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

by Robert W. Righter

  The gold rush culture that emerged by 185o, dominated by Americans and built on a "pyramid of mining," overwhelmed the indigenous peoples as well as the Spanish and Mexican residents.Yet the importance of a reliable supply of water did not originate with the American takeover of San Francisco. The Indians of California had long manipulated their environment, including diverting their source of water. However, in most cases, the Indian peoples, such as those in the Hetch Hetchy Valley, chose to live near water sources, rather than divert or store them.I

  Spanish settlement in Alta California in 1769 brought a new awareness of the necessity of water. The Franciscan friars and the presidio soldiers were familiar with arid lands and, as they established missions along the coast, took great care to plan and build with water in mind. They based their economy not only on grazing but also on intensive agriculture. And if they succeeded in converting the Indians to Catholicism, a growing population would demand a bountiful supply of the precious commodity. Furthermore, the Spaniards believed that control of water could be viewed as a foreign policy tool, enhancing their settlements while discouraging other European powers with designs on this faraway region. Water, as historian Norris Hundley has noted, was "crucial to Spain's successful colonization of California . . . as a means of imperial expansion.."2

  In spite of the care they gave to water sources, the padres made mistakes in site selection, resulting in either flood or drought. The Mission San Carlos Borromeo, Father Junipero Serra's headquarters, had to be relocated for this reason. Usually "prayer rather than relocation became a frequent response to capricious weather cycles," but occasionally the Franciscan padres became embroiled in controversies that appeals to the Almighty could not resolve. The Mission San Fernando and the pueblo of Los Angeles failed to agree on an equitable management of Los Angeles River water, necessitating negotiation and compromise. In Northern California the rather insignificant Guadalupe River became a source of contention between the Mission Santa Clara and the pueblo of San Jose. Since populations were small, normally the disputants settled their differences amicably, although the later controversy lasted for two decades and caused bitterness between the Hispanic and Indian communities, as well as the padres, who generally sided with the Indians.3

  Although the mission's padres defended Indian water rights, one should not presume that the first Californians benefited. Water projects, then as now, required labor, and the mission Indians supplied it. The padres, of course, never considered the neophytes as slaves, yet they did force them to construct the primitive hydraulic works necessary for expansion of irrigated land. The building of an irrigation system served a dual purpose: It provided a needed crop infrastructure while controlling the Indians and assimilating them to intensive agriculture.4 Such structured labor, so culturally foreign to the natives, caused alienation at best; at worst, death.

  In the case of water disputes, Spanish-Mexican authorities almost always privileged community needs over individual rights. Water was an invaluable resource to be shared, held in common for the good of the community. However, with the American takeover the political culture changed dramatically. American newcomers were confident, impatient, and arrogant, and armed with their capitalist ideas, they felt unconstrained by limitations.5 They believed that the abundant natural resources of California, whether grass, timber, precious metals, or water, were at their disposal-all in the name of progress, or more specifically, empire building on the Pacific Rim. They would extend no special community status to water. If you were clever enough, it could be privatized for profit. Men such as William Ralston, William Sharon, and George Hearst were hardheaded businessmen, often greedy, uneducated, and embracing a cut-throat code that was the only one they understood.6 In a sense, they represented the failure of idealists such as Emerson or Thoreau to produce any sort of social philosophy that embraced community or encouraged respect for the limits of nature.

  The exploitation of California's natural resources continued unabated in the years leading to Hetch Hetchy. Those who presumed to speak for wealth, much of which flowed to San Francisco, believed they were transforming a pioneer land into a settled, civilized one. And in a large sense, the waters of California served as the converting agents. Logging companies, which cut the coastal redwoods as well as the sugar pine forests of the Sierra Nevada, often used the energy of river waters to transport logs to mills. The most common work of water might be found in the dominant mining industry. From simple pan placer mining, to river mining, to quartz mining, to hydraulic mining, all shared in the need for water. However, that need graduated exponentially with hydraulic mining to the point that mining and water bonded and could not be separated. In time, a large, pressurized supply of water became even more important than the gold-bearing gravel and soil that it reduced.?

  Hydraulic mining provides an example of man's most environmentally destructive activities, one in which greed transgressed all thought of community concern. This form of mining used whole rivers to extract a few ounces of gold for a commercial company. Workers transported water by ditch, flume, or pressurized pipe, which in turn fed into a nozzle so powerful that it made today's fire hose seem like a child's toy. The more primitive noz zles required six or eight adults to hold them. The more sophisticated ones had to be anchored by steel and iron. Hydraulickers washed away mountains of rock, gravel, and debris for gold. They represented the antithesis of the individual placer miner with his simple pan or sluice box, who by 1855 remained only a romantic memory. In his place emerged San Francisco mining corporations, staffed by bank clerks and engineers more familiar with the workings of stock trading than a sluice box. Mining operations required prodigious amounts of capital and water, and the financiers of Montgomery Street in San Francisco usually supplied both, selling water by the "miner's inch," the amount of water that flowed through a square-inch hole in ten hours under constant pressure.8 Some water companies merged and consolidated, to become so large that they bought out mining companies. In 1856 the Eureka Canal Company in El Dorado County boasted dams, reservoirs, and 247 miles of canals valued at $700,000. By 1865 the restructured Eureka Lake andYuba Canal Company owned its own mining operations, delivering 85 million gallons every 24 hours to its extended sites.9 In an age in which electric power did not yet exist and steam power was expensive, the kinetic energy of water dominated.

  The technical problems that emerged from hydraulic mining challenged engineers to advance their knowledge. William Ralston's North Bloomfield Mining Company faced what appeared to be insurmountable runoff problems at the Malakoff Mine. Undaunted, hydraulic engineers designed a tunnel some 130 feet beneath the surface, requiring workers to drill and blast a tunnel a mile and a half long through bedrock at a cost of over a half million dollars. To the amazement of skeptics, the design was successful. North Bloomfield was the largest operation, but more than go other hydraulic operations sifted gold from a massive amount of soil.

  The environmental calamity resulting from these companies hell-bent on profit and expansion staggers the imagination. Mountains disappeared as the companies swung their great nozzles toward any section of earth that had potential to yield profit. Water became the instrument of a business dominated by human greed and unregulated capitalism gone berserk. 10

  In addition to the immense environmental damage, there were social costs as well. During the hydraulic mining era (1852-1884), debris-filled rivers flowed onto the Sacramento Valley. Once there, the water slowed and the silt and debris settled. By 1874 the Yuba River flowed in places sixty feet higher then it had in pre-gold rush days. During spring runoff, desperate farmers and townspeople could not raise levees fast enough. High water broke levees, coating hundreds of farms with debris that residents called "slickens," ruining the land and driving farmers into poverty. One need not have a vivid imagination to understand the problem. Powerful San Francisco mining corporations unleashed vast amounts of debris-laden water into the mountain rivers with no concern for downstream users. Water has and wil
l cause destruction through floods, but such events represent uncontrollable chance acts of nature. This catastrophe represented the deliberate rapacity of men of wealth. San Francisco corporate heads should have said "This is wrong" and stopped or at least mitigated the practice. However, their reaction to the suffering of local communities was to hire attorneys to defend their right.

  This mining practice would not have ended except that farmers and valley merchants banded together to form the Anti-Debris Society. They sued for relief but found none in the California courts. Then Edward Woodruff, an absentee landowner, brought suit in 1882 in the U.S. Ninth Circuit's district court in San Francisco, where judge Lorenzo Sawyer presided.11 On January 7, 1884, hydraulic mining came to an end. Judge Sawyer, after reviewing more than 20,000 pages of testimony and making numerous field trips to observe the mines and the downstream damage they caused, gave his 225-page decision in Woodruff v. North Bloomfield (which he insisted on reading aloud to an impatient audience), calling for a permanent injunction against hydraulic mining.12 Common sense won out over the industrialists' greed as farmers and the environment were left to recover lives and land. Close to 20,000 miners packed up their gripsacks, and many hydraulic engineers began to look for work. They had the talent to move massive amounts of water. Why not capture the waters of the Sierra Nevada for a beneficial use, rather than glean a few ounces of gold? The engineers could look on the Hetch Hetchy Valley as simply another challenge, one more satisfying than turning mountain waters into chocolate-colored rivers of mud and debris. 13

  The hydraulic mining wars underscored the power of San Francisco, the financial center of the West. Like the water currents of the Golden Gate, commerce surged both east to the mines and west to far-flung seaports, spawned largely by the needs of the mines. Above all, it was the bankers, venture capitalists, and business interests who determined the politics and the economy of the state. According to one writer, this domination of San Francisco took place not by mere chance but by design. Author Gray Brechin likens the rise of San Francisco to the Italian city-states of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Such cities as Milan orVenice dominated the surrounding countryside, or contado, which was subservient to their needs. The city could offer the countryside protection from neighboring enemies as well as markets for farm products, while the contado's peasant population provided food, natural resources, labor, conscripts, and even taxes for the dominant city-state. Of course oligarchies, which had no semblance of democratic virtues, controlled the Italian city-states. Yet Brechin sees little difference between such oligarchies and what he terms the "linked dynastic elites" of San Francisco. These wealthy families-such as the Spreckels, de Youngs, Phelans, Bourns, Crockers, Stanfords, and Hearsts-all controlled the flow of information, "editing out that which negatively concerned themselves." These families represented an urban aristocracy dedicated to wealth, power, and above all, growth. They all agreed, says Brechin, "that the city must grow-and its land values rise-to assure the continuation of their dominion."14 To harvest such growth, San Francisco reaped the resources of the countryside without much sowing. Acquiring gold from the mountains at the impoverishment of farm land below was a perfect example. When San Francisco leaders laid siege to the Hetch Hetchy Valley, they believed it was their right. The Italian city-states were not shy in claiming the countryside, and neither was San Francisco. The city had no standing army, but it did have population, political power, and a certain sense of entitlement.

  Still, there were limitations on San Francisco power that no Italian citystate had to endure. Above all, the city had to contend with the federal government. When the farmers got no satisfaction on hydraulic mining from the California legislature or state courts, they went to the U.S. Ninth's district court. There the "hinterlands" received a modicum of belated justice. Later, federal power would force San Francisco to compromise on its desires for absolute control of the Hetch Hetchy water system. The San Francisco plutocrats also had to contend with the fifth estate. A free, uncontrolled press and a vigorous journalistic tradition often led to revealing investigative reporting. Newspaper publishers, such as the de Young brothers and William Randolph Hearst, could be absolutely slanderous at times, and yet their investigative reporters kept politicians and the "dynastic elites" nervous, and to a degree, aboveboard.

  It would be a mistake, however, to suggest that only the dynastic elites fought for Hetch Hetchy to feather their nests. The middle class supported the effort, knowing that an improved urban infrastructure would not only enhance their lives but also raise the value of their more modest real estate holdings. It did not matter if their stake was a quarter of an acre, rather than thousands; they understood the principle of growth and appreciating land values. When it came to the Hetch Hetchy water system, people of the Bay Area, regardless of middle- or working-class status, saw the investment in abundant, pure water to be in their interests, although at times they were reluctant to pay for it.

  While I have suggested restrictions on Brechin's contado idea, one must also grant it credence. San Francisco leaders had a vision, and it included use of the surrounding lands. Through patience, determination, arrogance, and a special sense of mission, they pursued the vision of a great city. San Francisco's determination was similar to that of Chicago, where the word empire was on the lips of every city booster, even though such a metaphor was highly undemocratic. Chicago desired hinterland hegemony, and so did San Francisco. 15

  From the viewpoint of James Phelan, a man steeped in the classics, such cities as Babylon, Thebes, Athens, Alexandria, Carthage, and Constantinople achieved greatness through their infrastructures and control of the surrounding countryside. Rome, of course, was never far from his mind. He admired the architecture and transportation system, but it was the aqueducts, furnishing the city with abundant freshwater from the hinterlands, that offered the most pertinent example for San Francisco. The greatness of Rome depended on its aqueducts. Phelan admired their engineering, but he knew that construction had not come quickly. For four and a half centuries the city depended on local wells and the Tiber River. But the empire needed more water, and between 312 B.c. and A.D. 226 engineers designed-and slaves built-eleven gravity-fed masonry aqueducts, bringing some 38 million gallons of freshwater a day from distant lakes, rivers, and streams. In its glory days, the days Phelan and San Francisco boosters liked to recall, ancient Rome's abundant water supply helped create an almost aquatic culture that depended on the public and private baths, where Romans gathered for cleanliness, enjoyment, and discussions of politics and business.16 No doubt Phelan committed to memory the story of how the Gothic leader Vitiges and his army blocked the aqueducts leading to the city, thus ending the imperial rule of Rome forever.17 Clearly civilization, and indeed survival, depended on a bountiful water supply. Not surprisingly, when architects designed the two elegant water towers associated with the Hetch Hetchy system (Sunol and Pulgas), one replicated the water tower of Tivoli that fed Rome, while the other followed a Roman Renaissance revival architecture, modern proof that symbolism plays an important role in the perception of a city and its countryside.

  THE FIRST SYSTEMS to provide potable water to the city of San Francisco bore no resemblance to the magnificent aqueducts of Rome. Residents in 1848 acquired water by the most primitive means. With no viable streams close at hand, owners of homes, restaurants, hotels, and shipping offices dug crude wells, often brackish or dry. A more reliable source was the water boats that plied daily across the Golden Gate from Sausalito and Marin County, where streams coming off MountTamalpais offered a sufficient supply of drinkable water. Water venders unloaded the cargo and then negotiated the dirt (or mud) streets with their carts, selling buckets and casks of what might truly be called "liquid gold." For a time the carts quenched the thirst of San Franciscans, but no wonder the numerous bars were rumored to compete with the water carts for sales.

  This primitive water system gave no protection against fire. The ramshackle town of San Francisco
, whose population far exceeded its infrastructure's capacity to provide for it, burned down seven times between late 1849 and 1851.18 Many criticized the inadequate volunteer fire department and the lack of water and equipment. However, the limited water supply was unfairly blamed. Often fires were the work of unruly gangs, such as Australian immigrants known as the "Sydney Ducks" who were not above using arson to create havoc, allowing them to pillage property. 19

  As the gold fever subsided, San Francisco looked to replace the water carts with a respectable infrastructure. In 1851 the Mountain Lake Water Company contracted with the city to bring water by flume from Mountain Lake and Lobos Creek, both on the sand dune-dominated western edge of the city. The company never succeeded and, plagued by lawsuits, went broke in 1862. In the meantime entrepreneurs formed the San Francisco WaterWorks in 1857. This company also tapped Lobos Creek and succeeded in bringing water by flume around the shore of the Golden Gate and into the city, where pumps elevated it to a suitable level for distribution. A year later, George H. Ensign organized the Spring Valley Water Works, developing a small spring in the city, close to the intersection of Mason and Washington streets. He laid a few pipes but, lacking capital, he was bought out by a stronger consortium in 186o that retained the Spring Valley name. In 1865 the San Francisco Water Works and the Spring Valley Water Works consolidated. The Spring Valley Water Works, which changed its name to "Spring Valley Water Company" in 1904, became the dominant water utility in the city. No other company in California was so controversial, save perhaps the Southern Pacific Railroad, and no other private enterprise was so involved with the fate of the Hetch HetchyValley. 20