The creation of the American West required conquering its most formidable barrier: water scarcity. The previous decades demonstrated that private enterprise and individual effort were insufficient to overcome the continent’s arid reality. The federal government stepped in through the Reclamation Act of 1902. This law provided subsidies and the engineering might necessary to irrigate the desert. However, the first great modern water conflict unfolded not between farmer and nature, but between a burgeoning metropolis and a small, unsuspecting farming community. This conflict revealed the intense political corruption and sheer ruthlessness underlying the “greening of the desert”.
The Oasis in the High Desert#
California, the perennial trend-setting state, is defined mostly by its aridity. Los Angeles is drier than Beirut, and 65 percent of the state receives less than 20 inches of precipitation annually. Yet, east of the Sierra Nevada, the Owens River provided an oasis. This substantial river flowed through a long valley, flanked by the Sierra Nevada and the White Mountains, which rise ten thousand feet (3,048 m) from the valley floor.
The river flowed into Owens Lake, a huge, turquoise, and improbable sight in the desert landscape. The valley was postcard-pretty, a narrow swath of green amid the high desert. Mount Whitney, the highest peak between Canada and Mexico at 14,495 feet (4,418 m), loomed over the valley. The lake, though saline, supported millions of migratory waterfowl and vast numbers of brine shrimp. Early visitors were induced to remain by the startling numbers of food sources available.
Two men quickly recognized the river’s value to the desperate metropolis to the south. Fred Eaton, a western patrician, and William Mulholland, an Irish immigrant and city water superintendent, became close friends while working at the Los Angeles City Water Company. Eaton, who was later elected mayor, grew messianic about the approaching water shortage for Los Angeles. He insisted that the Owens River, located 250 miles (402 km) away, was the city’s only answer. Mulholland initially found the idea preposterous. He believed that damming rivers would create reservoirs that evaporated huge amounts of water in California’s heat. He favored slowing rainfall to force more water into the aquifer, even planting seeds and building checkdams to conserve water. However, the basin’s rapid population growth nullified his conservation efforts.
The Reclamation Gambit#
Los Angeles faced a daunting problem: building a 250-mile (402 km) aqueduct through high desert and mountains was impractical for private enterprise. This challenge was exactly what the Reclamation Service—an unparalleled experiment in federal intervention—was created to handle.
The Reclamation Service, created in 1902, needed its initial projects to succeed to satisfy congressional skeptics. The Owens Valley, already populated by proven irrigation farmers, offered a near-guarantee of success. The river was underused, and there was a favorable site for the Long Valley reservoir. Frederick Newell, the first Reclamation Commissioner, viewed the Owens Valley project, which could irrigate sixty thousand additional acres (24,281 ha), as a perfect candidate. By early 1903, Reclamation engineers, led by Joseph Lippincott, were surveying streamflows and soils in the valley.
Lippincott, the regional engineer for the Reclamation Service, soon became a double agent. He maintained a highly suspicious relationship with Mulholland and Eaton, guiding them around the valley multiple times. In September 1904, the Inyo Register, the valley’s newspaper, ran a small item noting that Eaton, the former mayor of Los Angeles, and Mulholland, connected with the city water system, were visiting the proposed government dam site. The article noted they were being shown around by Lippincott himself.
The conspiracy deepened when Eaton secured the land Los Angeles truly needed to control the river. He relentlessly pursued Thomas B. Rickey, a rancher who held the critical Long Valley reservoir site. Rickey initially refused to sell. Eaton finally succeeded by offering to recommend that Rickey’s hydroelectric company be allowed to usurp a competitor’s claim on the main power sites on the river. Rickey experienced a sudden change of heart and sold Eaton an option clear on the ranch, including the reservoir site, for $450,000.
A Project Built on Secrecy and Deception#
The scheme demanded silence from the powerful figures involved in Los Angeles. For months, city newspaper publishers operated under a self-imposed gag rule, ensuring no word of Mulholland and Eaton’s secret acquisition of water options appeared in print.
However, the ethics of the Reclamation Service were strained past the breaking point. Lippincott, who had accepted a $2,500 contract from Los Angeles after completing his consultant duties, was widely accused of violating basic ethical standards. His boss, Newell, tried to contain the damage by appointing a panel of engineers to review the project, but several Reclamation engineers refused to sit next to Lippincott. The night before the panel was to convene in July 1905, Lippincott panicked. He sent a telegram to Eaton demanding a public denial that Eaton had represented himself as Lippincott’s agent in Owens Valley. Eaton, who received the telegram while still masquerading as Lippincott’s agent in a federal land office, was furious.
Despite the efforts at secrecy, General Harrison Gray Otis, the notoriously anti-union publisher of the Los Angeles Times, could not contain himself. On July 29, 1905, under the headline, “Titanic Project to Give the City a River,” the unauthorized story of the plan spilled out.
The Syndicate’s True Aim#
The Times story contained a strange line that exposed the true motivation behind the project. The lead sentence gushed that the “cable that has held the San Fernando Valley vassal for ten centuries to the arid demon is about to be severed”. No one had previously mentioned the San Fernando Valley. This valley was a plain of dry, mostly worthless land situated on the other side of the Hollywood Hills.
Otis and other oligarchs had bought massive tracts of the San Fernando Valley at low prices, knowing the aqueduct water would transform the land’s value. Otis’s newspaper quickly began lauding the valley’s future, editorializing that a “big river of water” would turn the expanse into small plots with “luxuriant fruit trees, shrubs and flowers”.
The scheme united the most powerful men in Southern California: Henry Huntington (railroads and land development), Harriman (railroads), William Kerckhoff (utilities), and even the warring newspaper publishers, Otis and his rival William Randolph Hearst. They represented a monopolists’ version of affirmative action, covering railroads, banking, and land development. This syndicate was so powerful that, like two convicts bound by a ball and chain, neither publisher could betray the other without exposing himself.
The city’s citizens, long accustomed to scandal and graft, were successfully manipulated before the bond issue vote. A city newspaper, the Daily News, reported that city workers were dumping water from reservoirs into the Pacific to create a sense of crisis. Mulholland dismissed the claim as merely “flushing the system,” and the explanation was widely believed. With Hearst, a potential presidential candidate, writing an editorial urging a “yes” vote, the bond issue passed fourteen to one on September 7, 1905.
The Political Bargain#
The success of the aqueduct required federal cooperation, which meant navigating Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt. The city needed rights-of-way across federal lands. A bill introduced by Senator Frank Flint of California aimed to secure these rights and quarantine the land for three years, allowing the city time to buy up necessary water rights.
This effort crashed into Congressman Sylvester Smith of Inyo County. Smith, a charming politician with an ironclad set of principles, was inflamed by the idea of Otis and Huntington getting richer on water abducted from his district. Smith proposed a compromise: let the Reclamation Service build the Long Valley Dam, and the water would be used first for irrigation in Owens Valley. Return flows would then be freely diverted by Los Angeles. Smith stipulated that the Owens Valley must have a nonnegotiable first right to the water. Crucially, any surplus water could not be used for irrigation in the San Fernando Valley.
The fate of the Owens River was ultimately decided in a late meeting between Senator Flint, President Roosevelt, and Gifford Pinchot. Pinchot, the Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, and Roosevelt were both wealthy patricians who subscribed to utilitarian conservation—“the greater good for the greatest number”. Flint argued passionately that Los Angeles needed the water desperately and that Smith’s prohibition on San Fernando Valley use was an impossible restriction. Flint claimed that without the water, the city might suffer another real estate bust like the one that depopulated it by one-half in 1889.
Roosevelt turned to Pinchot, who coolly stated that there was “no objection to permitting Los Angeles to use the water for irrigation purposes”. Roosevelt did not consult the Geologic Survey’s hydrologists or even his own Interior Secretary, Ethan Hitchcock, about the decision. Roosevelt forced Hitchcock to help draft a letter stating the water was “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 necessary legislation passed, ignoring Smith’s original conditions.
The Price Paid in Water and Tears#
The Owens Valley, initially reassured by promises that there would be enough water for all, soon faced betrayal. The city’s theft was blatant. In one instance, a local leader named Watterson found a Los Angeles clerk, Lelande, carrying the deed to crucial land. Watterson locked Lelande in a bank office, put a revolver on his desk, and forced the frightened clerk to take off his coat and trousers to ensure the deed was retrieved.
The full impact of the aqueduct materialized years later. On November 5, 1913, when the first water cascaded down the aqueduct’s final sluiceway, Mulholland gave his famous, simple speech. Addressing Mayor H. H. Rose, he simply said, “There it is. Take it”. The water was an “apparition in a Syrian landscape,” delivered to the San Fernando Valley.
The consequences for Owens Valley were dire. By the 1920s, the drought returned, and Los Angeles kept tightening its grip on the water. The city’s actions were driven by a fanatic desire to conquer nature. William Mulholland once said that if he were the custodian of Yosemite Park, he would have photographers capture its beauty for a year. Then, he declared, he would “build a dam from one side of that valley to the other and stop the goddamned waste!”. This sentiment defined the attitude of Los Angeles’s water masters toward natural resources.
In 1924, local residents Mark Watterson (brother of the man who retrieved the deed) and others took dramatic action. They drove a caravan of automobiles to the Alabama Gates on the aqueduct and opened the massive wheels that controlled the weirs. For the first time in years, the Owens River flowed back across the desert into Owens Lake. This act of sabotage was necessary because the drought held the city in a deadly grip, and the locals saw no other way to retaliate against the city’s continuous demands.
The ultimate result was a civilization built on a massive subsidy and a profound natural imbalance. The Los Angeles metropolis, at once tawdry and glitzy, was entirely built on this appropriated water. As Otis’s paper continually blathered about the “promised land,” the only greater fraud was the overflowing desert river upon which the city depended. The creation of the Los Angeles Aqueduct was a landmark moment, establishing the cardinal law of the West: water flows toward power and money.
A Monument of Concrete and Contempt#
The Los Angeles Aqueduct, a long section of which crosses the Mojave Desert, showcased early engineering ambition. But the real monuments of this era were the dams. Archaeologists from another planet might conclude that our temples were dams: massive structures built with exquisite care that will outlast skyscrapers and cathedrals. Hoover Dam, built on the Colorado River, is one such formidable, serene structure. It was the first of the world’s truly great dams, giving engineers the confidence to conquer almost all of the world’s great rivers.
The Hoover Dam legislation, passed in 1928, provided the template for massive public works and corporate success. Construction was awarded to the consortium known as Six Companies, Inc., a joint venture that included eight firms like Henry J. Kaiser’s company. These firms scraped together the necessary funds and won the bid with an amazingly low offer of $48,890,995.50. The Hoover Dam project instantly elevated these firms to super-company status, mining government resources in a symbiotic relationship.
The dam, standing 726 feet and 5 inches tall, was topped out in 1935. Its electricity later helped produce the planes and ships that won the Second World War. The project, built in the depths of the Depression, carried America’s spirits with it. Yet, the story of human intervention in the Colorado River quickly devolved into a chronicle of hubris and obtuseness. Even Hoover Dam was built against Arizona’s bitter opposition, as Governor B. B. Moeur looked on the dam with trepidation, fearing California would claim Arizona’s unused water. This paranoia was well-founded: the West had quickly established that massive engineering triumphs justified the means, regardless of the consequences for the small communities or the environment. The story of the stolen river thus set the stage for the era of colossal dam building that followed.
The aqueduct that feeds Los Angeles stands as a permanent reminder that in the desert, necessity does not lead to consensus; it leads to conquest. The city, having achieved its survival through audacity and federal collusion, demonstrated that the scale of a challenge only justifies the scale of the deceit required to overcome it.