Cadillac Desert (14 page)

Eaton’s jubilation was so great he couldn’t restrain himself. He ran to the telegraph office and shot off a cryptic message to Mulholland. “The deal is made,” he wired. All it had required was “a week of Italian work.”

Los Angeles now had most of what it needed, but Mulholland still wanted some additional water rights in order to kill the Reclamation project once and for all. Within hours of receiving Eaton’s telegram, he was frantically organizing an expedition of prominent Los Angeleans to the Owens Valley, using the pretext that they were investors interested in developing a resort. The group included Mayor Owen McAleer and two prominent members of the water commission. For them to see the river firsthand was crucial, Mulholland reasoned, because he and Eaton would need more money to buy the last water rights they wanted, and the city could not legally appropriate money toward a project that hadn’t even been described, let alone authorized. A group such as this could easily free up some money in the Los Angeles business community if they fathomed how much water there was.

It went exactly as planned. The group arrived in the valley on the cusp of spring, when even small tributaries of the Owens River were overflowing; days after they returned, Eaton and Mulholland had all the money they needed. They requisitioned an automobile and raced off to the valley by the shortest route, across the Mojave Desert—probably the first time anyone crossed it by car. After a week of frantic, furtive buying, the two men returned. “The last spike has been driven,” Mulholland announced to the assembled water commissioners. “The options are all secured.”

Like all the other newspaper publishers in the city, Harrison Gray Otis had been operating under a self-imposed gag rule. Although the publishers knew what was going on, not a word of Mulholland and Eaton’s stealthy grab of water options had appeared in the papers. However, on July 29, the same day the Reclamation panel reached its verdict, Otis could no longer contain himself. Under a headline that read, “Titanic Project to Give the City a River,” the whole unauthorized story spilled out in the Los Angeles Times.

Otis seemed to take particular satisfaction in the way Fred Eaton had hoodwinked the greedy but guileless rubes in the Owens Valley. “A number of the unsuspecting ranchers have regarded the appearance of Mr. Eaton in the valley as a visitation of Providence,” the Times chortled. “In the eyes of the ranchers he was land mad. When they advanced the price of their holdings a few hundred dollars and he stood the raise, their cup of joy fairly overflowed.... The farmer folk in the Owens River Valley think that he has gone daffy on stock raising. To them he is a millionaire with a fad.” The paper even admitted that the town of Independence, whose neighboring ranchers had been made offers they couldn’t refuse, was faced with financial ruin, but it refused to let such a fact spoil its enjoyment of a good joke. The paper also recalled in excruciating detail Joseph Lippincott’s career as a double agent, apparently thinking it was doing him a favor. “In the consummation of the great project that is to supply Los Angeles with sufficient water for all time, great credit is given to J. B. Lippincott,” it said. “Without Mr. Lippincott’s interest and cooperation, it is declared that the plan never would have gone through....
Guided by the spirit of the Reclamation Act ...
he recognized the fact that the Owens River water would fulfill a greater mission in Los Angeles than if it were to be spread over acres of desert land.... Any other government engineer, a nonresident of Los Angeles and not familiar with the needs of this section, undoubtedly would have gone ahead with nothing more than the mere reclamation of the arid lands in view” (emphasis added). It was praise that was to damn Lippincott for the rest of his life.

There was nothing quite as revealing in the
Times’s
story, however, as its very lead sentence: “The cable that has held the San Fernando Valley vassal for ten centuries to the arid demon,” it gushed in a spasm of metaphorical excess, “is about to be severed by the magic scimitar of modern engineering skill.”

There was something very strange about that sentence. All along, the Owens River had been portrayed as a matter of life or death to the city of Los Angeles. No one had ever said a word about the San Fernando Valley.

Sesquipedalian tergiversation was the strong suit of Harrison Gray Otis, along with slander, meanness, biliousness, and the implacable pursuit of a good old-fashioned grudge. Under his ownership, the Times was less a newspaper than a kind of mace used to bludgeon and destroy his enemies, who, and which, were many. (Otis often said that he considered objectivity a form of weakness.) The Democratic Party was “a shameless old harlot”; labor leaders were “corpse defacers,” labor unions “anarchic scum”; California’s preeminent reformer, Governor (later Senator) Hiram Johnson, was “a born mob leader—a whooper—a howler—a roarer.” The newspaper owned by Otis’s former partner, H. H. Boyce, was the “Daily Morning Metropolitan Bellyache,” while Boyce himself was “a coarse vulgar criminal.” William Randolph Hearst and his
Examiner,
more serious rivals than Boyce, were, interchangeably, “Yellow Yawp.” Even innocent bystanders were vaporized by the General’s ire. One morning Otis was greeted by a new neighbor who happened to mispronounce his name. “Good morning, General Ah-tis,” said the man cheerily. “It’s O-tis, you goddamn fool,” the General bellowed back.

General
Harrison Gray Otis. Otis’s military coronation had come through the offices of President William McKinley as a reward for volunteering to send young men into the Philippine jungles during the Spanish-American War. By the time he returned to the States, the twentieth century had dawned, and Otis was utterly unprepared for it. Unions were organizing, the open shop was threatened, and even in Los Angeles the Socialists—the
Socialists—
were getting ready to run a candidate for mayor. Anti-unionism became breakfast fare for
Times
readers, as predictable as sunrise, and Otis was soon ordained public enemy number one by organized labor in the United States—no mean feat for a newspaper publisher in a remote western city. It was a notoriety he loved. To celebrate it, Otis commissioned a new headquarters that resembled a medieval fortress—it even had a parapet with turrets and cannon slots—and had a custom touring car built with a cannon mounted on the hood. The effect of all this on his enemies was inspirational. Hiram Johnson was addressing a crowd in a Los Angeles auditorium when someone in the audience, who knew that Johnson’s talent for invective surpassed even the General’s, yelled out, “What about Otis?” Johnson, all prognathous scowl and murderous intent, took two steps forward and began extemporaneously. “In the city of San Francisco we have drunk to the very dregs of infamy,” he said in a low rumble. “We have had vile officials, we have had rotten newspapers. But we have had nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous in San Francisco as Harrison Gray Otis. He sits there in senile dementia with gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all the things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy. This man Otis is the one blot on the banner of southern California; he is the bar sinister on your escutcheon. My friends, he is the one thing that all Californians look at when, in looking at southern California, they see anything that is disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked, and putrescent—
that,”
concluded Johnson in a majestic bawl, “that is Harrison Gray Otis!”

The vitriol that Otis and his rivals hurled at one another, however, could be turned off instantly if some more important matter was at hand. In the avaricious social climate of southern California, that usually meant an opportunity to make money; and in the dry climate of southern California, money meant water.

The first sign something was afoot came in the weeks following the
Times’s
disclosure of Mulholland and Eaton’s daring scheme, when Otis’s newspaper took time out from its usual broadsides to laud the future of the San Fernando Valley, an encircled plain of dry, mostly worthless land on the other side of the Hollywood Hills. “Go to the whole length and breadth of the San Fernando Valley these dry August days,” the paper editorialized on August 1. “Shut your eyes and picture this same scene after a big river of water has been spread over every acre, after the whole expanse has been cut up into five-acre, and in some cases one-acre, plots—plots with a pretty cottage on each and with luxuriant fruit trees, shrubs and flowers in all the glory of their perfect growth....” Again on October 10, a so-called news story began, “Premonitory pains and twitches: The San Fernando Valley has caught the boom. It appears just about ready to break....”

What was odd about this was that there was as yet no guarantee—at least none publicly offered by Mulholland—that the San Fernando Valley was going to receive any of the Owens Valley water. In the first place, the route of the aqueduct had not yet been disclosed; it might go through the valley, but then again it might not. Secondly, the voters had not even approved the aqueduct, let alone voted for a bond issue to finance it. Mulholland had been saying that the city had surplus water sufficient for only ten thousand new arrivals. If that was so, and if the city was expected to grow by hundreds of thousands during the next decade, where was this great surplus for the San Fernando Valley to come from? In those days, the valley was isolated from Los Angeles proper; it sat by itself far outside the city limits. In theory, the valley couldn’t even
have
the city’s surplus water, assuming there was any—it would be against the law.

The truth, which only a handful of people knew, was that William Mulholland’s private figures were grossly at odds with his public pronouncements; it was the same with his intentions. Despite his talk of water for only ten thousand more people, there was still a big surplus at hand. (During the eight years it would take to complete the aqueduct, in fact, the population of Los Angeles rose from 200,000 to 500,000 people, yet no water crisis occurred.) The crisis was, in large part, a manufactured one, created to instill the public with a sense of panic and help Eaton acquire a maximum number of water rights in the Owens Valley. Mulholland and Eaton had managed to secure water rights along forty miles of the Owens River, which would be enough to give the city a huge surplus for years to come. But Mulholland was not saying that he would
use
any of the surplus; in fact, he seemed to be going out of his way to assure the Owens Valley that he would not. For example, the proposed intake for the aqueduct had been carefully located downstream from most of the Owens valley ranches and farms, so that they could continue to irrigate; Mulholland would later tell the valley people that his objective was simply to divert their unused and return flows.

In truth, Mulholland planned to divert every drop to which the city held rights as soon as he could. Like all water-conscious westerners, he lived in fear of the use-it-or-lose-it principle in the doctrine of appropriative rights. If the city held water rights that went unused for years, the Owens Valley people might successfully claim them back. But where would he allow the surplus to be used?

Privately, Mulholland planned to lead the aqueduct through the San Fernando Valley on its way to the city. In his hydrologic scheme of things, the valley was the best possible receiving basin; any water dumped on the earth there would automatically drain into the Los Angeles River and its broad aquifer, creating a large, convenient, non-evaporative pool for the city to tap. It provided, in a word, free storage. That it was free was critically important, because Mulholland, intentionally or not, had underestimated the cost of building the aqueduct, and to build a large storage reservoir in addition to the aqueduct would be out of the question financially. Even had it been feasible, Mulholland was deeply offended by the evaporative waste of reservoirs; he was much more inclined to store water underground.

Mulholland had an even more important reason for wanting to include the San Fernando Valley in his scheme. Under the city charter, Los Angeles was prohibited from incurring a debt greater than 15 percent of its assessed valuation. In 1905, that put its debt limit at exactly $23 million, which was what he expected the aqueduct to cost. But the city already had $7 million in outstanding debt, which left him with a debt ceiling too low to complete the project. After coming this far—securing the water rights, organizing civic support—he wouldn’t have the money to build it!

Mulholland, however, was clever enough to have thought of a way out of this dilemma. If the assessed valuation of Los Angeles could be rapidly increased, its debt ceiling would be that much higher. And what better way was there to accomplish this than to
add to the city?
Instead of bringing more people to Los Angeles—which was happening anyway—
the city would go to them.
It would just loosen its borders as Mulholland loosened his silk cravat and wrap itself around the San Fernando Valley. Then it would have a new tax base, a natural underground storage reservoir, and a legitimate use of its surplus water in one fell swoop.

Anyone who knew this, and bought land in the San Fernando Valley while it was still dirt-cheap, stood to become very, very rich.

The person who finally began to figure it all out was Henry Loewenthal, the editor of Otis’s despised rival newspaper, William Randolph Hearst’s
Examiner.
The
Examiner
had been skeptical of the aqueduct plan from the beginning, though it did not oppose it outright; Loewenthal’s editorials merely made a point of questioning Mulholland’s sense of urgency and, on occasion, his figures. But even such mild skepticism was more than enough to enrage Otis, who attributed Loewenthal’s doubts to the fact that the
Times
had scooped the
Examiner
about the aqueduct story. “Anyone but a simpleton or a poor old has-been in his dotage would sing very low over a failure like that,” snarled Otis in an editorial, “but the impossible Loewenthal insists on emphasizing his own incompetency.”