One Sky Above Us Introduction Guthrie The Outcome of Our Ernest Endeavors Butte Like Grass Before the Sickle P.S I Like You Very Much Progress Take It Lachryma Montis This Isn't History To Speak for My People I Will Never Leave You The Gift

Take It

“The West was settled without logic. People settled where they wanted to settle, with no regard whatever to the ecological consequences or the ability of the land to support them. Los Angeles is probably the preternatural example of a place being where it has no business being. There's absolutely nothing in the immediate environs to support it. But people wanted to live in Los Angeles. And they depleted the ground water in Los Angeles over several decades, to the point where they had to go elsewhere for water in order to continue supporting the city that had no business being where it was."
T. H. Watkins

Between 1890 and 1904, the population of Los Angeles quadrupled, to nearly 200,000. There was already too little water in dry years. It seemed clear that Los Angeles could not grow much further without some new source of supply. And Los Angeles had to grow -- its whole economy was based on frenzied boosterism.

If Los Angeles runs out of water for one week, the city within a year will not have a population of 100,000 people. A city quickly finds its level, and that level is its water supply.
William Mulholland

But the nearest water was in the Owens River Valley, 233 miles to the northeast. And it was already being used by someone else -- small farmers who were irrigating their apple orchards and fields of hay and alfalfa with snow-melt from the Sierras. Then, in September of 1904, two strangers arrived in the Owens Valley. They were careful not to identify themselves, but one was Fred Eaton, a former mayor of Los Angeles.

The other was William Mulholland, the Irish-born head of the Los Angeles Water Department. He believed rivers existed only to be used: If it were left up to him, he once said, he would have the Yosemite Valley carefully photographed and then"build a dam from one side... to the other and stop the goddamned waste." Mulholland believed he could build a system of aqueducts and siphons and tunnels that would take Owens River water right through the Sierras and all the way into Los Angeles.

But the brand-new federal Bureau of Reclamation had already promised to improve the irrigation system for the people of Owens Valley. Eaton hurried to Washington and quietly talked the government out of it: The water, he argued, would benefit many more people if it could be moved to Los Angeles.

"They were helped by the federal government. Teddy Roosevelt decided it made more sense to have a strong city on the western flank of America, that city being Los Angeles, than it did to have 50,000 acres of apples growing in the Owens Valley. So they actively helped Los Angeles get its hands on that river."
Marc Reisner

Posing as an eccentric but enormously wealthy rancher, Eaton went back to the Valley and began buying up land and water rights. With inside information he and some wealthy friends also quietly bought up desert land around Los Angeles, knowing that once Mulholland's aqueduct was built it would be worth a fortune. Then, Mulholland and Eaton persuaded the city's voters to pass the largest bond issue in the history of the United States -- twenty-three million dollars.

"They set their sights on that river; no city in history had ever done anything like it, gone two hundred miles across the desert and imported an entire river by aqueduct, by siphon, by tunnel. They stole it, but they stole it fair and square."
Marc Reisner

At last, William Mulholland could get to work. Neither personal profit nor politics ever interested him: once, asked if he wanted to run for mayor, he answered that he'd sooner give birth to a porcupine -- backwards. He lived only to build, and now faced an engineering challenge that rivaled the Suez and Panama Canals.

Fifty three tunnels had to be blasted through the mountains; 500 miles of trails and roads; 120 miles of railroad track. Five to six thousand men had to be fed and housed and doctored while they inched their way across the Mojave desert. The 110-degree heat spoiled food moments after it was cooked. Blowing sand destroyed 28 caterpillar tractors that had to be replaced by 1,500 mules. Forty-three men died in the six years it took to finish the job. The West had seen nothing like it since the building of the transcontinental railroad.

"At the reservoir in Los Angeles in 1913, William Mulholland, before a crowd of thousands, turned to one of his engineers at the last pump and gave the indication to turn the great wheels, open the floodgates, and down the water came, dancing and sparkling in the sun, and started spilling into the reservoir, and Mulholland turned to the dignitaries and said, 'There it is, gentlemen, take it.'"
T. H. Watkins

Los Angeles got its water, and because of it soon surpassed San Francisco as the biggest and most powerful city in the West. The Owens Valley never recovered.

"If you go to the ancient Anasazi dwellings in the southwest, and you stand there, and try to listen to the wind, and hear what the stories might be from there, what I hear is that people don't always accept what the environment tells them. You want to say, didn't they get it, this is a desert, you know, why would you try to build a huge city here? And when I see a place like Chaco Canyon, I think that maybe two thousand years from now, someone's going to be standing in what was once Los Angeles or Phoenix, Arizona, and ask the same question. And it's the same story that arcs from five hundred years ago to a thousand years into the future. Didn't they get it?"
Dayton Duncan