by Jon Wilkman
Downtown Los Angeles celebration of the arrival of electricity from Hoover Dam (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power)
It was a celebration reminiscent of the crowds that gathered beside the channel below the Cascades in 1913 when the first water arrived from the Owens Valley. In 1936, an audience of ten thousand sat on wooden chairs to listen to orators touting the limitless future of the City of the Angels.23 The podium was on the grounds of the old courthouse, where only eight years before, the County Coroner’s Inquest hoped to put to rest the controversy and consequences of the St. Francis Dam.
Despite the devastating misstep in San Francisquito Canyon, water and power engineering in the United States marched into an era of unprecedented infrastructure accomplishment during the 1930s and ’40s. With the support of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, it was a period of government activism that reinvigorated the Progressive-era ambitions that inspired and empowered William Mulholland and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power forty years before.
Great dams were rising across the county. In 1936 the Hoover Dam, and two years later the Parker Dam, spanned the Colorado River. In Arizona, the Bartlett Dam (1939) was built on the Verde River. In Oregon and Washington, the Bonneville Dam was opened in 1937, and the Grand Coulee captured the resources of the Columbia River in 1942. In Northern California, the Shasta Dam was completed in 1945. As part of a vast regional system designed for navigation, flood control, and power generation, twenty-six dams were included in the Tennessee Valley Authority, including Norris Dam, completed in 1936. In time, few American rivers remained uninterrupted. Large dams were considered monuments to the future, viewed with grateful awe, and reservoirs and aqueducts were welcomed as resources for national survival and success.
In ever-thirsty Los Angeles, the arrival of the Colorado River Aqueduct in 1941 provided another source of sustenance for future growth. That year, the Long Valley dam and reservoir were completed in the Owens Valley. The new storage facility was capable of containing sixty billion gallons, nearly two and a half times the amount once impounded in San Francisquito Canyon. The reservoir was named after Father John J. Crowley, a Catholic priest who attempted to heal the wounds between the Valley and Los Angeles and encourage tourism. But it would take more than a popular new fishing and camping site to ease the economic and environmental impact of Mulholland’s actions on behalf of burgeoning Los Angeles.
The Mulholland name may have been anathema in the Owens Valley, but despite the St. Francis Dam, there were those in Los Angeles who continued to honor him as a hero. Since the Chief had been portrayed for more than fifty years as a legendary figure in the city’s success story, to do otherwise could encourage doubts about the justness of L.A.’s aggressive water policies, the reputation of the DWP, and the legitimacy of municipally controlled utilities.
Anticipating the arrival of water from the Colorado River Aqueduct, the Chief’s old friends and associates, along with city leaders, a few ordinary citizens, and even schoolchildren, raised $30,000 for an impressive turquoise-tiled fountain, dedicated on August 1, 1940, near the site of the cabin where young Willie Mulholland began his career as an assistant Zanjero.
The Mulholland Memorial Fountain still stands, but after World War II, memories of an old engineer from another era seemed increasingly irrelevant as Los Angeles was transformed by the kind of population boom William Mulholland had spent his career attempting to anticipate. By 1950 the population of Los Angeles was approaching two million; the county census counted more than double that. When William Mulholland rode into town in 1877, barely more than eleven thousand people lived in the City of the Angels.
New Angelenos had their own histories to remember, or escape, and they often displayed little interest in exploring the past of the city they now called home. It wasn’t long before a book about the Chief’s life and work justified the title William Mulholland: A Forgotten Forefather24 and memories of the deadliest American civil-engineering failure of the twentieth century seemed to fade away, like water disappearing into a desert riverbed. It was as if the St. Francis floodpath never existed.
If the truth about what caused the collapse of the St. Francis Dam was a puzzle to be solved, the tragedy’s disappearance from public memory and the pages of history books is perhaps an even greater mystery.
Historical amnesia has been called a congenital condition in future-oriented Los Angeles, but when it comes to an appreciation of L.A.’s past, it is a national disorder as well. As with all great cities, a mix of fact and myth sold the promise of Los Angeles since the town’s earliest days. During the 1920s and ’30s, in part as a response to overblown boosterism, Hollywood scandals, and the political controversies of California’s Little Civil War in the Owens Valley, the image of the City of the Angels turned dark. This was especially evident in representations of the role played by water, including the St. Francis Dam disaster, where the actions of Los Angeles and the DWP were routinely portrayed as inept, corrupt, conniving, and cruel. As one historian remarked, “Contrary to the truism that ‘winners write the history,’ Los Angeles won the aqueduct war but has seemingly lost the ongoing battle over popular perceptions.”25 More complex truths are there to explore, but it’s difficult to inhibit the appeal of a good conspiracy theory, or replace the simplicity of persistent stereotypes.
Some of the first paragraphs in the dystopian history of L.A.’s legendary lust for water and power were drawn from the research of Andrae Nordskog, a pesky Mulholland and DWP critic from the Aqueduct days. The Iowa-born son of Norwegian immigrants, Nordskog was a prime example of the kind of colorful character who flourished in 1920s Southern California. A trained opera tenor who toured the country before arriving in Los Angeles, he served briefly as a manager for the new Hollywood Bowl. Along with music, he was fascinated by electronic technology, especially sound recording.
In 1921, Nordskog combined his passions and founded a record company. Through his Santa Monica–based Sunshine label, he produced what is widely considered the first jazz recording performed by African-American musicians. After business reversals in 1926, Nordskog turned his enthusiasm to a weekly reformist publication, the Gridiron. He also produced regular radio broadcasts exposing alleged malfeasance in local government, especially concerning water and utility issues. On March 15, 1928, Nordskog alerted County D.A. Asa Keyes that he had long before known about problems with the St. Francis Dam. After reading warnings about cracks in the Mulholland Dam in a San Francisco engineering magazine, he also followed up by taking photographs, but claimed pressure from Hollywood businesses forced him to keep quiet.
As the Boulder Canyon Bill moved through Congress, Nordskog prepared a feverish and detailed research report based on U.S. government documents. Picking up where the socialist-inspired Citizens Aqueduct Investigation left off in 1912, he claimed to prove collusion and corruption behind the creation of the Owens River Aqueduct and suggested the same skullduggery was afoot with L.A.’s involvement with the development of the Colorado River.
When Nordskog submitted a summary report to the California State Legislature, which was eager to get the Boulder project finished, his accusations were generally ignored—but they would not be forgotten. Nordskog’s conspiratorial attacks on the Owens River Aqueduct, the Boulder Canyon project, and the structural weakness of the St. Francis and Mulholland Dams became a foundational contribution to L.A.’s noirish reputation.26 In 1931, the DWP responded to increasing negative impressions with a ten-minute documentary entitled Romance of Water. With no mention of dynamite attacks and the St. Francis Dam, the film’s upbeat “educational” message had little effect on darker popular perceptions.
Andrae Nordskog’s exposés were not widely read, but they influenced a muckraking journalist who did a better job of changing attitudes. Morrow Mayo’s Los Angeles, published in 1933, expressed a polemical tradition of social and political outrage dating from the battles against Harrison Gray Otis’s antiunion oligarchy, the bombing o
f the Los Angeles Times, and the failed mayoral campaign of Socialist Job Harriman.
Without supplying specifics, Mayo described the St. Francis Dam as “a death-trap” and implied the Chief was responsible for the faults and scandals of the San Gabriel Dam, a project Mulholland had nothing to do with and in fact opposed. Mayo spent more pages excoriating the Owens River Aqueduct project, which he described as “one of the costliest, crookedest, most unscrupulous deals ever perpetrated, plus one of the greatest pieces of engineering folly ever heard of.”27 With little room for nuance, he concluded with a bitter epitaph that remains influential: “The Federal Government of the United States held Owens Valley while Los Angeles raped it.”28
Written with fury and disdain, Los Angeles was not greeted warmly in the circles of power in the City of the Angels, but the book was read on the East Coast, especially New York, where it confirmed long-held beliefs that the sunny urban upstart beside the Pacific Ocean somehow didn’t deserve increasing prominence. To East Coast wits, L.A. was a colossal fraud, populated by boobs from the Midwest and scam artists who preyed on them. In the 1920s, acerbic editor-author H.L. Mencken dismissed the city as “Moronia.”29
In 1939, novelist and B-movie screenwriter Nathanael West wrote Day of the Locusts, summing up Los Angeles as a “Dream Dump.” Like West, visiting journalists who dropped in to survey L.A.’s alien landscape and left as soon as possible saw the city as little more than an overgrown Hollywood set, a place of make-believe, false fronts, and transient values. It certainly wasn’t a real city like New York.
Attorney, political activist, and magazine editor Carey McWilliams was perhaps the most perceptive mid-twentieth-century writer to attempt to understand Southern California and the City of Los Angeles. It’s interesting to note that the New York publisher of McWilliams’s landmark 1946 book, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land, included the volume in a series chronicling “American Folkways,” along with the Ozarks and the “Town Meeting Country” of New England. Despite this, unlike East Coast L.A. observers, McWilliams sensed something new and important was happening. He saw a city that suggested the future—an “amalgam of all America, of all the states, of all the peoples and cultures of America”30—but he was influenced by Morrow Mayo’s outrage over the Owens River Aqueduct. Concerning the St. Francis Dam, he insisted Mulholland knew the structure was weak and did nothing while heavy rains created mounting pressure that led to the collapse. An advocate for Mexican-American civil rights, McWilliams declared that most of the flood victims were Mexicans. None of this was true, but like William Mulholland in his failure to involve other expert opinions in the design of the St. Francis Dam, writers like Mayo and McWilliams favored argument over analysis.
Hollywood produced an especially memorable vision of LA’s past and present. French film critics called a genre of cynical and shadowy dramas “film noir.” Perhaps the most influential L.A.-inspired film noir was released in 1974. With a story informed by the outrage of Andrae Nordskog, Morrow Mayo, and Carey McWilliams, Chinatown dove into the murky depths of the Owens Valley water wars and surfaced with an entertaining vision of greed and corruption in the black heart of modern Los Angeles.
Screenwriter Robert Towne’s clever plot has a passing relationship with history enlivened by a rich tradition of conspiracy theories. The events his story are based on took place around 1905, not in the 1930s. The St. Francis Dam plays an offstage role as the fictional Vanderlip Dam, a disaster city engineer Hollis Mulwray (think “Mulholland”) refused to forget. At the end of Towne’s story line, detective Jake Gittes learns that Los Angeles is a special hell—an alien puzzle, concealed in shadows that are impossible to penetrate: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” So much for historical analysis.
It’s not easy to understand the oversimplified vehemence of persistent anti-L.A. narratives. As I like to say to visitors from the East, let me show you around so at least you can hate the city intelligently. If Carey McWilliams was right that Los Angeles is the future of the United States writ large, such negative imagery may be less about the City of the Angels and more about a pervasive sense that the American Dream itself was oversold, and L.A. is somehow to blame for the disappointment. But it doesn’t take a film-noir conspiracy to conclude that the unwritten history of the St. Francis Dam is in part the result of a plot against the past.
Although the twenty-first-century academic landscape is expanding, for decades with a few exceptions, a mix of surface impressions, polemics, and dismissive indifference often fill a void left by a national his-torical establishment that was uninterested or unprepared to examine the past significance and complexity of America’s second-largest city. In the case of the St. Francis Dam disaster, there certainly were reasons to edit newspaper obituaries and whitewash uncomfortable realities, but the obscurity of the events that began just before midnight on March 12, 1928, is a product of how American history is assembled and written.
The traditional historical narrative of the United States has a decidedly East Coast point of view. TV news anchors in New York or Washington, D.C., direct us to events “out west,” making me wonder, where is “in”? For most of the twentieth century, the accepted saga of America west of the Mississippi consisted of homesteaders, cowboys and Indians, and the California Gold Rush. Everything after that, with the possible exception of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire and maybe the movies, was noted only briefly. It was almost as if the emergence of Los Angeles happened too fast for history. But that doesn’t explain the forgetting that obscures the St. Francis Dam disaster.
To make the pages of a history book, an event needs to have a preserved and available record, a place in the accepted narrative, or at least advocates for inclusion. The story of the St. Francis Dam had none of these. The leaders of Los Angeles certainly didn’t want to maintain memories of a catastrophe that might involve uncomfortable loose ends. Newspaper journalists quickly moved to the next headline, as they always do. There were far more pressing issues and events to cover, including an international economic depression and an upcoming world war. As for polemicists, since Mulholland accepted full blame, the city paid promptly, and everyone seemed satisfied, unlike the ongoing struggles in the Owens Valley, the tragedy of the St. Francis Dam appeared to have no surviving injustice or residual anger to rail against and keep recollections fresh.
For East Coast–oriented scholars, the collapse of a dam in rural Southern California, whatever the death count, hardly qualified for inclusion in the grand scheme of America’s past, especially when the devastating Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania was already there with more than 2,200 dead and included the involvement of prominent East Coast names. Everyone seemed to have decided that the history of Los Angeles was essentially Hollywood anyway. Finally, caught in a rush of new technology and ambitious projects, civil engineers were more concerned with designing the future than with rummaging through the past, especially the story of an embarrassing failure and the outdated faults of a self-educated engineer.
For all these reasons, for more than thirty years the failure of the St. Francis Dam was a classic cold case. But the story was far from over. In 1963, driven by one man’s obsession, and later reexplored with new investigative tools that could reconstruct the past and project the future, the St. Francis floodpath unexpectedly resurfaced.
15.
Charley’s Obsession and Computer Time Machines
Seventeen-year-old Charley Outland imagined himself a sleuth. Before midnight on March 12, 1928, Outland and a friend staked out Santa Paula High School, hoping to solve the mystery of a series of thefts. He never caught the thief, but the intrepid teenager encountered an event that changed his life and eventually transformed him into another kind of detective, even more dedicated to uncovering the facts and applying truth to justice.
While young Charley hid in the shadows, sirens began to wail. The lights were out in the streets of Santa Paula and telephone connections intermittent, but the news spr
ead rapidly. A great flood was coming and everyone needed to get to higher ground before it was too late. The high school senior and his friend hurried home. A few hours later, as dawn was breaking, Outland ventured out with his father and an older brother to see what had happened and to offer help. Downtown Santa Paula had escaped the worst of the floodwaters, but near the river a major bridge had been washed away and homes inundated. Dead animals floated in muddy ponds and battered corpses were tangled in debris.
Cries for help led Outland to a tree where a young boy, stripped naked by the ferocity of flood, held on as if his life still depended on it. It took some convincing to get him to come down. The frightened boy accepted an overcoat to cover himself and agreed to follow the Outlands home. There he was given clothes, and Charley’s mother, Stella, fixed a hot breakfast. Afterward, the survivor prepared to leave. At Mrs. Outland’s suggestion, her husband, Elmer, handed the stranger some money. He quietly took the cash, thanked the family, and left. Later that day, young Charley volunteered at a makeshift morgue and wondered why he hadn’t asked the boy more questions. “Probably it was better that way,” he wrote later. “The young man must have had many ‘whys’ surging through his befuddled mind, questions that only he could answer.”1 Charley had unanswered questions, too, and they haunted him for more than thirty years.
Charles Faulkner Outland, the third of four children, was born in Santa Paula on August 30, 1910. A lanky, strong-willed 1920s teenager, he played baseball, appeared in class plays, and was elected high school student body president. After graduation, he briefly attended Whittier College, east of Los Angeles, where the adventuresome young man learned to fly a single-engine airplane but never applied for a pilot’s license. “You didn’t need one in those days,” he explained.2