Cadillac Desert (15 page)

Such invective simply instilled in Loewenthal a passionate urge to outscoop Otis, and, in the process, catch him with his hand in the till. There
must
be some hanky-panky, Loewenthal surmised. Otherwise why Otis’s sudden interest in a desolate valley? And why did Otis’s number-one enemy, E. T. Earl, rival publisher of the
Express,
seem as enthusiastic as Otis? In the past, Earl had opposed nearly anything Otis endorsed, and vice versa, as a simple matter of dignity. But now Otis, Earl, and virtually all the rival newspapers, except his own, were united on perhaps the most controversial issue Los Angeles had ever faced. Why? Loewenthal decided to send a couple of his top reporters to the courthouse in San Fernando to find out.

The co-conspirators hadn’t even bothered to cover their tracks. They could have invented blind trusts, paper corporations, or some other ruse to conceal their identity; but there they were, caught in the open on an exposed plain.

On November 28, 1904—just six days after Joseph Lippincott was paid $2,500 to help steer his loyalties in the direction of Los Angeles—a syndicate of private investors had purchased a $50,000 option on the Porter Land and Water Company, which owned the greater part of the San Fernando Valley—sixteen thousand acres all told. Innocent enough. But the investors had then waited to consummate their $500,000 purchase until March 23, 1905—
the same day
that Fred Eaton had telegraphed the water commission that the option on the Rickey ranch in Long Valley was secured. On that day, as anyone who had access to Mulholland’s thinking knew, Los Angeles was all but guaranteed 250,000 acre-feet of new water—an amount that would leave the city with a water surplus for at least another twenty years. And the only sensible place to use the surplus water was in the San Fernando Valley.

Was the timing mere coincidence? The names of the investors who made up the secret land syndicate strongly suggested that it was not. In fact, their identity had given Loewenthal the scoop of his dreams. The only way he could improve its impact was to wait for exactly the right moment to go to press.

Loewenthal knew that the San Francisco
Chronicle
was, in a vague way, on to the same story. He also knew the
Chronicle
was not nearly as methodical in its investigations as his paper, and would probably publish rumors without supporting facts. On August 22, just as Loewenthal supposed, the
Chronicle
ran a story, unsupported by evidence, to the effect that the Owens Valley aqueduct was somehow linked to a land-development scheme in the San Fernando Valley. Two days later, the
Times
derisively dismissed the allegations in an editorial which, to Loewenthal’s delight, ran under the heading “Baseless Rumors.” On that same morning, the
Examiner’s
story went to press.

The San Fernando land syndicate, the
Examiner
revealed, was composed of some of the most influential and wealthy men in Los Angeles. There was Moses Sherman, a balding school administrator from Arizona who had moved to Los Angeles and become a trolley magnate—one of the most ruthless capitalists in a city that was legendary for same. (By coincidence, Moses Sherman also sat on the board of water commissioners of Los Angeles; the syndicate could not have prayed for a better set of eyes and ears.) Then there was Henry Huntington, Sherman’s implacable rival in the rush to monopolize the region’s transportation system. There was Edward Harriman, the chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad and a rival of both Sherman and Huntington. There was Joseph Sartori of the Security Trust and Savings Bank, and
his
rival, L. C. Brand of the Title Guarantee and Trust Company. There was Edwin T. Earl, the publisher of the
Express;
William Kerckhoff, a local power company magnate; and Harry Chandler, Otis’s son-in-law, the tubercular young man with the minister’s face, the gambler’s heart, and the executioner’s soul. But Loewenthal reserved the best for last. The person who had signed the check securing the $50,000 option on the immense San Fernando property was the same person who, that very morning, had dismissed talk of such a nest of land speculators as lies—Brigadier General Harrison Gray Otis.

“This is the prize for which the newspaper persons ... are working and the size of it accounts for their tremendous zeal,” wrote Loewenthal, almost squealing with delight. “The mystery of the enterprise is how it happens that Messrs. Huntington and Harriman, who let no one into their [previous] land purchasing schemes, but who bought up everything for themselves, consented to let the other in.” Loewenthal was, of course, enough of a cynic to know exactly why they had. The participants, taken together, represented the power establishment of southern California with an exquisite sense of proportion. Railroads, banking, newspapers, utilities, land development—it was a monopolists’ version of affirmative action. Besides, William Kerckhoff was a prominent conservationist and friend of Gifford Pinchot, the chief of the U.S. Forest Service, whose influence with President Theodore Roosevelt could prove invaluable. Harriman’s railroad owned a hundred miles of right-of-way along the aqueduct path that the city would need permission to cross, and Huntington owned the building that housed the regional headquarters of the Reclamation Service! Including Earl and Otis, the two feuding neighbors and publishers, was the master stroke. Like a couple of convicts bound together by a ball and chain, neither could betray the other without exposing himself.

The
Examiner’s
expose had Harrison Gray Otis venting steam from both nostrils and ears, but he didn’t dare look the accusations directly in the eye, so in the ensuing weeks he tried to hide behind “Mr. Huntington’s” skirts, as if Huntington had been solely responsible for the syndicate and he—Otis—had been an innocent seduced into joining, as a fresh young wayward girl is seduced into sex. Where Otis couldn’t weasel out, he blazed away. “Had Hearst’s ... yellow atrocity been the first to announce the plans of the Water Board, it would have claimed the project as its own conception and inauguration,” he raved.

Its front page would have shrieked in poster type about “The
Examiner’s
solution to the water problem,” and the public would have been deafened with yawp about how the
Examiner
“discovered Owens River,” laid out plans to bring the water to Los Angeles and showed the engineers how to build the aqueduct. The line would have been dubbed, “The Great Hearst Aqueduct,” or “The
Examiner
Pipe-line,” and Loewenthal the Impossible would have been the Moses of Los Angeles, who smote the rock of Mount Whitney with the rod of his egotism and caused the water to flow abundantly. Deprived of the opportunity for mendacious self-glorification ... the foolish freak vents its impotent rage in snarling under its breath.... The insane desire of the
Examiner
to discredit certain citizens of Los Angeles has at last led it into the open as a vicious enemy of the city’s welfare, its mask of hypocrisy dropped and its convulsed features revealed.

In the end, though, the broadsides between the rival papers were all sound and fury, signifying not much. Ever since their foremost minister had fled prosecution for land fraud, the citizens of Los Angeles had grown accustomed to scandal, and the city’s temperament was quite comfortable with graft. Henry Loewenthal would later speak of a “spirit of lawlessness that prevails here, that I have never seen anywhere else.” Nature was also smiling on the Owens Valley scheme. On August 30, a week before the scheduled referendum on the aqueduct, the temperature climbed to 101 degrees. The city had gone its usual four months without rain, and there would likely be two rainless months to come. On September 2, Hearst himself rode down from San Francisco in his private railroad car for a quiet palaver with the city’s oligarchs. As men of commerce, they understood each other, and Hearst had recently been bitten by the presidential bug; if he was truly serious about the White House, he could use their help. When the meeting was over, the publisher strode into the
Examiner’s
offices, barked Loewenthal into acquiescence, and personally wrote an editorial recommending a “yes” vote. Samuel T. Clover’s
Daily News,
the only paper on record opposing the aqueduct, lobbed a potential bombshell when it reported that the city’s workers, under cover of darkness, were dumping water out of the reservoirs into the Pacific to make them go dry, thus assuring a “yes” vote. But Mulholland’s lame explanation that they had merely been “flushing the system” was widely believed.

On September 7, 1905, the bond issue passed, fourteen to one.

To the Los Angeles
Times,
it was a “Titanic Project to Give the City a River.” To the Inyo
Register,
it was a ruthless scheme in which “Los Angeles Plots Destruction, Would Take Owens River, Lay Lands Waste, Ruin People, Homes, and Communities.” That sensational headline actually belied the feeling in the valley somewhat. Few people thought, at first, that things would be so bad. A number of the ranchers had made out well selling their water rights, and they would be able to keep their water for years, until the aqueduct was built. The city had bought up nearly forty bank miles of the river and would probably dry up the lower valley, but the upper valley, except for Fred Eaton’s purchase of the Rickey estate, had been left mostly intact. When Eaton moved up from Los Angeles as promised and began his new life as a cattle rancher, the valley people were reassured. After a while, they even began to fraternize with him.

Mulholland, meanwhile, had begun his own campaign to mollify the people of the valley, a campaign in which he was joined, somewhat more bellicosely, by the Los Angeles
Times,
which featured headlines such as “Ill-feeling Ridiculous” and “Owens Valley People Going Off as Half-Cock.” Inyo County’s Congressman, Sylvester Smith, was an influential member of the House Public Lands Committee, and since the city would have to cross a lot of public land it would have to deal with him. Meanwhile, Theodore Roosevelt, the bugaboo of monopolists, had just been elected to a second term. He would never let the Owens Valley die for the sake of Henry Huntington, Harrison Gray Otis, and their cronies in the San Fernando Valley syndicate. On top of all this, the Owens was a generous desert river, with a flow sufficient for two million people. It was laughable to think of Los Angeles growing that big, so even under the worst of circumstances there would be water enough for all. The reasoning was very sensible, the logic very sound, and it was fatefully wrong.

There was one person who knew that it was. She was Mary Austin, the valley’s literary light, who had published a remarkable collection of impressionistic essays entitled
Land of Little Rain
that won her recognition around the world. In the course of her writing she had spent long hours with the last of the Paiutes, the Indians who had lived in the valley for centuries until they were instantly displaced by the whites. The Paiutes showed her what no one else saw—that order and stability are the most transient of states, that there is rarely such a thing as a partial defeat. In a subsequent book, a novella about the Owens Valley water struggle called
The Ford,
she wrote about what happens when “that incurable desire of men to be played upon, to be handled,” runs up against “that Cult of Locality, by which so much is forgiven as long as it is done in the name of the Good of the Town.” Mary Austin was convinced that the valley had died when it sold its first water right to Los Angeles—that the city would never stop until it owned the whole river and all of the land. One day, in Los Angeles for an interview with Mulholland, she told him so. After she had left, a subordinate came into his office and found him staring at the wall. “By God,” Mulholland reportedly said, “that woman is the only one who has brains enough to see where this is going.”

No sooner had the city gotten the aqueduct past the voters than it faced the more difficult task of getting it past Congress. Most of the lands it would traverse belonged to the government, so the city would have to appeal for rights-of-way. The Reclamation project, though moribund, was still not officially deauthorized, which was, at the very least, a nuisance to the city. But deauthorization could prove to be even worse, because tens of thousands of acres that the Service had withdrawn would return to the public domain and be available for homesteading. Homesteading in California was another name for graft; half of the great private empires were amassed by hiring “homesteaders” to con the government out of its land. If the withdrawn lands went back to the public domain, every available water right would be coveted by speculators for future resale to the city. Mulholland seemed to believe that the city would never require more water, but others, notably Joseph Lippincott, thought him wrong. The withdrawn lands had to be kept off-limits at all costs.

The instrument for achieving this wishful goal was a bill introduced at the behest of Mulholland’s chief lawyer, William B. Matthews, by Senator Frank Flint of California, a strong partisan of Los Angeles and urban water development in general. The bill would give the city whatever rights-of-way it needed across federal lands and hold the withdrawn lands in quarantine for another three years, which would presumably give the city enough time to purchase whatever additional water or land it might need. Flint’s bill reached the Senate floor in June of 1906, and flew through easily. Its next stop, however, was the House Public Lands Committee, where it crashed into Congressman Sylvester Smith. Smith was an energetic and charming politician, a former newspaper publisher from Bakersfield with a sense of public duty and enough money to maintain an ironclad set of principles. The idea of Harrison Gray Otis and Henry Huntington becoming vastly richer than they already were on water abducted from his district inflamed his well-developed sense of outrage. Smith knew what he was up against, however, and realized that his best defense was to appear utterly reasonable. As a result, he said that he was willing to acknowledge the city’s need for more water, that he was willing to let it have a substantial share of the Owens River, and that he was willing to grant the aqueduct its necessary rights-of-way. He was not willing, however, to do any of this in the way the city wanted. He suggested a compromise. Let the Reclamation Service build its project, including the big dam in Long Valley—a dam that could store most of the river’s flow. The water could then be used first for irrigation, and because of the valley’s long and narrow slope, the return flows would go back to the lower river, where they could be freely diverted by Los Angeles. The city would sacrifice some of the water it wanted, the valley would sacrifice some irrigable land. It was, Smith argued, an enlightened plan: sensible, efficient, conceived in harmony. It was the only plan under which no one would suffer. He would add only two stipulations: the Owens Valley would have a nonnegotiable first right to the water, and any surplus water could not be used for irrigation in the San Fernando Valley.