Cadillac Desert (94 page)

The Education of Henry Adams,
one of the most peculiar books ever written by an American, is interesting, in the context of this chapter, for its depiction of the mood of empire that swept the nation in the late nineteenth century.

Powell’s journal—actually an embellished and edited version published for public consumption—is a very lively account of his Colorado River adventure and is worth reading, as is his original
Report on the Arid Lands.
Few, if any, bureaucrats since Powell have written as well.

A. B. Guthrie’s
The Big Sky,
though a work of fiction, is the most compelling and realistic portrait of the mountain men I have seen. It is one of the few great American novels. Harrison Clifford Dale’s account of the Ashley-Smith expeditions is a fairly rich account of some astonishing exploratory feats.

BOOKS

Adams, Henry.
The Education of Henry Adams.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.

Athearn, Robert G.
High Country Empire.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971.

Boulton, Herbert Eugene.
Coronado: Knight of Pueblos and Plains.
New York: Whittlesey House, 1949.

Dale, Harrison Clifford.
The Ashley-Smith Expeditions and the Discovery of a Central Route to the Pacific, 1822—1829.
Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1941.

De Voto, Bernard. Across
the Wide Missouri.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947.

—.The Course of Empire.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952.

Dodge, Richard. The Plains of the Great West. New York: Archer House, 1959.

Dunne, John Gregory. “Eureka! A Celebration of California.” In Jonathan Eisen and David Fine, eds., Unknown
California.
New York: Macmillan, 1985.

Garland, Hamlin. A
Son of the Middle Border.
New York: Macmillan, 1917.

Guthrie, A. B. The Big Sky. New York: Sloane, 1947.

Hafen, Leroy.
Mountain Men and the Fur Trade.
Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1969.

Hoffman, Wilbur.
Sagas of Western Travel and Transport.
San Diego: Howell North Books, 1980.

Hollon, W. Eugene.
The Great American Desert, Then and Now.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Ise, John.
Sod and Stubble.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1936.

Lewis, Meriwether, and William Clark,
The Journals of Lewis and Clark.
Edited by Bernard De Voto. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953.

—.
The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1906.

Lilley, William, and Lewis Gould. “The Western Irrigation Movement 1878—1902: A Reappraisal.” In Gene Gressley, ed.,
The American West: A Reorientation.
Laramie: University of Wyoming Publications, 1966.

Robinson, Michael.
Water for the West.
Chicago: Public Works Historical Society, 1979.

Rolvaag, O. E.
Giants in the Earth.

Roosevelt, Theodore.
The Winning of the West.
Reprint. Fawcett House, 1963.

Shannon, Fred A.
The Farmer’s Last Frontier.
New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1945.

Smith, Henry Nash.
Virgin Land.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950, 1970.

Stegner, Wallace.
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953.

Taft, Robert.
Artists and Illustrators of the Old West
. New York: Scribner’s, 1953.

Treadwell, Edward.
The Cattle King.
Fresno, Calif.: Valley Publishers, 1931.

Webb, Walter Prescott.
The Great Plains.
New York: Ginn, 1931.

Winship, George Parker. “The Coronado Expedition, 1540-1542.” Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, Fourteenth Annual Report, 1892—93.

Winther, Oscar Osburn.
The Transportation Frontier: Trans-Mississippi West, 1865—1890.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.

CHAPTER TWO: The Red Queen

The story of how Los Angeles went to the Owens Valley for water has been told now and then, though not too accurately. The movie
Chinatown,
which came out in the mid-1970s, is a great film that may be responsible for misinforming a lot of people who consider it completely factual. (Oddly, Mulwray, the character whose name is a play on “Mulholland,” comes across as a hero in the movie—and is murdered for his honesty—so the film may actually have polished Mulholland’s reputation, which it probably did not intend to do.)

The most thorough and believable account, by far, of the whole Owens Valley—Los Angeles episode is William Kahrl’s
Water and Power,
which was not published until 1982. Kahrl’s prodigious research shows in the text. Remi Nadeau’s
The Water Seekers
is considerably less exhaustive than Kahrl’s book and is biased fairly heavily, in the end, in favor of Los Angeles. Nonetheless, it does contain some good anecdotal material, which I used in the chapter.

For a critical appraisal of Harrison Gray Otis, Harry Chandler, and the Los Angeles
Times
(the old
Times,
not the unrecognizably superior newspaper published by the third-generation Chandler, Otis), William Bonelli’s
Billion Dollar Blackjack
is recommended. David Halberstam’s
The Powers That
Be is also very good, though it deals more with the post-Otis newspaper. Anyone really interested in the mentality of the Los Angeles power structure at the turn of the century should peruse some old issues of the paper on microfilm; though more temperamental than most of his peers, Otis was no aberration.

Robert Matson’s
William Mulholland: A Forgotten Forefather
provides some interesting personal detail about a very complicated man. Originally written as a thesis, the monograph is not easy to find in libraries.

Carey McWilliams’s
California: The Great Exception
has to be considered required reading for anyone seriously interested in how California came to be the state and culture that it is. In fiction, James M. Cain may have captured southern California best, especially in
Mildred Pierce;
his essay “Paradise” is singular.

Important interviews for this chapter:
Horace Albright, Jack Burby, Dorothy Green, David Kennedy, William Warne, Samuel P. Hays, and William Kahrl.

BOOKS

Bain, Joe S., et al.
Northern California’s Water Industry.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966.

Beck, Warren A., and David A. Williams.
California: A History of the Golden State.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972.

Bonelli, William G.
Billion Dollar Blackjack.
Beverly Hills, Calif.: Civic Research Press, 1954.

Carr, Harry.
Los Angeles: City of Dreams.
New York: Appleton-Century, 1935.

Chalfant, Willie Arthur.
The Story of Inyo.
Privately printed. Chicago,1922.

Cooper, Erwin.
Aqueduct Empire.
Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1968.

Dunne, John Gregory. “A Celebration of California.” In Jonathan Eisen and David Fine, eds.,
Unknown California.
New York: Macmillan, 1985.

Fogelson, Robert M.
The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles 1850—1930.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Gottlieb, Robert, and Irene Wolt.
Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles
Times,
Its Publishers, and Their Influence on Southern California.
New York: Putnam, 1977.

Halberstam, David.
The Powers That Be.
New York: Knopf, 1979.

Hays, Samuel P.
Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency.
New York: Atheneum, 1975.

Jorgenson, Lawrence C.
The San Fernando Valley, Past and Present.
Los Angeles: Pacific Rim Research, 1982.

Kahrl, William.
Water and Power.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Kahrl, William, ed.
The California Water Atlas.
Sacramento: Department of Water Resources, 1979.

Keffer, Frank.
History of the San Fernando Valley.
Glendale, Calif.: Still-man, 1982.

Longstreet, Stephen.
All Star Cast: An Anecdotal History of Los Angeles.
New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1977.

McWilliams, Carey.
California: The Great Exception.
Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, 1949, 1976.

Matson, Robert W.
William Mulholland: A Forgotten Forefather.
Stockton, Calif.: University of the Pacific, Pacific Center for Western Studies, 1976.

Nadeau, Remy.
The Water Seekers.
Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, 1974.

Outland, Charles F.
Man-made Disaster: The Story of Saint Francis Dam.
Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1963, 1977.

Watkins, T. H.
California: An Illustrated History.
Palo Alto: American West Publishing, 1973.

ARTICLES

Amaral, Anthony. “A Struggle in the Owens Valley.”
American Forests,
August 1964.

Hayden, Frederick. “Los Angeles Aqueduct.”
Building and Engineering News,
August 15, 1915.

Hoffman, Abraham. “Joseph B. Lippincott and the Owens Valley Controversy: Time for Revision.” Southern California Quarterly, Fall 1972.

• . “Origins of a Controversy: The United States Reclamation Service and the Owens Valley—Los Angeles Water Dispute.” Arizona
and
the West, Winter 1977.

Lippincott, Joseph B. “William Mulholland: Engineer, Pioneer, Raconteur.” Civil Engineering, February/March 1941.

Los Angeles Times, 1898—1928. (Author’s note: So many issues of the newspaper were reviewed for this chapter that it seems pointless to list them all here. Most of the citations in the chapter are dated. The newspaper is well indexed for anyone who wishes to review its coverage of the water issue during the period.)

“Mulholland Retires after 50-Year Service at Los Angeles.”
Engineering News-Record,
November 22, 1928.

Wood, R. Coke. “Owens Valley as I Knew It.”
Pacific Historian,
Summer 1972.

Yonay, Ehud. “How Green Was My Valley.”
New West,
March 28, 1977.

CHAPTER THREE: First Causes

The chronicle of the political events leading to the passage of the Reclamation Act is based largely on William Lilley and Lewis Gould’s “The Western Irrigation Movement 1878—1902: A Reappraisal,” in Gene Gressley, ed.,
The American West: A Reorientation.
The essay is revisionist history at its best—provocative yet sturdy—and few people seem to know of it. The chronicle of natural events that helped lead to passage of the Act is taken largely from Wallace Stegner’s
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian.

Samuel Hays’s
Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency
is a very good account of the early conservation movement and its utilitarian tenets.

Michael Robinson’s
Water for the West
contains some good material on the failures of private irrigation ventures and contrasts vividly with William Smythe’s supremely glorified view in
The Conquest
of
Arid America
(which was written much earlier). Eugene Hollon’s
The Great American Desert, Then and Now
provided outstanding general background for this chapter, as did National Land for People’s “Reclamation History” (three-part series).

BOOKS

Delano, Alonzo.
Life on the Plains and Among the Diggings.
Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1966.

Gaffney, Mason.
Diseconomies Inherent in Western Water Laws.
Riverside, Calif.: January 1961 (unpublished monograph).

Hawgood, John A.
America’s Western Frontiers.
New York: Knopf, 1967.

Hays, Samuel P.
Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency.
New York: Atheneum, 1975.

Hollon, W. Eugene.
The Great American Desert, Then and Now.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Ise, John.
Sod and Stubble.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1936.

Lilley, William, and Lewis L. Gould. “The Western Irrigation Movement 1878—1902: A Reappraisal.” In Gene M. Gressley, ed.,
The American West: A Reorientation.
Laramie: University of Wyoming Publications, 1966.

Robinson, Michael.
Water for the West.
Chicago: Public Works Historical Society, 1979.

Smythe, William E.
The Conquest of Arid America.
New York: Macmillan, 1905.

Warne, William.
The Bureau of Reclamation.
New York: Praeger, 1973.