Cadillac Desert (19 page)

To say that the Wattersons had played fast and loose with their investors’ capital was an understatement. For at least the past two years, they had been using the amalgamated capital of the Owens Valley to shore up their failing financial empire—their resort, the mineral water company, their tungsten mine. They had recorded deposits in other banks that were never made, recorded debits that were already paid, entered balances that never existed on ledger sheets. They had loaned the entire life savings of their friends and neighbors to enterprises which were, at best, unlikely to succeed. When it was all tallied, there was a $2.3 million discrepancy between the bank books and reality. The brothers had always been the valley’s best and last hope. Now they were going to go to jail for embezzlement and fraud.

They had done it, they said, for the good of the valley, and as outrageous as it sounded, it was probably true. None of the money had ever left Inyo County. With the irrigation economy dying at the hands of Los Angeles, the valley’s only chance of surviving at all was to develop its minerals, its mining, its potential for tourism. During the trial, people who had lost everything nodded and agreed. Even as the Wattersons were being charged with thirty-six counts of embezzlement and grand theft, the citizens of Owens Valley were pledging $1 million to keep them in business.

It was too late. On August 4, 1927, all five banks were permanently closed. People wandered over to gawk at their final sign of defeat, a bitter message posted on the door: “This result has been brought about by the past four years of destructive work carried on by the city of Los Angeles.”

The prosecuting attorney was a lifelong friend of both Wilfred and Mark. If he had not been the prosecutor, he said, he would have agreed to be a character witness. He cried openly as he made his final argument, and the judge and jury wept along with him. On November 14, the Wattersons were sent to San Quentin for ten years, later reduced to six. As the train taking them to San Francisco passed outside Bishop, someone was putting up a sign. It read, “Los Angeles City Limits.”

William Mulholland had only four months to savor his triumph.

By refusing to pay Fred Eaton the $1 million he wanted for his reservoir site, Mulholland had left himself short of water storage capacity. It was a serious situation to begin with, and it was compounded by the drought, the dynamitings, and the phenomenal continuing influx of people. His power dams were also running day and night, spilling water into the ocean before it could be reused. The water he had obtained at such expense and grief was being wasted. As a result, he turned to the dam he had under construction in San Francisquito Canyon, and, ignoring the advice of his own engineers, decided to make it larger.

The reservoir behind the enlarged Saint Francis Dam reached its capacity of 11.4 billion gallons in early March of 1928, and immediately began to leak. Few dams fail to leak when they are new, but if they are sound they leak clear water. The water seeping around the abutment of the Saint Francis Dam was brown. It was a telltale sign that water was seeping through the canyon walls, softening the mica shale and conglomerate abutment.

It was also a sign that William Mulholland chose, if not exactly to ignore, then to disbelieve. After all, it was
his
dam. Would the greatest engineering deparment in the entire world build an unsafe dam? To reassure the public, Mulholland and his chief engineer rode out to the site on March 12 for an inspection. The last of the season’s rains was falling, and muddy water was running from a nearby construction site. After a perfunctory look, Mulholland decided that the site was the source of the mud, and pronounced the dam safe. On the same night, at a few minutes before midnight, its abutment turned to JellO, and the reservoir awoke from its deceptive slumber and tore the dam apart.

There are few earthly phenomena more awesome than a flood, and there is no flood more awesome than several years’ accumulation of rainfall released over the course of an hour or two. The initial surge of water was two hundred feet high, and could have toppled nearly anything in its path—thousand-ton blocks of concrete rode the crest like rafts. Seventy-five families were living in San Francisquito Canyon immediately below the dam. Only one of their members, who managed to claw his way up the canyon wall just before the first wave hit, survived. Ten miles below, the village of Castaic Junction stood where the narrow canyon opened into the broader and flatter Santa Clara Valley. When the surge engulfed the town, it was still seventy-eight feet high. Days later, bodies and bits of Castaic Junction showed up on the beaches near San Diego.

The flood exploded into the Santa Clara River, turned right, and swept through the valley toward the ocean. It tore across a construction camp where 170 men were sleeping, and carried off all but six. A few miles below, Southern California Edison was building a project and had erected a tent city for 140 men. At first, the night watchman thought it was an avalanche. As it dawned on him that the nearest snow was fifty miles away, the flood crest hit, forty feet high. The men who survived were those who didn’t have time to unzip their canvas tents, which were tight enough to float downstream like rafts. Eighty-four others died.

When the flood went through Piru, Fillmore, and Santa Paula it was semisolid, a battering ram congealed by homes, wagons, telephone poles, cars, and mud. Wooden bridges and buildings were instantaneously smashed to bits. A woman and her three children clung to a floating mattress until it snagged in the upper branches of a tree. They survived. A rancher who heard the deluge coming loaded his family in his truck and began to dash to safety. As he stopped by his neighbors’ house and ran to the door to warn them, the flood arrived and swept his family out to sea. A four-room house was dislodged and floated a mile downstream without a piece of furniture rearranged; when the dazed owners came to inspect it, they found their lamps still upright on their living-room tables. A brave driver trying to outrace the flood could not bring himself to pass the people waving desperately along the way; his car held fourteen corpses when it was hauled out of the mud. The flood went on, barely missing Saticoy and Montalvo, and, at five o’clock in the morning, went by Ventura and spent itself at sea.

Hundreds of people were dead, twelve hundred homes were demolished, and the topsoil from eight thousand acres of farmland was gone. William Mulholland, whose career lay amid the ruins, was still alive, but as he addressed the coroner’s inquest he bent his head and murmured, “I envy the dead.” After a feeble effort to put the blame on “dynamiters,” he took full responsibility for the disaster.

But the great city his aqueduct had created was, for the moment at least, willing to forgive him. “Chief Engineer Mulholland was a pitiable figure as he appeared before the Water and Power Commission yesterday,” the Los Angeles
Times
reported on March 16. “His figure was bowed, his face lined with worry and suffering.... Every commissioner had the deepest sympathy for the man who has spent his life for the service of the people of Los Angeles ... his Irish heart is kind, tender, and sympathetic.”

Nine separate investigations eventually probed the collapse of the Saint Francis Dam. No one is even sure how many lives were lost, but a likely total is around 450: it would become one of the dozen worst peacetime disasters in American history. The precise cause of the collapse was never officially determined, but when an investigator dropped a piece of the rock abutment into a glass of water, it dissolved in a few minutes. It was also learned that Mulholland had ordered the reservoir filled fast—a violation of a cardinal engineering rule—because he didn’t want Owens River water to go to waste.

The city took full responsibility for all losses and paid most of the claims without contest, which cost it close to $15 million. For much less than that, Mulholland not only could have bought the Long Valley site, but built the dam, too.

In the ensuing months, in hearing after hearing, Mulholland was dragged through an agonizing reappraisal of his career. It was learned that two other dams in whose design and construction he participated as a consultant eventually collapsed, and a third had to be abandoned when partially built. He was a bold engineer, an innovative engineer; he was also a reckless, arrogant, and inexcusably careless engineer. His fall from grace was slow, awful, and complete. By the time he wearily resigned, in November of 1928, at the age of seventy-three, his reputation was sullied beyond redemption. His wit and his combativeness vanished in retirement, and even in the company of his perfervidly loyal children he often lacked the energy to speak. He told them, “The zest for living is gone.”

The city finally settled with Fred Eaton, who lost almost everything in the collapse of the Watterson banks, for $650,000. A few weeks later, the two old and broken men moved to heal their twenty-year rift. Lost in despondency at home, Mulholland received a message that Eaton, who had since returned to Los Angeles, would like to see him. Without a word, he got his hat and strode out the door. Eaton had suffered a stroke; he needed a cane to walk, and he looked ancient. “Hello, Fred,” said Mulholland as he approached Eaton’s bedside. Then both of them broke down and wept.

T
he dam in Long Valley was ultimately built, and the reservoir that formed behind it, which was named Lake Crowley in honor of a priest who devoted the latter part of his life to healing the rift between city and valley, was, in its day, one of the largest in the country. By then, however, all hope of fruitful coexistence had died. On a map, the Owens Valley was still there, but it had ceased to exist as a place with its own aspirations, its own destiny. By the mid-1930s, Los Angeles was landlord of 95 percent of the farmland and 85 percent of the property in the towns. In the town of Independence, the Eastern California Museum, which tells the story of the battle largely from the valley’s side, sits on land leased from the city.

Los Angeles leased some of the land back to farmers for a while, but the unpredictability of the water supply discouraged most of those who tried to carry on. There might be enough for twenty or thirty thousand acres in wetter years; then there might be enough for only three or four thousand. As the city grew, the river became utterly appropriated; when that happened, the Department of Water and Power sank wells and began depauperating the aquifer, as would happen—as is happening—in so many places in the West. The last of the ranchers quit in the 1950s and the economy shifted to tourism; most of those who remain now pump gas, rent rooms, or serve lunch to the skiers and tourists driving through on Highway 395. By the 1970s, even that tenuous existence was threatened; the aquifer was so drawn-down that desert plants which can normally survive on the meagerest capillary action of groundwater began to die, and the valley went beyond desert and took on the appearance of the Bonneville Salt Flats. When the winds of convection blow, huge clouds of alkaline dust boil off the valley floor; people now live in the Owens Valley at some risk to their health. The city has refused every request that it limit its groundwater pumping, just as it has refused to stop diverting the creeks that feed Mono Lake to the north—another casualty of its unquenchable thirst. Some sporadic dynamitings began to occur again in the 1970s, and reporters arrived eager to cover the “second Owens Valley War,” but the war was long since over—there was nothing left to win.

As for Otis, Chandler, Sherman, and the rest of the syndicate that called itself the San Fernando Mission Land Company, they became rich—phenomenally rich. While presiding over the San Fernando Valley’s metamorphosis from desert to agricultural cornucopia, they used the profits to constantly acquire more land. In 1911, Chandler, Otis, and Sherman purchased another 47,500 acres nearby and began to develop them—the biggest subdivision in the world. Within a year, they were assembling the third-largest land empire in the history of the state, the 300,000-acre Tejon Ranch, straddling Los Angeles and Kern counties. (Besides the Los Angeles
Times,
the Tejon Ranch, undiminished in size, remains the principal local asset of the Chandler family.) In a speech given in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt singled out Otis as “a curious instance of the anarchy of soul which comes to a man who in conscienceless fashion deifies property at the expense of human rights.” But Roosevelt, as much as anyone, was responsible for setting this anarchic soul loose. No one knows how great a profit the syndicate realized from the initial seventeen thousand San Fernando acres, but one writer, William Kahrl, estimates that Chandler was worth as much as $500 million when he died, and the San Fernando Valley was the soil from which this incredible fortune grew. It may not have been the most lucrative land scam in United States history, but it ranked somewhere near the top.

Between the arrival of William Mulholland and his death, Los Angeles grew from a town of fifteen thousand into the then most populous desert city on earth. Today it is the second-largest, barely surpassed by Cairo. Its obsessive search for more water, however, was never to end. While Lake Crowley was filling, the city was already completing its aqueduct to the Colorado River, whose construction almost precipitated a shooting war with Arizona, a rival as formidable as the Owens Valley was weak. And though the first Colorado River aqueduct was supposed to end its water famines forever—as was the Owens River aqueduct—the city was soon planning a second Colorado River Aqueduct and plotting to seize half of the Feather River, six hundred miles away, at the same time. No sooner had it managed to do all of that than the city fathers were secretly meeting with the Bureau of Reclamation, mapping diversions from rivers a thousand miles distant in Oregon and Washington. Like the Red Queen, Los Angeles runs faster and faster to stay in place.