Cadillac Desert (16 page)

Smith’s proposal was obviously anathema to the San Fernando land syndicate, and to the city as well. The chief of the Geologic Survey doubted that it would work, and even if it did, for the West’s largest city to settle for leftover water from a backwater oasis of fruit and cattle ranchers was, to say the least, humiliating. The city might have to beg for extra water in times of drought or go to court to try to condemn it. If the Owens Valley held on to its first rights and expanded its irrigated acreage, Los Angeles might soon have to look for water again, and the only river in sight was the Colorado, a feckless brown torrent in a bottomless canyon which the city could never afford to dam and divert on its own. Smith’s proposal led directly to one unthinkable conclusion: at some point in the relatively near future, Los Angeles would have to cease to grow.

What was William Mulholland’s response? He took a train to Washington, held a summit meeting with Smith and Senator Flint, and decided to do what any sensible person would have done: he accepted the compromise.

If it was a smokescreen, as it appears to have been, it was a brilliant move. (Mulholland seems to have been a far better political schemer than he was a hydrologist and civil engineer.) For one thing, it put Sylvester Smith off guard, making him believe that the reconciliation he wanted to effect was a success. For another, it gave Los Angeles some critical extra time to plead its case before the two people who might help the city get everything it wanted: the President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, and the man on whom he leaned most heavily for advice—Gifford Pinchot.

Pinchot was the first director of Roosevelt’s pet creation, the Forest Service, but that was only one of his roles. He was also the Cardinal Richelieu of TR’s White House. Temperamentally and ideologically, the two men fit hand in glove. Both were wealthy patricians (Pinchot came from Pittsburgh, where his family had made a fortune in the dry-goods business); both were hunters and outdoorsmen. Though their speeches and writings rang of Thomas Jefferson, at heart Pinchot and Roosevelt seemed more comfortable with Hamiltonian ideals. Roosevelt liked the Reclamation program because he saw it as an agrarian path to industrial strength, not because he believed—as Jefferson did—that a nation of small farmers is a nation with a purer soul. Pinchot espoused forest conservation not because he worshiped nature like John Muir (whom he privately despised) but because the timber industry was plowing through the nation’s forests with such abandon it threatened to destroy them for all time. Roosevelt was a trust-buster, but only because he feared that unfettered capitalism could breed socialism. (For evidence he only had to look as far as Los Angeles, where Harrison Gray Otis was whipping labor radicals into such a blind, vengeful froth that two of them blew up his printing plant in 1910 and killed twenty of their own.) The conservation of Roosevelt and Pinchot was utilitarian; their progressivism—they spoke of “the greater good for the greatest number”—had a nice ring to it, but it also happens to be the progressivism of cancer cells.

On the evening of June 23, Senator Frank Flint left his offices on Capitol Hill for a late meeting with the President. It was a hot and muggy night, and Roosevelt seemed in an irritable mood. Behind him, however, stood a man who seemed a model of coolness and decorum, Gifford Pinchot. Flint, who had just received an intensive coaching from Matthews and Mulholland, began a passionate appeal.

Smith’s so-called compromise, he said, was nothing less than capitulation. Los Angeles had agreed only in despair; it was going to run out of water any day and it couldn’t afford to be filibustered to death in Congress. Smith’s prohibition on using surplus water in the San Fernando Valley left the city no choice but to leave any surplus in the Owens Valley or dump it in the ocean. In the first case, water rights the city had purchased at great expense might revert to the valley under the doctrine of appropriative rights; in the second case, the city would violate the California constitution, which forbade “inefficient use” of water. The real estate bust of 1889 had depopulated the city by one-half. Imagine what a water famine would do! All of the city’s actions in the Owens Valley had been legitimate. It had paid for its water, fair and square, and it wanted to let the valley survive. But there was only so much water, and it was a hundredfold—a thousandfold, said Smith—more valuable to the state and the nation if it built up a great, strong, progressive city on America’s weakly defended western flank instead of maintaining a little agrarian utopia in the high desert.

It was a rousing speech—the kind of speech that Roosevelt liked to hear. It was, in fact, just the kind of speech
he
would have made.

Roosevelt turned to his other visitor. “What do you think about this, Giff?”

“As far as I am concerned,” Pinchot answered coolly, “there is no objection to permitting Los Angeles to use the water for irrigation purposes.”

It was as simple as that. Roosevelt did not even bother to call in the Interior Department’s lawyers or the Geologic Survey’s hydrologists to ask whether Flint’s argument was sense or nonsense. He never invited Sylvester Smith to give his side of the argument. He didn’t even tell Smith or his own Interior Secretary, Ethan Hitchcock, about his decision; they found out about it secondhand a day and a half later. Hitchcock, a wealthy, principled man in the style of Sylvester Smith, had been profoundly embarrassed by the two-faced behavior of his employee J. B. Lippincott, and had been looking for a way to make amends to the Owens Valley. Flabbergasted and infuriated by the President’s decision, Hitchcock raced over to the White House, where Roosevelt refused to hear him. Instead, he forced him to suffer the humiliation of helping him draft a letter explaining “our attitude in the Los Angeles water supply question.” As Hitchcock stood by, impotent and enraged, Roosevelt wrote, “It is a hundred or a thousandfold more important to state that this water is more valuable to the people of Los Angeles than to the Owens Valley.” The words could have come right out of William Mulholland’s mouth.

The Otis-Sherman-Huntington-Chandler land syndicate was, potentially, enough of an embarrassment to Roosevelt’s antimonopolist image that he felt compelled to add an amendment to Flint’s bill prohibiting the city from reselling municipal water for irrigation use. In the opinion of the House Public Lands Committee, however, the stipulation was “meaningless.” “This water will belong absolutely to Los Angeles,” said the bill’s sponsor, echoing the sense of the committee, “and the city can do as it pleases....” Which it would.

Roosevelt’s support for Flint’s bill was only the beginning of the aid and comfort he was to give to the most powerful city on the Pacific Coast. When the Reclamation Service officially annulled the Owens Valley Project in July of 1907, the hundreds of thousands of acres it had withdrawn were not returned to the public domain for homesteading, on Roosevelt’s orders—just as Mulholland wished. It was a decision without precedent, and its result was that the handful of rich members of the San Fernando syndicate could continue using the surplus water in the Owens River that thousands of homesteaders might have claimed instead. Ethan Hitchcock had promised that such a decision, which he already foresaw when Roosevelt closed ranks behind Los Angeles, would be made over his dead body, but Roosevelt spared his life by firing him first. And when the city, immensely satisfied with the result, asked Pinchot whether he couldn’t go a step further, the chief of the Forest Service decided to include virtually all of the Owens Valley in the Inyo National Forest.

The Inyo National Forest! With six inches of annual rainfall, the Owens Valley is too dry for trees; the only ones there were fruit trees planted and irrigated by man, some of which were already dying for lack of water. This didn’t seem to bother Pinchot, nor did the fact that his action appears to have been patently illegal. The Organic Act that created the Forest Service says, “No public forest reservation shall be established except to improve and protect the forest ... or for the purpose of creating favorable conditions of water flow, and to provide a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of the United States; but it is not the purpose of these provisions ... to authorize the inclusion ... of lands more valuable for the mineral therein,
or for agricultural purposes,
than for forest purposes” (emphasis added). The valley’s irrigated orchards were infinitely more valuable than the barren flats and scattered sagebrush that characterized the new national forest, so Pinchot’s action was incontrovertibly a violation of the legislation that put him in business. He lamely countered that he was simply acting to protect the quality of Los Angeles’ water; but since much of the treeless acreage he included in the Inyo National Forest lay
below
the intake of the aqueduct, it was a flimsy excuse. As a formality, Pinchot was obliged to send an investigator to the Owens Valley to recommend that he do what he had already made up his mind to do. He sent three before he found one who was willing to go along. “This is not a government by legislation,” lamented Sylvester Smith on the Senate floor, “it is a government by strangulation.”

In July of 1907, with the reclamation project in its grave and the Owens Valley imprisoned inside a national forest without trees, Joseph Lippincott resigned from the Reclamation Service and immediately went to work, at nearly double his government salary, as William Mulholland’s deputy. He remained utterly unchastised. “I would do everything over again, just exactly as I did,” he said as he departed.

The one thing that no one seems to have thought about in all this was that the people of Owens Valley were only human, and there was just so much they could take.

The aqueduct took six years to build. The Great Wall of China and the Panama Canal were bigger jobs, and New York’s Catskill aqueduct, which was soon to be completed, would carry more water, but no one had ever built anything so large across such merciless terrain, and no one had ever done it on such a minuscule budget. It was as if the city of Pendleton, Oregon, had gone out, by itself, and built Grand Coulee Dam.

The aqueduct would traverse some of the most scissile, fractionated, fault-splintered topography in North America. It would cover 223 miles, 53 of them in tunnels; where tunneling was too risky, there would be siphons whose acclivities and declivities exceeded fifty-grade. The city would have to build 120 miles of railroad track, 500 miles of roads and trails, 240 miles of telephone line, and 170 miles of power transmission line. The entire concrete-making capacity of Los Angeles was not adequate for this one project, so a huge concrete plant would have to be built near the limestone deposits in the grimly arid Tehachapi Mountains. Since there was virtually no water along the entire route, steampower was out of the question and the whole job would be done with electricity; therefore, two hydroelectric plants would be needed on the Owens River to run electric machinery that a few months earlier had not even been invented. The city would have to maintain, house, and feed a work force fluctuating between two thousand and six thousand men for six full years. And it would have to do all this for a sum equivalent, more or less, to the cost of one modern jet fighter.

The workers would have to supply their own hard-shelled derby hats, since hard hats did not yet exist, and even if they had the city couldn’t afford them. They would live in tents in the desert without liquor or women—although both were available nearby and ended up consuming most of the aqueduct payroll. They would eat meat that spoiled during the daytime and froze at night, since the daily temperature range in the Mojave Desert can span eighty degrees. Nonetheless, the men would labor on the aqueduct as the pious raised the cathedral at Chartres, and they would finish under budget and ahead of schedule. If you asked any of them why they did it, they would probably say they did it for the chief.

The loyalty and heroics that Mulholland inspired in his workers were a perpetual source of wonder. For six years he all but lived in the desert, patrolling the aqueduct route like a nervous father-to-be pacing a hospital waiting room—giving advice, offering encouragement, sketching improvised solutions in the sand. In sandstorms, windstorms, snowstorms, and terrifying heat, his spirits remained contagiously high. Pilfering, which can add millions to the cost of a modern project, was almost unknown. Although the pay was terrible—Mulholland simply couldn’t afford anything more—he initiated a bonus system that shattered records for hard-rock tunneling. (The men were in a race with the world’s most illustrious tunnelers, the Swiss, who were digging the Loetchberg Tunnel at the same time.)

Throughout the entire time, Mulholland showed the better side of a complex and sometimes heartless character. If he wandered through a tent city and discovered that a worker’s wife had just had a baby, he would stop long enough to show her the proper way to change a diaper. He would sit down and eat with the men and complain louder than anyone about the food. In lieu of newspapers, his wit was breakfast conversation. Once, when a landslide sealed off a tunnel with a man still inside, Mulholland arrived to check on the rescue effort.

“He’s been in there three days, so I don’t suppose he’s doing so well,” said the supervisor, a mirthless Scandinavian named Hansen.

“Then he must be starving to death,” said Mulholland.

“Oh, no, sir,” said the supervisor. “He’s getting something to eat. We’ve been rolling him hard-boiled eggs through a pipe.”

“Have you?” said Mulholland archly. “Well, then, I hope you’ve been charging him board.”

“No, sir,” said the flustered Hansen. “But I suppose I should, eh?”