The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism

by Robert W. Righter

  While the Yosemite Park Act of 1864 provided a modicum of protection for the Yosemite Valley and a small grove of Sequoia gigantea (the Mariposa Big Trees), it had no effect on the valley 20 miles to the north. As public domain, Hetch Hetchy was open to those who wished to visit it for pleasure or claim it for economic gain.34 Such was the status of this secluded place until 1890.

  The sheep-grazing free-for-all in Hetch Hetchy and elsewhere threatened to denude the High Sierra meadows, as did lumbermen in the nearby forests. The threats drove Muir into action. The hundreds of thousands of high-country acres surroundingYosemite Valley needed protection through permanent park status. That certainly was high on the agenda when Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson, assistant editor of Century Magazine, set off on a two-week camping trip in June 1889. The urban-dwelling Johnson had known the mountaineer naturalist for many years. In fact, as editor for Scribner's, in 1877 Johnson was so enamored with Muir's writing that he offered to publish "everything you write."35 Now the two hiked together in the Sierra Nevada. Like many other wilderness novitiates, Johnson fell under Muir's spell as they camped through the "Range of Light" Johnson later recalled how much he enjoyed the trip, especially the fireside talks, as "we lay by the fire and revealed our inmost selves (as one does only by the fireside) until we were overcome by sleep."36 On one of those fireside evenings they made a pact. If Muir would write two articles on theYosemite high country for Century Magazine, Johnson would lend his considerable support and influence to the idea of establishing a national park, encompassing about two million acres surrounding the Yosemite Valley. Both fulfilled their side of the pact.37 With the help of Representative WilliamVandever of Los Angeles and Daniel K. Zumwalt, a land agent for the Southern Pacific Railroad, the bill sailed through Congress in an amazingly short time. President Benjamin Harrison signed the Yosemite National Park bill into law on October I, 189o, just over a year after the fateful camping trip.38

  The new national park included the Hetch Hetchy Valley, while, ironically, its sister, Yosemite Valley, languished under state control. The status of the private landholdings within the Hetch Hetchy Valley-often designated as "inholding" by the National Park Service-were not affected. Significant valley homestead lands would give the city of San Francisco an opportunity to purchase ownership in future years. When President Grover Cleveland established Stanislaus National Forest in 1897, to the north and west of Hetch Hetchy, he extended federal jurisdiction, while acknowledging a mosaic of private and public lands.39

  WHILE THE FEDERAL government worked on land ownership patterns in Yosemite National Park, an important demographic movement swept across the United States that would indirectly, yet significantly, influence the fate of the Hetch HetchyValley. The rise of the city brought industry and individual wealth but was accompanied by growing pains. A nation that had traced its roots to the farmhouse was now moving to city tenements. Californians who had gauged their lives by nature's seasons and the rising and setting sun now found life's metronome in the repetitive regularity of the factory whistle and the time clock. The harsh sounds of industry and mechanization replaced the more dulcet sounds of nature. Furthermore, white Americans on the West Coast felt anxious, if not threatened, by immigrant groups such as the Chinese and-soon to come-the Japanese. Not all those who fought for preservation of natural areas were reactionary and racist, but it is fair to say that many were concerned, wondering if all this change was for the better. Their anxiety was enhanced by writers such as Ernest Thompson Seton, Theodore Roosevelt, and Frederick Jackson Turner who lamented the na tion's relinquishment of its roots, suggesting that one result might be the deterioration of American character, so strongly influenced by the frontier and so intimately connected with nature. The American world of the nineteenth century was vanishing, and it seemed as if only the landscape artists might retain it for the nation's memory.40

  The rise of the city was something of a paradox. Commenting on Hetch Hetchy Valley, the historian Peter Schmitt noted that "the urban migration . . . might well have created a water shortage in San Francisco, but it also increased federal responsibility to keep the public domain in trust for those who visited the valley."41 On one hand, the burgeoning population of San Francisco and the Bay Area towns placed pressure on city officials to find more water. Hetch Hetchy provided one alternative because the valley offered a perfect storage receptacle. On the other hand, many believed that the evils of the growing city could be offset by more parks and places of solitude. People needed nature to counteract the debilitating effects of urban life.

  Responses to the rise of the city were complex and not easily defined. Many Americans found Dartmouth professor Liberty Hyde Bailey's "back to the land" idea appealing, while nature writers such as John Burroughs, with his comforting rural ways, enjoyed surprising popularity. However, the people who fought to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley, it must be emphasized, had no desire to turn their backs on the city. On the contrary, the great majority had little interest in Bailey's or Burroughs's admonitions. They lived in the city and were not tempted to leave its comforts and culture. They read the graceful writing of such authors but rarely acted on their earthy philosophy. What motivated them was not the agrarianism of the "back to the land" movement, but rather a desire to go "back to nature" in the sense of a temporary retreat from what Robert Marshall, the NewYork City resident with a passion for wilderness, would later call "the terrible neural tension of modern existence."42 They viewed mountain wilderness as a vacation spot, not as a workplace. They were of the middle class, educated, and with no pecuniary interest in the Sierra Nevada mountains. They were little different from Eastern hikers and members of the Appalachian Mountain Club who had "no fuzzy nostalgia for a lost agrarian ideal."43 Rather they were city dwellers who believed that frequent exposure to nature was one means of enhancing and adorning their urban lives. They viewed Hetch Hetchy as a leisure resource, where they might reflect, perhaps, on the sins of the city before returning to it.

  The Sierra Club, founded by Muir in 1892, mirrored this urban bias. Although Muir's core wealth came from tending his wife's family orchards, he never espoused the agrarian life, and he would agree with the assessment of his wife, Louie Strentzel Muir, that "a ranch that needs and takes the sacrifice of a noble life, or work, ought to be flung away beyond all reach and power for harm."44 The 192 Sierra Club charter members concurred. They included lawyers, professors, scientists, teachers, preachers, and a number of other professional men and women who espoused William Smythe's belief that the good life blended "the cream of the country and the cream of the city."45 Their "country," of course, was not the pastoral orchards of the Central Valley but rather the Sierra Nevada mountains. In Muir's Range of Light they would find sylvan nature, a place of pleasure and contemplation. They committed to saving the Hetch Hetchy Valley for their recreational enjoyment and spiritual enrichment, with no thought of making money. The defenders were sufficiently affluent that they could afford to view the valley without harboring thoughts of water for irrigated crops, timber for housing, or lamb for dinner tables. Prominent conservationists such as Muir, Robert Underwood Johnson, Harriet Monroe, and countless others believed in "the healing power of Nature."46 Visitation to a valley such as Hetch Hetchy, a kind of baptism in nature, could be a cure for the maladies of the city, to be taken once a year with or without a community of fellow campers.

  The cure for the affliction of the city took many different forms. San Franciscans might soothe their angst through a picnic in Golden Gate Park or a stroll on North Beach. Outdoor recreation, whatever the form, became more popular throughout the United States, and increasingly the "indoor America, sedentary and dyspeptic of disposition, was giving way to a newAmerican."47 Those who fought for Hetch Hetchy always praised the valley as a scenic place to camp. Camping, once considered only a necessity, had become popular. By the last quarter of the century, middle-class people "experimented with a variety of types of camping-some solitary and physically rigor
ous, some communal and less demanding." Whatever the case, in the words of historian CindyAron,"camping seemed to fit perfectly the needs of a growing vacation public. It promised health, rest, and enjoyment-all for a modest price."48

  Americans throughout the nation enjoyed more leisure time. NewYorkers retreated to the Adirondacks while San Franciscans found the Sierra Nevada alpine meadows to their liking. This should not suggest that Americans were trying to emulate Joe Knowles, the publicity-conscious "wild man" who allegedly stripped naked to survive the rigors of the Maine woods and thus became a minihero. Nor were they prepared to join Muir, who "might go on foot to the Sierra Nevada, and make his bed in a hollow tree and his dinner of tea and a crust of bread.."49 If there was a "wilderness cult," it was a cult of the mind, not the body. Many avid readers of Muir enjoyed his words and books from the comfort of their home hearths, experiencing the wilderness through Muir's rapturous descriptions and harrowing tales. Few wanted to experience firsthand what Muir could give them vicariously.

  Those campers who did visit the Hetch HetchyValley did not seek hardship and hunger. Rather, they wished to savor a close but comfortable experience with nature. They differed only in their locale from other hiking clubs across the nation. The Appalachian Mountain Club (1876), the Rocky Mountain Club (1875), the Mazamas of Portland (1894), each promoted the communal and social aspects of camping. They represented a view of nature that did not necessarily force the participant to abandon convenience or culture. The Sierra Club annual outing, beginning in 1901, became a popular event for both women and men, featuring adventure, cultural and moral uplift, romance, and a chance for club leaders to proselytize for nature and the national parks. This new phenomenon of camping and what one historian has called "the golden age of hiking" created a constituency that would be heard in the halls of Congress.50

  Before San Francisco transformed Hetch Hetchy, camping was the primary use. Like the Central Miwoks' and the sheepherders' use of the valley, it was low impact. Although participants might not acknowledge the fact, communal camping was another form of money-spending tourism. One hundred and fifty people could have an economic impact as well as an environmental one. Each camper in a Sierra Club outing to Hetch Hetchy paid a significant sum of money, much as those involved today with ecotourism packages do. The club encouraged visitation to Hetch Hetchy, and if it might realize a modest profit from the venture, so much the better. Aside from dues and voluntary contributions, the fee was the only way to support the club's political efforts.

  Meanwhile, the Yosemite National Park boundaries made little sense. Like many hurried land decisions, Congress in 1890 established park boundaries along longitude and latitude survey lines with little thought to scenic quality, watersheds, mountain ridges, or property ownership. Owners of cattle and of timberland to the west of the Yosemite Park boundary made management impossible. With legal access to any "inholdings," property owners found it absurdly simple to exploit the park. One cattleman owned a Soo-acre "inholding" but allowed his livestock to roam over 45,ooo acres of park land.51

  Yosemite's boundaries needed to be realigned. In the i89os California congressmen introduced bills to that effect, with the support of U.S. Army officers who found the peripheral boundaries a management nightmare. A lumber company forced the issue in 1903, when it began cutting timber on its properties within the park. The following year Interior Secretary Ethan Allen Hitchcock appointed the Yosemite Park Commission-consisting of Hiram M. Chittenden, a talented army engineer who had served as superintendent of Yellowstone National Park; Robert Marshall of the U.S. Geological Survey, and Frank Bond of the General Land Office-to make recommendations. In the summer of 1904 the Chittenden Commission took to the field, visiting Hetch Hetchy as well as other scenic sites. It took testimony and was particularly anxious to hear from John Muir, who chafed against seeing any land sliced away, particularly in the alpine country to the south. In the end, the committee recommended elimination of much land that contained marginal scenery, as well as park land honeycombed with private holdings, essentially indefensible against invasions from livestock, incursions by miners, or cutting by loggers. Congress essentially adopted the Chittenden Commission report, and the Yosemite Act of February 7, 1905, shrunk the contours of the park by 542 square miles. Clearly, as one historian put it, the act accomplished the purpose of stripping from the park "any lands limited in natural wonders but rich in natural resources."52

  Jurisdiction in the Hetch Hetchy Valley again went unchanged, but this congressional action trimmed the western park boundary so that there was only a narrow buffer between the valley and Stanislaus National Forest. More significant, the Chittenden Commission added 113 square miles to the northern part of the park. This land was almost all within the Tuolumne River watershed. To justify its action, the commission contended that the addition was largely for protection of water rights. But rights for whom? The report admitted that "already a large portion of its [the Tuolumne River's] water is appropriated and the time may soon come when municipal needs will further draw upon them." Such a statement can be seen as a dark cloud over the valley's future. Aware of San Francisco's desires, the commissioners seemed intent on protecting the city's water interests from private entry. They did not go so far as to recommend the use of Hetch HetchyValley as a reservoir site, but they did suggest that national park land could be beneficial to municipal or state water users.53

  Another ominous sign for Hetch Hetchy was congressional approval in i9oi of the Right-of-Way Act. This legislation opened the park to municipal water exploitation by authorizing rights of way across California parks, as well as other government reservations in the state, for electrical plants and transmission lines, for telephone and telegraph lines, for canals and pipes, and as one critic put it, "for about any purpose whatever." It was "perfectly tailored for looters of the parks," although the secretary of the interior did have the power to review requests and refuse them if justifiable. 54

  To its credit, the Chittenden Commission recommended repeal of the L901 Right-of-Way Act, but Congress ignored the suggestion. Without doubt the legislators passed the 1901 Right-of-Way Act to aid the water interests of San Francisco, and the idea of repeal was firmly resisted. But still the act's origins are shadowy at best. We do know that Representative Marion De Vries of Stockton, California, pushed the bill through the lower house of Congress, while Senator George C. Perkins shepherded it through the upper house. It went through Congress with virtually no debate or opposition. But who wrote it and put it into the hands of De Vries? That question will never be answered to anyone's satisfaction, but the fact that in T9oT Mayor Phelan had boosted his interest in water and was surreptitiously entering water rights claims in the Hetch Hetchy Valley gives pause. Joseph B. Lippincott, a water engineer of questionable ethics, assisted him. That the Right-of-Way Act passed in the same year as the city moved to claim the valley provides strong circumstantial evidence that the two events were connected and perhaps premeditated.ss

  The passage of this act, an ominous entree for exploitation of Hetch Hetchy, did not concern the Sierra Club at the time. A tiny organization without any Washington, D.C., connections, the club focused its limited energy toward Sacramento. In the California capital, Muir and the preservationists worked to convince the state legislature to return Yosemite Valley to federal control. There was great satisfaction when they finally accomplished the task in i9o6.56 In the meantime clouds were gathering in the remote valley. Neither Muir nor the Sierra Club, nor the handful of persons who had camped in Hetch Hetchy, suspected that its smooth flowing waters and lush meadows would soon be endangered. For Muir the valley had changed little since his 1871 solo visit. He loved this place for its solitude, its ancient groves of oak and pine trees, its plunging waterfalls, and its riotous meadows deeply set in granite frames. Protected by the umbrella of Yosemite National Park, the valley of glacial origins could only give him satisfaction. This "great landscape garden, one of Nature's rarest and most preci
ous mountain temples," as he described it, seemed secure.57 In spite of a progression of human use, the valley had retained its integrity. It seemed safeguarded under Muir's watchful eye and the protection afforded by the US. Army. However, no one had reckoned with the ambitious leaders of San Francisco, who had no acquaintance with or feel for Muir's valley or, if they did, considered its loss only a small price to pay for urban progress.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Imperial City and Water

  "Cities, like all other living things, need water to survive, and even more water to flourish."

  GERALD T. KOEPPEL, Water for Gotham: A History (2000)

  IN THE SAME year that Joseph Screech wandered into the Hetch HetchyValley, San Francisco was in the midst of a remarkable change from a city of shacks and tents to one of wood frame houses and commercial enterprises. In the brief time from the American takeover to the gold rush, a mere three years, the Mexican town of Yerba Buena transformed itself into a commercial center of some 40,000 people, a cosmopolitan mixture of ethnic and racial groups, all driven by a desire to acquire wealth in this new countryand all in need of water.

  From this beginning, water in San Francisco was of paramount importance. In many regions residents assume abundant water as a given right, but it has always been problematic in the arid West-highly valued, often scarce or unavailable when you want it. San Francisco was on the edge of aridity, but its location made it particularly vulnerable. So the city sought to solve its resource problem by looking to the snow-fed streams of the distant Sierra Nevada mountains. City leaders understood that availability of water often influenced urban growth as well as individual fortunes. For human coimnu- nities water is a necessary commodity that has multiple meanings, often bringing out the best and most noble human characteristics but also quite capable of triggering self-serving actions and greed. In the water wars of San Francisco, all of these traits were present.