Cadillac Desert (11 page)

CHAPTER TWO

The Red Queen

W
hile Los Angeles moldered, San Francisco grew and grew. The city owned a superb natural harbor—the best on the Pacific Coast, one of the best in the world. When gold was struck in the Sierra Nevada foothills, 150 miles across the Central Valley, San Francisco became the principal destination of the fortune seekers of the world. The names of the camps suggested the potency of the lure: New York-of-the-Pacific, Bunker Hill, Chinese Camp, German Bar, Georgia Slide, Nigger Hill, Dutch Corral, Irish Creek, Malay Camp, French Bar, Italian Bar. Those who found their fortunes were inclined to part with them in the nearest haven of pleasure, which was San Francisco. Those who did not discovered that they could do just as well providing the opportunities. With oranges going for $2 apiece at the mines, and a plate of fresh oysters for $20 or more, it was a bonanza for all concerned.

In 1848, the population of San Francisco was eight hundred; three years later, thirty-five thousand people lived there. In 1853 the population went past fifty thousand and San Francisco became one of the twenty largest cities in the United States. By 1869, San Francisco possessed one of the busiest ports in the world, a huge fishing fleet, and the western terminus of the transcontinental railroad. It teemed with mansions, restaurants, hotels, theaters, and whorehouses. In finance it was the rival of New York, in culture the rival of Boston; in spirit it had no competitor.

Los Angeles, meanwhile, remained a torpid, suppurating, stunted little slum. It was too far from the gold fields to receive many fortune seekers on their way in or to detach them from their fortunes on the way out. It sat forlornly in the middle of an arid coastal basin, lacking both a port and a railroad. During most of the year, its water source, the Los Angeles River, was a smallish creek in a large bed; during the few winter weeks when it was not—when supersaturated tropical weather fronts crashed into the mountains ringing the basin—the bed could not begin to contain it, and the river floated neighborhoods out to sea. (For many years, Santa Anita Canyon, near Pasadena, held the United States record for the greatest rainfall in a twenty-four-hour period, but it may be more significant to state that the twenty-six inches that fell in a day were nearly twice the amount of precipitation that Los Angeles normally receives in a year.) Had humans never settled in Los Angeles, evolution, left to its own devices, might have created in a million more years the ideal creature for the habitat: a camel with gills.

The Spanish had actually settled Los Angeles long before they ever saw the Golden Gate. It was more convenient to Mexico and, from an irrigation farmer’s point of view, it was a more promising place to live. By 1848, the town had a population of sixteen hundred, half Spanish and half Indian, with a small sprinkling of Yankees, and was twice the size of San Francisco. A decade later, however, San Francisco had grown ten times as large as Los Angeles. By the end of the Civil War, when San Francisco was the Babylon of the American frontier, Los Angeles was a filthy pueblo of thirteen thousand, a beach for human flotsam washed across the continent on the blood tide of the war. One of the town’s early pioneers, a farm boy whose family had emigrated from Iowa, described it as a “vile little dump ... debauched ... degenerate ... vicious.”

If anything could be said to have saved Los Angeles it was its reputation as a haven from persecution, a place where one could lose oneself. Since the ranks of the persecuted include those who are too virtuous for their fellow citizens, as well as those who are not virtuous enough, sooner or later the city was bound to attract the victims of mobocracy. And the most persecuted among the virtuous in nineteenth-century America were, besides peaceful Indians and runaway slaves and Mennonites and Quakers, the members of the Mormon faith.

After fleeing Illinois for Utah, the Mormons had always been obsessed with finding escape routes to the sea. The first irrigation canals were still being dug beside the Wasatch Range when Brigham Young dispatched a party of his most loyal disciples, in 1851, to follow Jedediah Smith’s old route to the coast. When they crossed the San Bernardino Mountains, they found themselves in a huge arid basin that reminded them of home and was only a day or two from the sea. The streams were less reliable than those in Utah—the southern mountains received a scantier snowpack that never lasted halfway through the summer—but the San Bernardinos got decent winter rain, and artesian wells below them flowed like geysers. With money earned by selling food and supplies at usurious prices to adventurers bound through Utah for the gold fields, the Mormons purchased a huge chunk of land from an old Spanish rancho. The soil was good, the climate was ideal, and no one was better at irrigation farming than Mormons. Before long they were supplying much of the basin with food. In 1857, the U.S. Cavalry marched on Utah and Brigham Young ordered all distant settlements abandoned, but the Mormons’ achievement had left its mark. A Presbyterian colony was soon established nearby, then a Quaker colony, then an ethnic colony of Germans. In this freakish climate—semitropical but dry, ocean-cooled but lavishly sunny—you could grow almost anything. Corn and cabbages sprouted next to oranges, avocados, artichokes, and dates. The capitalists of San Francisco did not remain oblivious; the Southern Pacific ran a spur line to Los Angeles in 1867, finally linking it to the rest of the world. On this same line, huge San Bernardino Valencias found their way to the 1884 World’s Fair in New Orleans, where they attracted crowds. No one could imagine
oranges
grown in the western United States. It was then and there, more or less, that the phenomenon of modern Los Angeles began.

They came by ship, they came by wagon, they came by horse. They came on foot, dragging everything they could in a handcart, but the real hordes came by train. In 1885, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad linked Los Angeles directly with Kansas City, precipitating a fare war with the Southern Pacific. Within a year, the cost of passage from Chicago had dropped from $100 to $25. During brief periods of mad competition, you could cross two-thirds of the continent for a dollar. If you were asthmatic, tubercular, arthritic, restless, ambitious, or lazy—categories that pretty well accounted for Los Angeles’ first flood of arrivals—the fares were too cheap to pass up. Out came Dakota farmers who despaired at the meager profits they made growing wheat.
You could grow oranges.
Out came Civil War veterans looking for an easy life, failures looking for another chance, and the usual boom-town complement of the slick, the sharp, and the ruthless.

The first boom began in the early 1880s and culminated in 1889, when the town transacted $100 million worth of real estate—in today’s economy, a $2 billion year in Idaho Falls. Fraud was epic. Hundreds of unseen, paid-for lots were situated in the bed of the Los Angeles River, or up the nine-thousand-foot summits of the San Gabriel Range. The boom was, predictably, short-lived. In 1889, a bank president, a newspaper publisher, and the town’s most popular minister all fled to Mexico to spare themselves jail terms, and a dozen or more victims took their own lives. By 1892, the population had dropped by almost one-half, but the bust was followed quickly by an oil boom, and enough fortunes were being made (the original Beverly Hillbillies were
from
Beverly Hills, then a patch of jackrabbit scrub overlying an oil basin) to pack the arriving trains again. Los Angeles soon drew close to San Francisco in population and was crowing with glee. “The ‘busting of the boom’ became but a little eddy in the great stream,” enthused the Los Angeles
Times,
“the intermission of one heartbeat in the life of ... the most charming land on the footstool of the Most High ... the most beautiful city inhabited by the human family.” Only one thing stood in the way of what looked as if it might become the most startling rise to prominence of any city in history—the scarcity of water.

T
he motives that brought Harrison Gray Otis, Harry Chandler, and William Mulholland to Los Angeles were the same that would eventually bring millions there. Otis came because he had been an incontrovertible, if not quite an ignominious, failure. He was born in Marietta, Ohio, and as a young man held a series of unspectacular jobs—a clerk for the Ohio legislature, a foreman at a printing plant, an editor of a veterans’ magazine. His one early taste of glory came during the Civil War, in which he fought on the Union side, acquired several wounds and decorations, and ultimately rose to the rank of captain.
Captain
Harrison Gray Otis. He liked the title well enough to think himself deserving of a sinecure, and after the war he drifted out to California in search of one. What he got was an appointment as government agent on the Seal Islands, some frigid, treeless, wind-blasted humps of rock in the Bering Sea. His chief duty there was to prevent the poaching of walrus and seals, an assignment that suited Otis better than he knew, since he bore an odd resemblance to the former and had a disposition to match. He was a large blubbery man with an intransigent scowl, an Otto von Bismarck mustache and a goatee, and a chronic inability to communicate in tones quieter than a yell, whether he was debating the American role in the Pacific or telling someone to pass the salt. “He is a damned cuss who doesn’t seem to feel well unless he is in a row with someone,” one among his legion of enemies would later remark.

The Seal Islands post was a humiliation that Otis, who was more ambitious than he was clever, couldn’t afford to pass up. But after three years he had had enough, and he returned, bilious and frustrated, to California, where he got a job as editor of a local newspaper in Santa Barbara. Otis hated Santa Barbara. It was a hangout of the privileged classes, smug, snobbish, and perfectly content to remain small. Otis despised inherited wealth and class, but he despised a town that was disdainful of growth even more. He believed in it, perfervidly, just as he believed in those who started with nothing and dynamite their way to success. “Hustlers ... men of brain, brawn, and guts” were the people he admired most, even if he had less in common with them than he thought. Otis would pursue a sinecure as a greyhound chases a rabbit, and it was his rotten luck at it, more than anything else, that finally caused his success. Trying to get himself appointed marshal of California, he was offered the job of consul in Tientsin, an insult that was more than he could bear. In 1881, Otis quit the paper in Santa Barbara and moved his family to Los Angeles.

The city was still small when Otis arrived, but it was already served by several newspapers, one of which, the
Times and Mirror,
was owned by a small-time eastern financier named H. H. Boyce. Boyce was looking for a new editor, and, though the pay was a miserable $15 a week, Otis took the job. Perhaps because he was fuming about the pay, or perhaps because he knew that time was running out, Captain Otis then made one of the bolder decisions of his life. He took all of his savings and, to help offset the low pay, convinced Boyce to let him purchase a share in the newspaper. Privately he was thinking that someday, perhaps, he could force H. H. Boyce out.

Harry Chandler came to Los Angeles for his health. He grew up in New Hampshire, a cherubic child with cheeks like Freestone peaches. His falsely benign appearance, which stayed with him all his life, made him a popular boy model among advertisers and photographers. But cherubic Harry was a rugged individualist and a ferocious competitor, and if there was money involved he would rarely pass up an opportunity or a dare. While at Dartmouth College, he accepted someone’s challenge and dove into a vat of starch—a display that nearly ruined his lungs. Advised by doctors to recuperate in a warm and dry climate, he bought a ticket to Los Angeles. Arriving there, he moved from flophouse to flophouse because none of his fellow tenants could endure his hacking cough. When he was thoroughly friendless and nearly destitute, Harry met a sympathetic doctor who suffered from tuberculosis and owned an irrigated orchard near Cahuenga Pass, at the head of the San Fernando Valley. Would Harry like a job picking fruit?

The work was hard but invigorating. Before long, Harry felt almost cured. The work was also surprisingly lucrative. The doctor was as uninterested in money as Harry was interested, and let him sell a large share of what he picked. In his first year, Harry made $3,000. It was a small fortune, and inspired in Harry an awed faith in the potential of irrigated agriculture and, most particularly, agriculture in the San Fernando Valley. With the proceeds, Harry began to acquire newspaper circulation routes, which, at the time, were owned independently of the newspapers and bought and sold like chattel. Before long, he was a child monopolist, owning virtually all the routes in the city.

By 1886, Harrison Gray Otis had finally managed to hound H. H. Boyce out of the Los Angeles
Times and Mirror.
It was a pyrrhic victory, however, because Boyce had immediately established a rival paper, the
Tribune,
and engaged Otis in an all-out circulation war. With the allegiance of whoever dominated the circulation routes, one or the other was certain to win. It was Otis’s luck that he got to Harry Chandler first. Within days, the
Tribune
began to disappear mysteriously from people’s doorsteps, and its delivery boys simultaneously contracted a contagion. Meanwhile, new subscribers began to flock, like moths scenting pheromones, to the
Times.
Boyce was broken within months. Before Otis had much chance to gloat, however, he learned that the defunct
Tribune’s
printing plant had secretly acquired a new owner, whose name was Harry Chandler, and that the tactics that they had used together against Boyce could just as easily be turned against the
Times.
Otis, who bore lifelong grudges over provocations infinitely smaller than this, was realistic enough to know when he was had. Besides, this mild-appearing young man was the embodiment of every quality he admired. As a result, the
Times
acquired a new circulation manager and guiding light, whose name was Harry Chandler, and in 1894 Harry Chandler acquired a new father-in-law, whose name was Harrison Gray Otis.