicate the location of “the dope” (dynamite).40