Cadillac Desert (18 page)

In 1980, there were few people still alive who remembered Mulholland, but one who did was Horace Albright, the director of the National Park Service under Herbert Hoover. Albright could no longer remember the year—he was eighty-two—but it was probably 1925 or 1926, and he was a young park superintendent invited to attend a testimonial dinner for Senator Frank Flint, the man who had engineered the dubious federal decisions that allowed the Owens Valley aqueduct to be built. Albright was seated at Mulholland’s table, a couple of chairs away, and midway through dinner he felt a rough tap on his shoulder.

“You’re from the Park Service, aren’t you?” Mulholland demanded more than asked.

“Yes, I am,” said Albright. “Why do you ask?”

“Why?” Mulholland said archly. “Why? I’ll tell you why. You have a beautiful park up north. A majestic park. Yosemite Park, it’s called. You’ve been there, have you?”

Albright said he had. He was the park’s superintendent.

“Well, I’m going to tell you what I’d do with your park. Do you want to know what I would do?”

Albright said he did.

“Well, I’ll tell you. You know this new photographic process they’ve invented? It’s called Pathé. It makes everything seem lifelike. The hues and coloration are magnificent. Well, then, what I would do, if I were custodian of your park, is I’d hire a dozen of the best photographers in the world. I’d build them cabins in Yosemite Valley and pay them something and give them all the film they wanted. I’d say, ‘This park is yours. It’s yours for one year. I want you to take photographs in every season. I want you to capture all the colors, all the waterfalls, all the snow, and all the majesty. I especially want you to photograph the rivers. In the early summer, when the Merced River roars, I want to see that.’ And then I’d leave them be. And in a year I’d come back, and take their film, and send it out and have it developed and treated by Pathé. And then I would print the pictures in thousands of books and send them to every library. I would urge every magazine in the country to print them and tell every gallery and museum to hang them. I would make certain that every American saw them. And then,” Mulholland said slowly, with what Albright remembered as a vulpine grin, “and then do you know what I would do? I’d go in there and build a dam from one side of that valley to the other and
stop the goddamned waste!”

“It was the tone of his voice that surprised me,” Albright said. “The laughingly arrogant tone. I don’t think he was joking, you see. He was absolutely convinced that building a dam in Yosemite Valley was the proper thing to do. We had few big dams in California then. There were hundreds of other sites, and there were bigger rivers than the Merced. But he seemed to want to shake things up, to outrage me. He almost
wanted
to destroy.”

It was the same tone, the same bitter and unreasoning quarrelsomeness, that Mulholland displayed when a reporter from the
Times
asked him why there was so much dissatisfaction in the Owens Valley. “Dissatisfaction in the valley?” said Mulholland mockingly. “Yes, a lot of it. Dissatisfaction is a sort of condition that prevails there, like foot and mouth disease.” It was the same unreasoning rage that made him say, when his war of attrition against the Owens Valley had finally caused events to take a drastic turn for the worse, that he half regretted the demise of so many of the valley’s orchard trees, because now there were no longer enough live trees to hang all the troublemakers who lived there.

Trees or no trees, that George Watterson, Leicester Hall, and William Symons had not yet been lynched themselves said something about the valley’s self-restraint. Symons and Watterson had prudently taken to carrying sidearms, but, aside from an occasional curse or jeer, they were left alone. The valley thought it had a better means of taking revenge on the city than assassinating its agents. Soon after the McNally Ditch coup was engineered, the ditch companies that still had control of their water began opening their headgates and letting water flood uselessly over their fields. Before long, only a trickle was reaching the intake of the aqueduct. Mulholland demanded that the diversions stop, but the farmers refused. In exasperation, he tried a bit of double psychology: he sent more purchasing agents to reinforce Watterson, Symons, and Hall, and at the same time sent his attorney, William Matthews, to meet with the ranchers to see if the matter could still come to an amicable settlement. Just hours before Matthews was scheduled to sit down with the ditch companies, however, Mulholland went into one of his sudden fits of anger and telephoned his maintenance crews to demolish the intake of the largest diverter, the Big Pine Canal.

The reaction was instantaneous. The leaders of the Big Pine Company were the worst people Mulholland could have chosen to antagonize: the Watterson brothers, a resort operator and speculator named Karl Keough, and Harry Glasscock, the incendiary editor of the
Owens Valley Herald.
As soon as news arrived of what was happening, a posse of twenty men, bristling with guns, roared out to the canal intake. As guns were trained on Mulholland’s crew, the rest of the men dumped their equipment into the Owens River. The valley mood veered suddenly from bitterness to wild exuberance. “Los Angeles, it’s your move now,” exulted the Big Pine
Citizen.
And yet the Big Pine farmers were soon to prove as indifferent to the valley’s fate as the members of the McNally Ditch. When Mulholland shrewdly responded with ever higher offers for the cooperative’s water rights, a majority (not including the Watterson brothers) finally agreed to sell out for a price of $15,000 per second-foot, twice what the city had paid for the McNally Ditch rights. Mulholland was jubilant, but victory carried a heavy price. To satisfy his vendetta against his oldest friend, he had now spent twice what the Long Valley damsite would have cost, and made himself evil incarnate throughout an entire valley as well.

As the farmers who held out felt increasingly alone, their methods grew more and more violent. On May 21, 1924, a group of men “broke” into the Watterson brothers’ warehouse, “stole” three cases of dynamite, and blew a large section of the aqueduct to smithereens. From that moment on, William Mulholland refused to refer to anyone in the Owens Valley by any other name than “dynamiter.” Then, in August, Leicester Hall, who had been warned to stay away forever, returned to the valley and was abducted from a restaurant as he ate. He was driven blindfolded to a road’s end, where he found himself facing a grim-looking group of men and a noose strung over a tree. Hall saved himself by uttering the Freemason’s distress call; there were so many Masons among the valley population that one was in the gang of would-be lynchers, and he managed to talk the others out of murder. But the dynamitings continued. When the Department of Water and Power released a report that recommended “destroying all irrigation”—those were the exact words—in the valley, and it turned out that the main author was Joseph P. Lippincott, the response was a fresh series of blasts. Glasscock’s paper was now openly counseling sabotage. The Ku Klux Klan, sensing a perfect battle stage between “Hollywood”—which was to say, cities, big business, liberalism, and Jews—and the small-town, revanchist values it cherished, was sending recruiters into the valley and getting good results. Even Fred Eaton, after holding himself aloof, finally entered the fray against the city of which he had been mayor. “Wherever the hand of Los Angeles has touched Owens Valley,” he wrote in a letter to the editor, “it has turned back into desert.”

Joseph Lippincott, whose one admirable quality may have been prescience, had said twenty years earlier that the Owens Valley was doomed as soon as Los Angeles obtained its first water right. Mulholland, however, kept insisting blindly that the valley could live on—he didn’t say how—even as he turned life there into a kind of hell.

No one knew when his neighbor would be approached and persuaded to sell out; no one knew when the city would move to condemn; no one knew when the armed guards who patrolled the aqueduct would receive orders to shoot to kill. “Suspicions are mutual and widespread,” a visitor from Los Angeles observed. “The valley people are suspicious of each other, suspicious of newcomers, suspicious of city men, suspicious, in short, of almost everybody and everything.... Owens Valley is full of whisperings, mutterings, recriminations....” It seemed only a matter of time before the onset of real war.

On November 16, 1924, as the drought continued to hold Los Angeles in a deadly grip, a caravan of automobiles rumbled slowly southward through the town of Independence. In the first car, behind drawn blinds, sat the grim figure of Mark Watterson. The cars turned toward the Alabama Hills, a small range of barren rises at the foot of the Sierra escarpment. Weaving through the hills was the Owens River aqueduct, and somewhere along its course were the Alabama Gates. In wetter times, the gates had turned floodwaters in the aqueduct onto the desert to keep them from straining the capacity of the siphons below. They hadn’t been used in years, but they still worked. When the caravan arrived at the gatehouse, a hundred men got out of the cars, walked up to the spillway, and turned the five huge wheels that moved the weirs. For the first time in many years, the Owens River flowed back across the desert into Owens Lake.

The effect of the seizure was electrifying Mulholland was in a murderous rage. He dispatched two carloads of armed city detectives to take back the gates, but news of their imminent arrival prompted the local sheriff to go down to meet them. “If you go up there and start trouble,” he told the detectives, “I don’t believe you will live to tell the tale.” They never went. Mulholland, in the meantime, secured a court injunction against the seizure, but when the papers were served to the men at the gates they threw them into the water.

And then, to everyone’s surprise, what could easily have produced bloodshed turned into a picnic. Wives, children, grandmothers, and dogs joined the lawbreakers. Tom Mix was filming a movie nearby, and when he heard what was happening he sent over his salutations and his orchestra. By evening a huge cloud of smoke began to rise from the scene, but it came from a barbecue pit. After dinner, the sheriff arrived and joined in. The crowd was now seven hundred strong, and the strains of “Onward Christian Soldiers” filled the desert night.

Events were finally swinging to the Owens Valley’s side. To Mulholland’s disgust, even the Los Angeles
Times,
now that Otis was dead, was sympathizing with the lawbreakers. “These farmers are not anarchists or bomb throwers,” it said in an editorial, “but in the main honest, hardworking American citizens. They have put themselves hopelessly in the wrong by taking the law into their own hands, but that is not to say that there has not been a measure of justice on their side.” Meanwhile, as Mark Watterson led the seizure of the Alabama Gates, Wilfred had wisely gone to Los Angeles to closet himself with the Joint Clearinghouse Association, a roundtable of the city’s bankers. After several hours, he emerged and sent Mark a telegram. “If the object of the crowd at the spillway is to bring their wrongs to the attention of the citizens of Los Angeles, they have done so one hundred percent,” he wired. “I feel sure that the wrongs done will be remedied.”

But such a simple happy ending could occur only on a Hollywood movie lot. As soon as the Alabama Gates were released and Wilfred Watterson had returned home, the bankers with whom he had met rejected his price for the consolidated valley water rights, to which he swore they had agreed. Meanwhile, Mulholland’s public relations department was flooding the state with a booklet “explaining” the Owens Valley crisis. “Never in its history has the Owens Valley prospered and increased in wealth as it has in the past twenty years,” it said. And it was true, as long as you looked at only the first nineteen of those years; in the twelve subsequent months, the city had almost brought the valley to its knees. Shops and stores were closing for lack of business—thousands of people had already moved out—but Mulholland dismissed pleas for reparations out of hand. If business was down, he said, the shopkeepers could move, too.

The first order to shoot to kill came on May 28, 1927, a day after the No Name Siphon, a huge pipe across a Mojave hill, lay in shards, demolished by a tremendous blast of dynamite. As city crews hauled in 450 feet of new twelve-foot pipe, another blast destroyed sixty feet of the aqueduct near Big Pine Creek. On June 4, another 150 feet went sky high. In response, a special train loaded with city detectives armed with high-velocity Winchester carbines and machine guns rolled out of Union Station for the Owens Valley. Roadblocks were erected on the highways; all cars with male occupants were searched; floodlights beamed across the valley as if it were a giant penitentiary. Miraculously, though the Owens Valley water war had gone on for more than twenty years, though it had turned violent during the past three, there were still no corpses. Harry Glasscock, however, was predicting in his editorial columns that the aqueduct would “run red with human blood,” and no one was prepared to argue with him. But before it could happen fate cast a plague on both houses. First came the collapse of the Watterson banks, and the revelation that the Owens Valley’s leading citizens were felons. Then, a few months later, came the collapse of the Saint Francis Dam.

The relationship between George Watterson and his two nephews had gone from one of competitiveness to one of bitterness to one of rancid hatred. In the early months of 1927, George saw his opportunity to invest in their final ruin. Four years of drought and rapidly declining business had left all five branches of the Inyo County Bank severely weakened. At the same time, the election of a new governor, Clement Young, on a huge infusion of campaign cash from A. P. Giannini and his Bank of Italy had resulted in the liberalization of the state banking laws, mainly to Giannini’s advantage. It was no surprise, then, when George Watterson filed, in the name of the Bank of Italy, an application to launch a competitive bank in Inyo County. But it was no surprise either when the state banking commissioner voided the application on the strength of Wilfred Watterson’s testimony that the bank was a front which Los Angeles would use to drive the valley into submission. Nor was it a surprise when, in response, an infuriated George Watterson, with considerable help from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, began a dirt-gathering investigation into his nephews’ bank. The surprise was what they ultimately found.