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

by Robert W. Righter

2. Josiah Dwight Whitney Yosemite Guide-Book: A description of the Yosemite Valley and the Adjacent Regions of the Sierra Nevada, and the Big Trees of California (published by authority of the California State Legislature, 1869) 83-84.

  3. John Muir, "The Hetch HetchyValley," Boston Weekly Transcript, March 25, 1873. No doubt Muir took some pleasure in publishing his Hetch Hetchy findings in a paper read by Whitney and his scientific friends.

  4. Muir, "Hetch Hetchy Valley," Overland Monthly, 42. Interestingly, Whitney accepted the glacial origins of the Hetch Hetchy Valley while denying significant glacial action inYosemite. In The Yosemite Guide-Book (iii) he states,"There is no doubt that the great glacier, which, as already mentioned, originated near Mt. Dana and Mt. Lyell, found its way down the Tuolumne Canon, and passed through the Hetch Hetchy Valley."

  5. James P. Walsh, Timothy J. O'Keefe, Legacy of a Native Son: James Duval Phelan and Villa Montalvo (Saratoga, Calif.: Forbes Mill Press, 1993), 81-87.

  6. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1797), part 2.

  7. Quoted in Emily Wortis Leider, California's Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1991), 257.

  8. Because there is very little research specifically about the Indians who inhabited the Hetch Hetchy Valley, I have relied on what is known of the Central and Southern Miwok and the Paiute of the Mono Lake area, who largely inhabited and/or visited Yosemite Valley. The two valleys were, of course, very similar in origin, vegetation, and altitude and only twenty miles apart. See Craig D. Bates, Martha J. Lee, Tradition and Innovation: A Basket History of the Indians of the Yosemite-Mono Lake Area (Yosemite National Park:Yosemite Association, 199o).

  9. See Henry T. Lewis, "Patterns of Indian Burning in California: Ecology and Etlmohistory," in Before the Wilderness: Environmental Management by Native Californians, ed. Thomas C. Blackburn and Kat Anderson (Menlo Park, Calif : Balleria Press, 1993), 55-79.

  io. Helen McCarthy "Managing Oaks and the Acorn Crop," in Before the Wilderness, 222.

  ii. Ibid., 214-i7.

  12. Described in ibid., 218-20.

  13. Peter Browning, Yosemite Place Names (Lafayette, Calif.: Great West Books, 1988), 6o; "Yosemite Guide," 30 (Spring 2001), 1.

  14. Irene D. Paden, Margaret E. Schlichtmann, The Big Oak Flat Road: An Account of Freighting from Stockton to Yosemite Valley (San Francisco, 1955), 191.

  15. Browning, Yosemite Place Names, 6o-6i; Ray W Taylor, Hetch Hetchy: The Story of San Francisco's Struggle to Provide a Water Supply for Her Future Needs (San Francisco: Ricardo J. Orozco, Publisher, 1926), 37. This was the first published book on the Hetch Hetchy issue. Reflecting the views of San Francisco politicians and engineers, it lacks critical perspective.

  16. Margaret Sanborn, Yosemite: Its Discovery, Its Wonders, and Its People (NewYork: Random House, 1981), 13.

  17. Jean-Nicolas Perlot, Gold Seeker: Adventures of a Belgian Argonaut during the Gold Rush Years (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1985), 282-84.

  18. Paden, Schlichtmann, The Big Oak Flat Road, 188-go.

  i9. Taylor, Hetch Hetchy, 37.

  20. Muir, "The Hetch Hetchy Valley" Boston Weekly Transcript.

  21. As Muir so eloquently described it in My First Summer in the Sierra, he was directly involved in tending sheep in 1869. However, there is no evidence that either he or the sheep entered the Hetch HetchyValley. One can suppose, however, that he first heard of Hetch Hetchy during that memorable summer.

  22. Whitney, Yosemite Guide-Book, 111-12.

  23. Muir, "Hetch Hetchy Valley," The Overland Monthly, 45.

  24. J. M. Hutchings, In the Heart of the Sierras: The Yosemite Valley (Oakland: Pacific Press, 1886). Hutchings includes a chapter on the Big Oak Flat Road, but never mentions the Hetch HetchyValley.

  25. Mrs. Carr to John Muir, fragment of letter, circa October, 1872, in John Muir Papers, reel 2, Correspondence, 1969-1873.

  26. Albert Bierstadt to Mrs. Sawyer and Mrs. Williston, November 8, 1976, in Mount Holyoke College Library/Archives.

  27. Probably the most impressive (37 in. ? 58 in.) Bierstadt painting of the Hetch Hetchy Valley hangs in the Wadsworth Atheneum gallery in Hartford, Connecticut.

  28. Information taken from a memo from Wendy Watson, Mount Holyoke Col- legeArt Museum, to Ron Good,August 31, 1998.

  29. Notes from Alfred Harrison, Jr., The North Point Gallery, in the Restore Hetch Hetchy Archive.

  30. Keith published a riveting account of this adventure with Muir in the Boston Advertiser, 1874. Keith's biographer Brother Cornelius reproduced the piece in Keith: Old Master of California (NewYork: G. P. Putnam, 1942), 61-65.

  31. Ibid., 477.

  32. Alfred Runte, Yosemite: The Embattled Wilderness (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 9-12. Runte suggests that the name Yosemite, rather than a word for grizzly bear, is a corruption of Yo-che-ma-te, an Ahwahneechee word for "some among them are killers," no doubt referring to the activities of a good number of the white militia members. See Bates, Lee, Tradition and Innovation, for information on the evolution of the Yosemite Valley Indians in the twentieth century.

  33. Hans Huth, Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [1957] 1972), 148-49.

  34. Muir noted on his 1871 visit to Hetch Hetchy the presence of two shacks, which he assumed were summer shelter for shepherds.

  35. Robert Underwood Johnson to John Muir, December 13, 1877, in John Muir Papers, reel 3, Correspondence, 1874-1879.

  36. Robert Underwood Johnson, Remembered Yesterdays (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1923), 284.

  37. The two Muir articles were "The Treasure of theYoselnite," Century Magazine 60 (August 1890), 483-500, and "Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park," Century Magazine 6o (September 1890). 656-67.

  38. Runte, Yosemite, 53-55. Also see Richard Orsi, "`Wilderness Saint' and `Robber Baron': The Anomalous Partnership of John Muir and the Southern Pacific Company for Preservation of Yosemite National Park," Pacific Historian 29 (Summer-Fall 1985), 136-56.

  39. The mixture of private and public lands was certainly not ideal from a man agement or conservation point of viewYet it is a reality that almost all national parks and national forests must face. For San Francisco it proved to be advantageous.

  40. Roderick Nash, "Conservation as Anxiety," in American Environmentalism: Readings in Conservation History, ed. Roderick Nash (NewYork: McGraw-Hill, 3rd ed., 1990), 105-12.

  41. Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (Balti- more:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969, repr. 199o), 156.

  42. Robert Marshall, "The Problem of the Wilderness," Scientific Monthly 30 (February 1930), reprinted in J. Baird Callicott, Michael P. Nelson, eds., The Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 85-102.

  43. See Laura and Guy Waterman, Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains (Boston: Appalachian Mountain Club, 1989), 307-8. The best books on this "back to nature" movement include Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind; Schmitt, Back to Nature; David E. Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy (NewYork: Little, Brown, 1981). Also see Ralph H. Lutts, The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science and Sentiment (Charlottesville: University Press ofVirginia, 2001).

  44. Quoted in James Mitchell Clarke, The Life and Adventures ofJohn Muir (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1980), 249.

  45. Schmitt, Back to Nature, xvi-xvii. Schmitt quotes William Smythe's City Homes on Country Lanes (NewYork: Macmillan, 1922), 60.

  46. Shi, The Simple Life, 196-97.

  47. Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), 143-45.

  48. Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play:A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 157.

>   49. Pomeroy, Golden West, 145.

  So. Ibid., 166-73; Jared Farmer, "Legendary Peaks: Indian Plan Meets Alpine Play," paper delivered at the Western History Association annual conference, Colorado Springs, October 16-19, 2002.

  Si. John Ise, Our National Park Policy:A Critical History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961), 66.

  52. Runte, Yosemite, 73.

  53. Yosemite Park Commission, Report o_f theYosemite Park Commission, pp. 8-9, as quoted in Runte, Yosemite, 75.

  54. Ise, Our National Park Policy, 64, 86.

  55• Ibid., 85-86;Jones,John Muir and the Sierra Club, 89-91; Runte, Yosemite, 76.

  56. Jones, John Muir and the Sierra Club, 86. Although Jones's title does not reflect it, approximately one-half of his book is on the Hetch Hetchy fight. It is the best account in print, although Jones, as he freely admitted, looked at the issue only from the view of the Sierra Club and the papers that he perused. Jones's has the most complete description of the recession fight to reinstate Yosemite Valley to federal care.

  57. John Muir, The Mountains of California, The Writings of John Muir, vol. 5 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 284-85.

  2. THE IMPERIAL CITY AND WATER

  i. Norris Hundley Jr., The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 177os-199os (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 2-4. See also Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), ch. 1, 13-70.

  2. Hundley, The Great Thirst, 33-34.

  3. Ibid., 50-57.

  4. Ibid., 58-6o.

  5. Quoted in ibid., 65.

  6. Alan Hynding, From Frontier to Suburb: The Story of the San Mateo Peninsula (San Mateo, Calif: Star, 1982), 74.

  7. Malcomb J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 203.

  8. William S. Greever, The Bonanza West: The Story of the Western Mining Rushes, 1848-19oo (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 52.

  9. Rohrbough, Days of Gold, 246.

  io. J. S. Holliday, Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 274-75.

  ii. Hundley, The Great Thirst, 76-77; Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, So-5i. Still the classic on the hydraulic mining controversy is Robert L. Kelley's Gold vs. Grain: The Hydraulic Mining Controversy in California's Sacramento Valley-A Chapter in the Decline of Laissez-Faire (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1959).

  12. The dramatic story of mining versus agriculture is well told by Holliday, Rush for Riches, 267-304.

  13. Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, 48.

  14. Ibid., xxii-xxiv.

  15. William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 41-46.

  16. Gerald T. Koeppel, Water for Gotham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5; also see J. G. Landels, Engineering in the Ancient World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).

  17. Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 43; Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, 73.

  18. Holliday, Rush for Riches, 177. Holliday lists the dates of San Francisco's great fires as December 24, 1849; May 4, June 14, September 17, and December 14, 1850; and May 4 and June 22, 1851.

  19. Ibid., 176.These fires, so destructive to property, were one of the primary reasons for the formation of the Vigilance Committee of 1851, which used either banishment or judicious hanging to restore order.

  20. Most of the facts in these two paragraphs come from Marsden Manson, "The Struggle for Water in the Great Cities of the United States," Association of Engineering Societies 38 (March 1907), 103-24.

  21. See Feral Egan, Last Bonanza Kings: The Bourns ofSan Francisco (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1998), 106.

  22. Laura Wood Roper, A Biography o_f Frederick Law Olmsted (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 261.

  23. Hynding, From Frontier to Suburb, 77.

  24. Quoted in Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, 68.

  25. J. R. McNeil, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (NewYork:W.W. Norton, 2000), 150.

  26. Hynding, From Frontier to Suburb, 76.

  27. Ibid., 76.

  28. John P. Young, San Francisco: A History of the Pacific Coast Metropolis, 2 vols. (San Francisco: S.J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1912), 1:586.

  29. San Francisco's dominance by city bosses during the gilded age is well documented. See Alexander Callow Jr., "San Francisco's Blind Boss," Pacific Historical Review 25 (August 1956), 261-76;Walton Bean, Boss Ruef's San Francisco (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952; and William Bullough, Blind Boss and His City: Christopher Augustine Buckley and Nineteenth-century San Francisco (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979).

  30. Robert W. Righter, "The Life and Public Career of Washington Bartlett" (M.A. thesis, History Department, San Jose State University, 1963), 55-59.

  31. "San Francisco Will Win in the Hetch Hetchy Project," The Grizzly Bear, February 1909.

  32. Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, 174-75.

  33. Egan, Last Bonanza Kings, 174-76.

  34. Hynding, From Frontier to Suburb, iio-ii. The town that would become Hillsborough was first formed by William Ralston. As a development, it failed. When Ralston and his Bank of California also failed, William Sharon inherited the distressed assets of Ralston, which in turn fell into Newland's hands.

  35. Douglas Strong, Tahoe: An Environmental History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 95-98.

  36. Quoted in ibid., 96.

  37. San Francisco Examiner, May 15, 1876, editorial.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Oakland Daily Transcript, May 5, 1875; Oakland Daily News, June 16, 1876.

  40. Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), ch. 10 ("California White Coal"), 262-84, 265.

  41. Strong, Tahoe, 98.

  3. WATER, EARTHQUAKE, AND FIRE, 1901-1907

  i. Walsh, O'Keefe, Legacy of a Native Son, 6o-6i.

  2. See Jones,John Muir and the Sierra Club, 55-80.

  3. See William Issel, Robert W. Cherny, San Francisco, 1865-1932: Power, Politics, and Urban Development (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 32-35.

  4. Emily Wortis Leider, California's Daughter: Gertrude Atherton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 204-5.

  5. Walsh, O'Keefe, Legacy of a Native Son, 120.

  6. James Phelan to Mabelle Gilman, May 8, 19o6, in James Phelan Papers, 18801930, MSS C-B 800, box i, Bancroft Library (hereafter abbreviated as BL).

  7. Wanda Muir to John Muir, Adamada, Ariz., April TO, 1906, in John Muir Papers (microfilm), reel 16, 1906-07.

  8. Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 279.

  9. Ibid., 121.Writing to the secretary of the interior in 1908, City Engineer Marsden Manson placed the date of entry as October 15, 1901. I accept the earlier date. See Marsden Manson Papers, C-B 416, carton 1:44, BL.

  10. William Hammond Hall, "The Story of Hetch Hetchy," in William Hammond Hall Papers, 86/152, box 6, folder 6:18, BL. This lengthy and self-serving account of the Hetch Hetchy struggle tells the story from Hall's point of view

  ii. Ibid., 4.

  12. While Lippincott has received severe criticism for his actions in the Owens Valley, he has been practically invisible in the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Wherever he went, however, one finds evidence that he used his official office with either the U.S. Geological Survey or, after 1902, with the Bureau of Reclamation to feign neutrality while actually pushing the agenda of his client. For a severe criticism of Lippincott's behavior in the Owens River fight, see William L. Kahrl, Water and Power: The Conflict over Los Angeles' Water Supply in the Owens Val
ley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 106-30.

  13. Reports on the Water Supplies of San Francisco, 1900-1908, Board of Supervisors, 1908, 38-39.This 230-page compilation of important water documents can be found in the San Francisco History Room, San Francisco Public Library. It contains a number of the important documents from the time of C. E. Grunsky, City Engineer, 1900-1903, and Marsden Manson, Chief Engineer, 1908-1912. I believe Manson collected the documents and had them bound. It is a valuable source and, to my knowledge, is not easily-if at all-available elsewhere. I have used the materials quite extensively in this chapter.

  14. John Muir to Robert Underwood Johnson, September 18, 1907, and September 23, 1907, in John Muir Papers, reel 16, 1907.

  15. Hall, "The Story of Hetch Hetchy" 12, 30.

  16. Quoted in ibid., 63.

  17. Harvey Meyerson, Nature's Army: When Soldiers Fought for Yosemite (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 176-8 1. Throughout his book, Meyerson gives examples of the army's protection of Yosemite against despoilers, be they sheep men or San Francisco water seekers.

  18. "A Brief in the Matter of Reservoir Rights of Way for a Domestic and Municipal Water Supply . . ." (July 27, 1907), 2, 4-5, ill Reports on the Water Supplies of San Francisco, 1900-1908, Board of Supervisors, 19o8, San Francisco Room, San Francisco Public Library.

  19. Reports on the Water Supplies . . . . 23-24.

  20. Secretary Hitchcock to President Theodore Roosevelt, February 20, 1905, in Reports on the Water Supplies . . . . 7,21, 31.

  21. Walsh, O'Keefe, Legacy of a Native Son, 79-80.

  22. Ibid., 114.

  23. "Report on Water Supply," by the Special Committee on Water Supply, dated October 8, 1906, 7, in SF City Engineer, 92/808 C, carton 3, folder "Data on Power," BL.

  24. Ibid., 9.

  25. Edwin Duryea, "The Facts about the Bay Cities Water Company's Water Supply for San Francisco," an address before the Commonwealth Club, March 13, 1907, 4-12 (copy in theYosemite Archives,Yosemite National Park).

  26. "Proposition Made by the Bay Cities Water Company to the Board of Supervisors," April 9, 19o6, 16, attached to ibid.