Across the bay the Oakland newspapers expressed interest in a regional water system with a Sierra Nevada source. The Oakland Transcript suggested "that by going into a partnership arrangement with San Francisco, this city, Sacramento, Stockton and other places could get water from the mountain lakes and streams at a very modest cost." One year later the Oakland Daily News reported a strong possibility that the San Francisco supervisors "will purchase the water rights of the Mount Gregory Water and Mining Company, and bring the pure waters of the mountain lakes of the Sierras down through Oakland and pass them under the bay." If so, Oakland would have "an ample supply of pure water, and at low rates.."39 Even at this early date, a regional water system was a possibility, and the Hetch HetchyValley was not the only candidate. Also evident was that the Bay Area communities looked to San Francisco for leadership, perhaps even dependency, as a child to a parent. This was not surprising, given how the city dominated in population and wealth.
Perhaps because of its confidence in dealing with Nevada's protests, San Francisco resurrected von Schmidt's idea in the 189os. But now there was a new consideration to the Lake Tahoe scheme, almost as important as the water itself. In the late 188os the advantages of electricity became evident, and within a decade nascent power companies formed throughout the nation. California was noticeably devoid of coal, and therefore the falling water of the Sierra Nevada became the electrical generating source of choice. "California White Coal" sped the state to the forefront of hydroelectric technology, as well as long-distance electrical transmission from the mountains to the more populated Bay Area and coastal towns.40 This new aspect of water transfer gave the Lake Tahoe idea new appeal. Tahoe water, once tunneled to the western slope, could be manipulated in a drop of some 7,000 feet to produce thousands of kilowatt-hours of electricity per day, before being transported by aqueduct for use by the city.
In i9oo the city sent an inspection team. The plan's possibility was enticing, particularly since von Schmidt, now desperate, was prepared to sell his water and property rights for $50 '000.41 However, nothing had really changed with the state of Nevada in the intervening 20 years. If approved, the plan would be tied up in the courts, filling only the bank accounts of water lawyers rather than the reservoirs of the city. The inspection team recommended that the city continue to look for sources on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada.
As the city continued its search, the Tuolumne River seemed to surface in the conversations as the most desirable. Although reservoirs might be built downstream, the isolated Hetch HetchyValley, at an elevation of 3,800 feet, had the advantage of providing a reserve for hydropower production as well as a storage basin for pure Sierra Nevada snow water. Furthermore, the U-shaped glacial valley had just been made part of Yosemite National Park in 189o. For San Francisco this was a significant event. National park status closed off private land entry, and the few private properties within the valley could be purchased or, if necessary, acquired through eminent domain proceedings. Other viable sites had been rejected by the city engineers and attorneys because they offered a briar patch of legal entanglements and expenses. Hetch Hetchy might require difficult, indeed original, civil engineering, but such physical obstacles seemed hurdles easier to jump than the multiple private claims on land and water that attended other rivers and sites. It would prove a questionable assumption.
Thus it was that by the late 189os San Francisco had made two significant decisions. The city should have a municipally owned water system, and water should come from a source in the Sierra Nevada mountains, preferably the Hetch Hetchy Valley. All that the city needed was enabling legislation, the acquisition of land and water claims, and a determined mayor. In 1900 they would all come together.
CHAPTER 3
Water, Earthquake, and Fire
"I saw the hillside covered by homeless people. I saw such suffering as I never expect to see again, and I know that a lot of it was caused by reason of the inefficient system of water that was being supplied to the people of San Francisco."
SENATOR KEY PITTMAN
WHEN MAYOR-ELECT James Phelan took office in 1896, he immediately drew wide publicity by taking the law into his own hands. With the blessings of a judge, he threw out eight elected city supervisors, known as the "Boodling Board of Supervisors." Only four remained, whom he presumed to be honest. The disgraced supervisors did not leave without protest. They entered City Hall on a Saturday night, determined to hold their ground until the Monday night supervisor's meeting. Not to be outdone, on Monday morning Phelan arrived with the police. As one reporter noted, the officers forcibly removed the trespassing supervisors, "bag and baggage, like a porter kicking out into the streets a lot of old ash cans.."i The supervisors of questionable character eventually went to court and regained their seats, but it did not matter. Phelan had made a statement. He intended to be strong and honest, taking government to incorruptible heights in a ratified atmosphere the city had never known. And, of course, he determined to provide San Francisco with a new water supply, pure and owned by the city.
Across the Bay, John Muir's involvement in politics might not have been so dramatic, but he was nevertheless effective. The mountaineer and man of national reputation wished to save his Yosemite Valley from the clutches of a state commission that he felt was every bit as incompetent as Phelan's city supervisors. Yosemite Valley, Muir believed, should be returned to the jurisdiction of the federal government. After lobbying President Theodore Roosevelt on a four-day camping trip in 1903, and with continual arm-twisting of Sacramento legislators, he achieved his goal.2 At the turn of the century Phelan and Muir were on separate tracks, each pursuing his dream: one for honest government, the other for Yosemite Valley.
If one had to characterize the Hetch HetchyValley fight through two personalities, Phelan and Muir would be reasonable choices. Phelan, determined to have the valley, was rich, powerful, honest, cultured, committed, with a sense of noblesse oblige for his city. His father had made a small fortune in the liquor business, a booming enterprise during the gold rush days, and had branched out into trade and banking. James, born in 1861, would be the recipient of a small fortune, which he enlarged through his investments in city real estate. Just as William H. Crocker controlled much of San Francisco's banking activity, Phelan was equally influential in real estate. Phelan loved San Francisco, for in a small degree, he owned it.3 He also had ambitions for it. He studied the history and architecture of Rome, Paris, and London with the thought of replicating their most desirable features in San Francisco. His friend, Gertrude Atherton, perhaps best described him as a man with "a broad and charitable outlook, and while one side of his mind was intellectual, with a great love of literature and particularly poetry, the other was shrewd, far-seeing, financial." He never married, and when Atherton suggested that it was because "his one true love was California," he smiled and did not deny it.4
Phelan's instincts were urban, and when he experienced the outdoors, as he often did at his manicured Montalvo estate, his idea of roughing it was to have a barbeque complete with chilled wine, linen, and uniformed servants.5 In essence, Phelan's compass point in life was anthropocentric: he truly appreciated the creations of human beings. Nature, when present in his life, was a mere backdrop for music, poetry, sculpture, grand architecture, and art. The night before the San Francisco earthquake Phelan enjoyed the performance of Enrique Caruso as Don Jose in the opera Carmen.6
In contrast, on that fateful day Muir was in the Arizona desert examining deposits of petrified wood.? He was never at home in the city. He was comfortable in his well-tended orchards across the bay in Martinez but never more at ease than in the pinnacles of the High Sierra. Muir was more biocentric, focused on the creations of nature. Kevin Starr, the historian of California, summarized the two men: "For Phelan, California was the splash of baroque fountains in a sun-drenched plaza. For Muir and his fellow Sierra Club members, . . . California was a trek though the High Country."8 The two men looked on the Hetch Het
chyValley through the prism of their beliefs, and what they saw was quite different. From their appositional points of view spring many of the arguments the two sides advanced. At issue was the meaning of progress and whether the United States had reached the point where it might wish to preserve landscapes of special beauty, even if that might inconvenience material needs. For Phelan that point had not been reached. For him, a great dam symbolized human determination and ingenuity, an edifice that would enhance nature and yet serve the human needs of his city. Muir did not believe that humans could enhance the beauty of nature, at least not a mountain sanctuary. In a sense, the debate was the opening salvo of a century's worth of conflict over "the highest and best use" of natural areas.
During the early phases of this opening salvo San Francisco had the edge. Even before Muir formed the Sierra Cub in 1892, the city cast covetous eyes toward the valley. Mayor Phelan applied for a permit in late 1902, but did not get it. The city learned some lessons. Patience would be necessary. The supervisors found that there were other water options. Leaders also discovered that momentous events can influence decisions. The earthquake and fire, while disastrous in itself, created sympathy for the stricken city. San Francisco also recognized that power resided in Washington and that views modify with political change. From 1903 to 1914 the city of San Francisco and the Sierra Club changed their arguments very little, but how Washington received those arguments did matter. Two secretaries of the interior favored the city's position, two leaned toward the Sierra Club view Washington political concerns, as well as changing attitudes toward the national parks and natural resources, played a crucial part in the outcome of this fight. Both sides would learn, if they did not know already, that in such natural resource issues, the political party and personalities who controlled Washington made a difference.
Mayor Phelan made the first step when he applied to the Department of the Interior on July 29, 1901, for reservoir rights on the Lake Eleanor site and in the Hetch Hetchy Valleys Although this was a beginning, it was also the culmination of an unfolding interest in the valley. That interest is best represented by looking at the clouded career ofWilliam Hammond Hall, an engineer intimately involved with both Hetch Hetchy Valley and San Francisco water politics. In May of 1878 the California legislature appointed Hall as state engineer, essentially to continue the work of Josiah Whitney. One of his tasks was to collect data on water sources that could serve municipal purposes. By 1882 Hall had completed a survey of Lake Eleanor, located to the west of the Hetch Hetchy Valley and at a considerably higher elevation. Eleanor Creek was a small tributary that entered the Tuolumne River west of the valley. Also in that year, J. P. Dart, a Sonora engineer, drew up maps for a Hetch Hetchy water project. Further downriver, W. G. Long and Joseph Hampton, both from the town of Sonora, filed water rights with the idea of constructing ditches to bring water to San Francisco. Interest in water transfer to the bay city was on the rise. However, these projects had as much chance at success as miners finding the mother lode. When presented to investors, the great cost involved in building a private water system to serve the city caused them to cease their scribbles and calculations and seek profit elsewhere.111
FIGURE 4. Mayor and senator James Phelan attended the dedication of the 1923 dam and gave a speech. He was heavily invested in the Hetch Hetchy water and power system from 1900 until his death in 1930. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library.
By 1885 the governor granted Hammond Hall leave to join John Wesley Powell's Irrigation Survey of the Western States. In the course of this work, Luther Wagoner, Hall's assistant, surveyed the Lake Eleanor site and its outlet stream. However, Wagoner passed over the attractive Hetch Hetchy Valley. According to Hall's later recollection, Powell would not approve such a spectacular valley for water storage "until necessity should call for its use, and that time, he considered, was then in the very distant future." 11 There is little reason to doubt Hall's account, but one wonders whether Powell had viewed a painting or a photograph of Hetch Hetchy or whether he was aware that shortly thereafter the valley would become part of Yosemite National Park. For whatever reason, Powell went on record that his U.S. Geological Survey would have no part of any plan to submerge the valley for irrigation or a water source.
However, Powell's reservations did not influence the government engineers for long. In 1891 John Henry Quinton inspected the valley for the Geological Survey. Aesthetic considerations no longer seemed paramount, and Quinton displayed no reluctance in recommending the valley as a proper location for a dam. However, the city-torn with corruption and dissensionwas not prepared to take action. Even when Phelan won the mayorship, his first priority was to reform an outdated city charter, not find water. When he had accomplished his municipal reform through what became known as the Phelan Charter, or more properly, the 1900 Charter, he turned his attention to public works. With political power consolidated in the mayor's office, Phelan selected C. E. Grunsky as the city engineer. Grunsky, a respected civil engineer who would go on to become president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, studied every water alternative within 150 miles of the city. Over a two-year period, his assistants examined water sources from the Feather River in the northern Sierra to the Tuolumne River in the southern Sierra. He made his recommendation on January 23, 19oi, when he sent a letter to the Board of Public Works recommending that the city develop the Tuolumne River watershed, with dams at the Lake Eleanor and Hetch HetchyValley sites. If the city failed to attain a federal permit to do so, Grunsky hoped that federal officials would deny any pending homestead claims. Although other options were not totally discounted, Mayor Phelan and San Francisco would follow Grunsky's recommendation. Once the city made its choice, it hung onto that choice with the determination and patience of a wolf after its prey.
To assist with the city's application, Phelan hired Joseph B. Lippincott to conduct the necessary surveys. This action was suspect, for Lippincott was an employee of the U.S. Geological Survey. He should not have done private consulting work, nor should Phelan have hired him. But Lippincott seemed to have no qualms about selling his services to the highest bidder. He had the advantage, of course, of appearing to be an impartial government employee simply doing an irrigation survey. Just a few years later, Lippincott would be severely criticized for using his position with the Bureau of Reclamation to further the interests of the city of Los Angeles in acquiring water rights on the Owens River.12 The situation in San Francisco was, if not identical, similar.
Phelan and Grunsky, on the other hand, can be faulted for secretly filing water rights under the mayor's name rather than that of the city of San Francisco. Phelan argued, however, that the covert action was necessary since "there were no provisions in the regulations issued by the Department of Interior under which a municipality could file."13 We do know that Phelan filed, not out of any hope for personal gain, but rather for the benefit of his cherished city. He pondered the possibility that the Spring Valley Water Company might somehow gain senior water rights in Hetch Hetchy if the survey became public information. Such suspicions were well founded. The company had already frustrated San Francisco's efforts to establish a municipal water supply when it got wind of the city's intent to buy the Calaveras dam site (in Alameda County). Spring Valley outbid the supervisors and nipped the city's water aspirations in the bud. City pretext notwithstanding, secrecy in the world of water claims and water rights was every bit as legitimate as in that of land purchases.
In time, John Muir would identify Phelan as the true enemy of the Hetch HetchyValley. His activities, his determination, and his political acumen were traits that, in Muir's view, would mark him as the man at the heart of this "black job." Marsden Manson, soon to become city engineer, and Warren Olney, a charter member of the Sierra Club turned "Benedict Arnold," were "only hired promoters." "Never was a scheme more truly a one man scheme than this." 14 Phelan became the object of much of Muir's contemptuous and occasionally heated accusations. In the natural world, Muir might char
acterize him as a snake, slithering about in a devious and plotting way. In truth, Phelan was an ambitious leader, a compelling speaker, and a man of civic responsibility, convinced that a municipally owned Hetch Hetchy system would resolve the city's water woes.
FIGURE 5. The famed naturalist and writer John Muir was the spiritual and political leader of the Hetch Hetchy fight. This photograph, taken in 1907, may have been shot in the valley by Herbert Gleason. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library.
Significantly in his recommendations City Engineer Grunsky suggested alternatives to submerging Hetch Hetchy Valley. In light of subsequent events, his recommendations must not be forgotten. Although Grunsky preferred to dam the valley, he believed that "either Lake Eleanor or Hetch Hetchy would be sufficient for the needs of San Francisco." For the foreseeable future-for Grunsky, a century-he believed that a combination of water sources from a free-flowing Tuolumne River, a dam at Lake Eleanor, storage rights on Cherry Creek, and the significant watershed resources of the Spring Valley Water Company would be sufficient to meet the city's needs as well as that of the participating Bay Area communities.15 The Hetch Hetchy Valley need not be touched. The valley could remain in abeyance, to be developed-if his predictions proved accurate-sometime around the year 2000.
In the end, neither Grunsky, Phelan, nor the supervisors embraced this option. They remained firmly committed to a darn in the Hetch HetchyValley, no matter what the financial realities or the political consequences. No person could fully explain this commitment, but perhaps San Francisco mayor Edward Taylor came closest when he suggested to a Commonwealth Club audience in r9o9 that the Hetch Hetchy Valley seemed to work a magical spell on those who encountered it. The darn site and valley tended to "completely hypnotize every civil engineer that sees it, and to render him forever after incapable of a rational consideration of the larger problem of public policy relating to it."16
The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism Page 7