American History Tellers - California Water Wars - A River in the Desert | 1

Episode Date: January 22, 2020

By the turn of the twentieth century, Los Angeles had grown from a dusty, crime-ridden pueblo into a thriving metropolis. The only problem was that it was growing too fast. With no consistently reliable water source and a desert climate leading to a decade-long drought, the city would have to begin looking elsewhere.In the Owens River Valley, over two hundred miles north of the city, a vast, rushing river, fed by Sierra mountain snow, lay the solution. But how to get the water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles? City water superintendent William Mulholland and former Los Angeles mayor Fred Eaton devised a breathtakingly simple plan: they would build an aqueduct. As Mulholland began sketching out an engineering vision for the project, Eaton secretly purchased land rights in the Owens Valley.But Eaton’s methods left many valley residents bewildered and angry, setting up a decades-long battle for survival that would pit a metropolis against a small ranching community.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's March 1905. You're a young engineer with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, but you've barely spent a moment indoors at your desk since you started the job. It's late at night, and you're knee-deep in what's left of the 4th Street sewer line. A two-day storm flooded the reserves, and you've been scrambling with other city workers to try and repair the damage.

All right, take a break. We've got a tent set up outside. Drink some coffee. After hours working in the foul-smelling muck, you're finally relieved. You make your way towards a makeshift tent and try unsuccessfully to warm your hands. Seated next to you is a fellow engineer named Harvey. He's older and higher up in the water department. Now, here with him in the tent, you try to think of something to break the silence. So, some drought, huh? Harvey squints and looks at you, possibly seeing you for the first time. I'd like to meet the fellow who thought it was a good idea to build a city here. He sounds tired, like a man who has spent all his time dealing with the same problem over and over. No fresh water anywhere except a tiny river that spends most of the time bone dry,

and then immediately floods any time a drop of rain falls. Totally asinine. Either there's no water at all or just too much. For 10 years, Los Angeles has been under drought conditions. The department instituted water rationing, but it hasn't helped. Though it doesn't look like it recently, there simply isn't enough rain. And the population is growing fast. You try and introduce some levity.

Maybe time travel is the solution, like one of those H.G. Wells books. Sure, I'm all ears. What do you got? It's easy. Go back in time about 100 years, and when the Spanish start building the mission, you tell them, don't bother, try San Diego. Nah, San Diego's worse off than we are. Besides, the solution isn't south, it's north. You lean forward, interested. What do you mean north? The Owens River, kid. Know where that is? You shake your head. 200 miles north. It's a giant river that feeds off the Sierra Mountain snowpack. Imagine, water source that will never run dry. Sure, but I

thought you said... Yeah, yeah. 200 miles away. So, easy. We just build a 200-mile-long aqueduct. No great shakes. Harvey starts to laugh again, but you can't tell if he's joking, or if he's upset, or if the strain of his work is finally getting to him. Bill Mulholland's already got the plans laid out. I tell you, it took... You both turn around. At first, you can't believe what you're seeing. Two blocks away, the supports of the Sixth Street Bridge collapse. You watch as the middle of the bridge drops into the raging river. God, at least no one was on the bridge. We had them all closed down this evening. It's going to be a huge cleanup job for someone, probably you. But you can't stop thinking about the plan Harvey mentioned. If the only true water solution lies far away in the eastern Sierras, what's it going to take to get it?

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Stream free on Freebie and Prime Video. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. On our show, we'll take you to the events, the times, and the people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. We'll put you in the shoes of everyday citizens as history was being made, and we'll show you how the events of the times affected them, their families, and affects you now. At the turn of the 20th century, the city of Los Angeles faced a crisis.

Tourism and land speculation had caused the population to increase by leaps and bounds. The growth was welcome, but natural water supply was running out. The solution would be found over 200 miles away in the waters of the Owens River, running clean and cool all year round from the Sierra Mountain Range. To get this water, Los Angeles would engage in some questionable land speculation of its own, ultimately enraging the farmers of the Owens Valley and setting up a bitter dispute. To take on the monumental task of engineering this water relocation, the city turned to Water Department Superintendent William Mulholland. His aqueduct

would propel the growth of Los Angeles from an unremarkable wild west town to a bustling metropolis, but the community of the Owens Valley would find their own water supply sacrificed. And they would fight back. This five-part series explores the politics and pitfalls of metropolitan growth and the price one man would have to pay. This is Episode 1, A River in the Desert. In September of 1876, the Transcontinental Railroad finally arrived in Los Angeles.

After years of waiting, the mostly agrarian, former Spanish mission was connected to the rest of the world. Once known as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de la Porciúncala, it was still commonly known as The Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de la Porciúncala, it was still commonly known as the Pueblo. Los Angeles was ready to grow as fast as the new trains could run. The young city was a jumble of different types, appealing to both the romantic and ambitious travelers, those who sought a whole new beginning. One of these was William Mulholland. He was 22 years old, handsome and rugged, with a thick head of swept-back hair.

Born in Belfast, Ireland in 1855, he'd left home at 14 and spent his early years crisscrossing the ocean, working on merchant and military vessels. In late 1877, he stepped off a southbound Union Pacific train from San Francisco and took a look around. Los Angeles, he later recalled, was the most attractive town I'd ever seen. There was plenty to do and fair compensation offered for whatever you did. Mulholland was being charitable. What he actually found was a dusty, dirty, crime-infested city of 8,000 people that was currently in the grips of a smallpox epidemic. But perhaps due to his time on the ocean, he immediately noticed the city's only fresh water source. He described the Los Angeles River as a beautiful, limpid little stream with willows on its banks. But again, reality was quite different. The river itself drew from a natural system of underground aquifers, fed by an inconsistent supply of rain. Too little rain and the river would dry up,

too much and it would overflow, flooding across a dry, arid landscape. Within a year, the young Irishman found himself a job related directly to that river, digging ditches for the Los Angeles Water Company. The word ditch was actually the technical term employed for the system of thin, often open-air canals that irrigated the city. They all sprung from the Los Angeles River and its main distribution line, the Sanja Madre, or Mother Ditch. People often washed their clothes in the Sanjas or even bathed in them, but it was Mulholland's job at $1.50 a day to keep the Sanja Madre clean. Complaints about the water in the 1880s ranged from descriptions like warm and nasty to so offensive to the taste and smell as to be undrinkable and

positively nauseating. The LA Times reported that fish would appear in customers' bathtubs. One story went that a man had drowned in a reservoir and simply been allowed to remain there. That the story was unproven didn't make it any less repeated. Variations replaced the dead man with a dead cow or a horse or a sheep, depending on the teller. The company responsible for the water supply had a relationship with the city it served that was complicated at best. The Los Angeles Water Company had gone private in 1868, signing a 30-year lease and paying the city an astonishingly low price of $33 a month for complete access to the Los Angeles River and its capricious water supply.

One of the water company's founders, Prudent Boudry, had gone on to become mayor in the 1870s. Another water company president, a cabinetmaker turned lumberman, William Perry, also served on the city council's water committee. In an audacious display of corruption, Perry had the luxury of setting rates and civic policy for a private company he also happened to run. When the city complained about the quality of its rationed water supply, the water company would simply shrug. It charged extra to customers with bathtubs. It argued against having to pay for fire department water or for street sprinkling in a town besieged by dust. So much dust, in fact, that one disgruntled visitor from Iowa wrote in an 1884 letter to

his hometown newspaper, for seven months out of the year, it is a wonder you can see anything at all. By the 1880s, Mulholland advanced in the water company, earning a foreman's position, and moved into a small shack by the Los Angeles River. During the day, he cleared brush and debris, often having to fork dead animals out of the stream. At night, he stayed up reading Thomas Fanning's

Practical Treatise on Hydraulics and John Troutwine's Civil Engineer's Pocketbook. According to one librarian, Mulholland was a constant presence at the downtown library, checking out and renewing massive books that no one else wanted to read. His ambition soon led him to work on a much larger project, the building of the Buena Vista Reservoir. Reservoirs were the only way to control the feast or famine nature of the Los Angeles water supply to store water for later use. The Buena Vista Reservoir was nestled in the southern Elysian Hills and was the first and largest of its kind. Working on the project for four years, Mulholland came in contact with another engineer named Frederick Eaton. Both men were the same age,

and both shared a common love of engineering. Eaton was born to a wealthy family of Southern Californians whose land deals would eventually form the city of Pasadena. He'd received a head start financially and educationally, but he and Mulholland got along well, and when Eaton left the water company in 1886, Mulholland took his place as superintendent, moving into a set of cramped offices downtown near Alameda Street. For the next decade, Mulholland set to work balancing the needs of his ever-expanding water system with the budgetary concerns of his boss, William Perry. Mulholland helped build a power station to service the Buena Vista Reservoir, and by the late 1890s, instituted a system of metering so that each customer's water could be read and billed accordingly.

But by then, the water company found itself assaulted on all fronts. An 11-year drought had begun in 1893. The streets remained unsprinkled, and still, fish were coming out of the plumbing. Demonstrations against the quality of water were being held in the city's central plaza on Olvera Street, and to make matters worse, the company's 30-year lease with the city was about to run out in 1898. It was a foregone conclusion that the city would have their water company back in municipal control, but arguments erupted over just how much the water company, its reservoirs and underground lines, was actually worth. A system that had begun in 1781 with three miles of wooden pipe had grown to 325 miles of iron pipeline carrying all the city's water. Water

company president William Perry held firm at what he considered a reasonable valuation of $3 million. City engineer Henry Dockweiler asserted the number should be only one million. And so, a board of arbitration was drawn up to put an end to the disagreement. As superintendent, Mulholland was forced to wade into the politics of his profession. Imagine it's 1898. You've been hired by the city of Los Angeles to attend the arbitration hearings regarding the water company. You're an engineer, no stranger to civic works projects, and this matter seems relatively open and shut. The water company people want more money, but you don't think they're entitled to it. Today, you're taking the lead for the city. Several other engineers are seated around you in the hot, stuffy hearing room. Across the long table sits a group of water company men and their superintendent, a relaxed-looking man with a mustache. Frankly, you've grown tired of his know-it-all attitude, and you'd like nothing more than to put

him in his place. You lean over past the stenographer to catch his eye. Uh, Superintendent Mulholland, I'd like to ask you about these water meters. Happy to answer. Can you describe for us what one is, what it does? Well, for what it is, I ask you to refer to section one of the annual report of 1898. Specifications and all that you can find on your own. As for what it does, it's a system by which the city water company can put accountability to the users of its water. And each residence is required to have a meter, each one to have a meter. We're still rolling them out. Some of our customers aren't very happy with them. They would prefer we trust them for their bills. I prefer we trust science. So you can't explain to me how they work? Oh, I did

already. I wrote the report. If the matter you're referring to is, will the customer be overcharged if a meter doesn't work? Apologies if I'm guessing here. No, go ahead. I'd love to hear the answer. Well, the answer is he cannot. The machine is built so that if it malfunctions, it will simply cease to take readings. A malfunctioning meter will not cause a bill to be higher. In fact, just the opposite. All right, then I'd like to turn my attention to the actual composition of the water lines underneath our city. And what exactly would you like to know?

Well, we'd like a complete list. The length of pipes, their size, character, and age. We also want to know the number of gate valves and all about them, as well as the number and position of fire hydrants and other structures connected with the water system. And you'd like this list now? Well, we're willing to adjourn for the next few days and let you collect your resources.

No need? Find a map. I'll show you. Eventually, a map of the city is unearthed and spread out on the long table. You and the rest of the room watch as Mulholland sketches out, in detail, all the items you requested. Begrudgingly, you're impressed. Well, Superintendent Mulholland, thank you for that. But, um, I don't think this arbitration should rely on memory alone, should it? Well, very well. Why don't we start digging? We can round up some shovels if you'd like. Your face goes a bit red.

It's been a long time since you've actually done any digging on your own, and you have no desire to start now. Mulholland's hand-drawn map proved to be accurate. Over 200 points along the waterline were all dug up and examined, and they all confirmed what he had jotted down from memory. His deposition cemented his position as an able company man who kept a staggering number of facts and figures in his head.

His quote-ready quips helped ensure his name would appear in newspapers whenever the topic of water was brought up. Ultimately, the water company was sold back to the city for two million dollars, and Mulholland kept his job as superintendent. He would later say, when the city bought the works, they bought me along with it. A year after the sale, in July of 1899, a series of earthquakes shook the city. These were followed by torrents of rain that caused a washout in the city's main tunnel in Los Feliz. All the water to the city was shut off for two weeks while Mulholland and his men waded in to repair the damage. The city and the water company put aside their financial differences

and worked together to prepare the damage. But it was just another reminder that Los Angeles could not sustain itself for long, not with a dwindling water supply. Something needed to be done. How did Birkenstocks go from a German cobbler's passion project 250 years ago to the Barbie movie today? Who created that bottle

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the Wondery app for all your true crime listening. In 1902, William Mulholland presented his first report on the state of water in Los Angeles. In three years, his system of metered water readers had helped reduce consumption and lowered their customers' bills by half. This despite a Water Department customer who had filed a restraining order against the city, claiming the meters violated the 14th Amendment by depriving him of his right to liberty and property. That case went nowhere. The city's consumption stood at 200 gallons of water per person daily. This was an improvement, Mulholland wrote, from

the last year's figure of 300 daily gallons, which had been one of the highest in the nation. But, he noted, the Los Angeles River now carried less than half the volume of water it had just nine years earlier. And thanks to a steady stream of boosterism from the city's Chamber of Commerce, the population of Los Angeles had soared to over 100,000, doubling in just a decade. With no end of eager families coming from colder Midwestern climates, Mulholland was at an impasse. There just wasn't enough water. Combined rainfall for the last two years had yielded only 13.5 inches, yet he couldn't seem to convince the city that its water supply was desperately limited.

With an aquifer that leaked groundwater in every direction, rainfall was almost impossible to store underground. Mulholland could keep building reservoirs, but they wouldn't make a difference without a constant, dependable water source. Yet, after every big rain, self-styled experts wrote editorials insisting that the water crisis was simply manufactured. But for the majority of the people in Los Angeles, the question was academic. Who could remember when it rained and when it hadn't? Certainly no one had moved to Los Angeles to think about rain. When one spring storm brought 10 inches in one day, Mulholland lamented to the water board, one of the trials of my life is to make people believe we have not had a very wet year. The city can't meet the demand with less than 14 inches.

Then, a week after he spoke, it rained again. But by the winter of 1903, less than half an inch of rain had fallen in eight months. Dry winds swept brush fires through the city, all the way to Santa Monica, reducing homes and property along the way to ash. Between the fires, the dust from lack of rain, and the wind sweeping this dust up into the air, the Chamber of Commerce warned that the tourists were being scared off. And by the next year, 1904, the situation had not improved, and in fact only gotten worse. North of the city, cattle herds in Antelope Valley were starving without anything green to graze, and nearby Lake Elizabeth had dried down to a long sheet of mud. In the hills of Los Angeles, Elysian Park pine trees were turning brown.

On January 10th, the city's clergyman called on everyone to pray for rain. It was around this time that Frederick Eaton, the former head of L.A.'s water company, had an idea. Since leaving the water company in 1886, Eaton had spent the intervening years jumping from one opportunity to the next. He'd invested in real estate developments, and then in the Pacific Electric streetcar system, which dotted Los Angeles with what would come to be known as the red cars. With his handsome, boyish good looks and well-spoken air, Eaton had been elected mayor. He'd served a two-year term and overseen the water company's

sale back to the municipality. But now he was almost 50, recently divorced, and living at the California Club on Hill Street with a woman 20 years younger. Still, Eaton was attuned to the city's water problems, just like Mulholland was, and he thought he might have found a solution. Eaton had first visited Inyo County, California in 1880 with his father. The county was 200 miles north of Los Angeles, nestled between the eastern Sierras and a forbidding desert landscape. The Owens River ran down through Inyo County, fueled with a year-round supply of runoff from the mountains. The pastureland surrounding the riverbanks was lush and verdant, and when the southland was hot and dry, the Owens River Valley was where the cattlemen drove their hungry herds.

Eaton's father even took measurements of water on all the streams as they traveled, with an eye to somehow transporting the water to his family vineyards in Pasadena. Eaton had returned to the Owens River Valley in 1892 after leaving the waterboard. But this time, he noticed something else. At an elevation of over 4,000 feet, the river's water could be transported easily down to Los Angeles at sea level using gravity alone. All he would need was a giant tunnel. Eaton spent the following years telling his theory to anyone who would listen, but no one would. Finally, he headed to the offices of the water superintendent to offer his proposal.

William Mulholland heard him out and was curious, but he wanted to get a good look himself. So in the fall of 1904, the superintendent of the water department and the former mayor of Los Angeles rented a buckboard wagon and packed a supply of beans, camping equipment, and whiskey. For the next five days, the pair traveled up and over the wooded Newhall Pass, down across the sun-baked vistas of the Mojave Desert, then ascended through the sandstone canyon of Red Rock to 4,400 feet above sea level. Just south of the town of Lone Pine, they stopped and Mulholland got his good look. What he saw was a solution to his city's water problems. At least 400 cubic feet of water flowed the Owens River every second. The plan was impressive in its simplicity. Just a river, fed from mountain runoff, but it would be enough for two million

people, let alone Los Angeles' current 200,000. And Eaton was right. Gravity would carry it all the way back to Los Angeles. Not one watt of power would be needed. Mulholland also noted that the river was dead-ending into the 73-acre Owens Lake, an inland alkaline sea. The high soda content rendered the lake useless for irrigation. All that water was just going to waste. On the way back to Los Angeles, Mulholland took measurements and sketched out diagrams. He began making plans to actualize what would have to be a steel aqueduct over 200 miles long. It would run north to south through some of the most forbidding terrain in the country. And of course, there were the residents of the Owens Valley to deal with.

They wouldn't want to just sign over the river to some far-off city. But that was not Mulholland's problem. He would leave the acquisition business up to Fred Eaton and the city of Los Angeles. Imagine it's March, 1905, and you're a rancher in Inyo County, just above the town of Independence. Times have been hard these last 10 years. You started out running 75 head on about 200 acres, but somewhere along the line, your heart fell out of it.

The money just wasn't coming in like you thought it would, and you started selling off your studs. Now it's just a couple dozen lonely beasts in yourself. For all the noise the town of Independence made about turning into a booming hub of rural commerce, it just hasn't. But today you're not in the pastures. You're meeting with a man come up from Los Angeles who wants to get himself into the cattle business. Mr. Browder? He's more fresh-faced than you remember, wearing a pair of glasses. Fred Eaton. He hands you a card. This says you're the mayor of Los Angeles? No, no, I was the mayor. Wouldn't recommend the position. This throws you a bit. Now, when we met in town, you told me you were looking to start cattle ranching. That's right. And from what I understand, it's about the same skill set.

Well, I didn't realize I'd be negotiating with a mayor of any city. You've rightly taken me by surprise. Well, that's why I came to set the record straight. I've been traveling to Inyo County for about 10 years now. Always seemed a place unto its own. I've had enough of the city, all the talk. All they do is talk. And when we met before, I didn't get the chance to

give you all my particulars. Well, you did tell me you'd have a number, and I do. The two of you walk into the yard. The sun is already down behind mountains. The number is $10 an acre. $10. You figure this city slicker is either crazy or stupid. You paid 50 cents an acre in 1885, but you keep your face neutral. That's a respectable number, but I'm going to have to think about it. I also wanted to ask you if you'd heard about the U.S. Reclamation Service moving around these parts. Sure, people talk. They want to make it into some kind of irrigation experiment. Well, I don't think they're going to, ultimately. Annexation is too expensive for the boys in Washington, or at least I think they're going

to find out that it is. So I should probably meet with them is what I'm thinking. Perhaps they've got a better offer. Mr. Bowder, I promise you they won't. The federal government doesn't usually make offers. They arrive, declare eminent domain. Would you rather Washington made money or you? You take a deep breath.

Why not get a bit crazy yourself? See how far you can push this guy. Actually, it's going to be $15 an acre. I'm only going to take your money if I can step right on a railroad train out of here. That's a lot of money, Mr. Browder. You're the mayor of Los Angeles. Nope, I was. But would $2,500 be enough to divest you from your herd as well?

Again, you can't believe it. He met your rays. Mr. Eaton, it's all yours. Authorized by the city of Los Angeles, Fred Eaton and other city agents quickly moved to scoop up the Owens River Valley properties. They bought everything and anything attached to the river or its irrigation canals. Eaton knew they had to work quickly and quietly. If word got out, there would be a panic, and the ranchers would inflate their prices beyond what the city could pay. But it wasn't the Inyo County ranchers he was worried

about. It was the Federal Reclamation Service. Created under Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, the Reclamation Service was designed as a national irrigation project that aimed to turn naturally dry areas into wet ones, and the Reclamation Service had its own eye on the Owens Valley. They thought it would be an excellent site for their research. A full year before Eaton and Mulholland took their trip up north, a Reclamation officer named Jacob Clausen took surveys and sent a glowing report to his superior, Joseph Lippincott. Have finished reconnaissance large reservoir site, Clausen wrote in the fall of 1903. All patents for dam site.

60,000 acres public, 50,000 acres private land irrigable. Clausen had found over 100,000 acres of land that was connected to water in addition to a perfect stretch of land on which a dam could be built. It would be perfect for the government's purposes. But what Clausen didn't know was that Lippincott, while contracting for the federal government, also contracted as an engineer for the city of Los Angeles, and Lippincott was a friend of Fred Eaton's. Now, over a year later, Eaton knew all the reclamation service had to do was decide to step in. They would purchase the private land and declare eminent domain on the public land, and that would crush any chance

the city had of trying to get the lands themselves. But Eaton was able to move fast. He had the full advantage of survey maps and land records and rights information already gathered by Jacob Clausen and the Reclamation Service. He knew where to look and who to ask and how much to quote. In the race for the water of Owens Valley, Eaton was going to make sure that Los Angeles would beat the federal government. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reach the age of 10 that would still a virgin.

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Listen to the Pitcairn Trials exclusively on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I'm Tristan Redman, and as a journalist, I've never believed in ghosts. But when I discovered that my wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door to where I grew up, I started wondering about the inexplicable things that happened in my childhood bedroom. When I tried to find out more, I discovered that someone who slept in my room after me, someone I'd never met, was visited by the ghost of a faceless woman. So I started digging into the murder in my wife's family, and I unearthed family secrets nobody could have imagined. Ghost Story won Best Documentary Podcast at the 2024 Ambies, and is a Best True Crime nominee at the British Podcast Awards 2024. Ghost Story is now the first ever Apple Podcast series essential. Each month,

Apple Podcast editors spotlight one series that has captivated listeners with masterful storytelling, creative excellence, and a unique creative voice and vision. To recognize Ghost Story being chosen as the first series essential, Wondery has made it ad-free for a limited time only on Apple Podcasts. If you haven't listened yet, head over to Apple Podcasts to hear for yourself. Back in Los Angeles, drought conditions had worsened. By spring of 1905, the Water Department was forced to prohibit the sprinkling of lawns, cut off water use in fountains and parks, and even attempted to restrict the number of toilet flushes allowed in private homes.

The last straw came when Mulholland ordered irrigation shutoff in the San Fernando Valley. Infuriated farmers sued the water department. Claims the drought was a hoax echoed louder when an article appeared in the Los Angeles Herald with the headline, 9 million gallons of water wasted. But this time, the headline turned out to be true. The new pumping station at the Buena Vista Reservoir had recently been finished, and around this time Mulholland noticed something odd. His numbers weren't coming out right. Water was being wasted somewhere between the station and outlets it was supposed to be feeding. Mulholland couldn't understand what was happening. The city should be getting more water, not less, and his reservoirs were starting to dip below

their usual levels. It took him over a week to discover the cause. Leaks and an outfall sewer had been enlarged by the powerful new pump, and fresh water was gushing out to sea through the old sewer line. Mulholland himself told the Los Angeles Times, using the error as an opportunity to illustrate the precarious condition of the city's water supply. The problem was fixed, but the idea of a city flushing away its own water remained indelible in the minds of many Angelenos. In March of 1905, Fred Eaton wired the city that the last land purchase was made. At Long Valley in Mono County, just above the northmost point of the Owens River,

he bought a vast track of ranch land from a cattleman named Thomas Rickey. The Long Valley property was shaped like a giant catcher's glove. It was the perfect site to build a dam just above the aqueduct. Eaton was an engineer after all. He knew the value of the site for the city, but he also saw the potential for a little bit of profit on the side. As agreed upon, he would sell all the rights he'd purchased to the city of Los Angeles at no markup. But he'd been working awfully hard these last few months, and the entire notion had been his idea anyway. So he offered the Long Valley property to the city at what he considered a fair price, nearly a half million dollars. Mulholland was apoplectic. It was not Eaton's price that angered him. It was the principle.

It was unconscionable that Eaton would hold a piece of the city's water project hostage. The Long Valley site was not necessary immediately to the city's plan, but owning it would keep the reclamation service away, along with anyone else. Already thinking towards the future, Mulholland had sketched out plans to build a 150-foot dam on the site. It would allow the city to store water year after year independent of snowfall in the mountains. He couldn't understand why Eaton had chosen this moment to throw a wrench in the works. But Eaton held firm, telling a newspaper, I simply wanted to retain the cattle which I had been compelled to take in the deals,

and mountain pasture land of no value beyond grazing purposes. But there was more to it than that. Eaton's pride and his greed had gotten the best of him. Mulholland refused to indulge him and rejected the offer. He would work around the Long Valley site. Eaton could pride and his greed had gotten the best of him. Mulholland refused to indulge him and rejected the offer. He would work around the Long Valley site. Eaton could keep it and enjoy his new future as a cattleman. By June 1905, the city's plan for Owens Valley Water was becoming one of the worst-kept secrets around. A consortium of newspapers swore a gentleman's pact

not to run the story until June 30th, but the Los Angeles Times published one day early and got the scoop of a lifetime. Titanic Project to Give a City a River trumpeted the headline. It went on saying, Options secured for 40 miles of river frontage into Inyo County. Magnificent stream to be conveyed in conduit 240 miles long. Stupendous deal closed. The paper detailed how Eaton and Mulholland

had secured the land purchases and that the aqueduct they were planning would cost $24 million to be funded by a series of bond issues voted on by the city. The enthusiasm of the Times and of its editor, Harrison Gray Otis, could be felt in every hyperbolized sentence. One front page piece crowed that

the price paid for many of the ranches is three or four times what the owners ever expected them to sell for. Everyone in the valley has money, and everyone is happy. This last assertion would not prove to be entirely true. In Inyo County, where residents discovered they'd sold their properties not to land-mad city people, but to a city itself, they became enraged. Imagine it's June 1905. It's nighttime, high in the Owens Valley. The oppressive summer air has cooled enough to carry a breeze through the windows of your new ranch house. It was your fiancé Fred Eaton's idea, moving up here from Los Angeles, and you thought it'd be an excellent way to start a new life with him, to get away from all those wagging tongues in the city. And who cares if he's 20 years older? You certainly don't.

It was exciting at first, meeting everyone in town, the other ranch wives, getting invited to bridge clubs, and Fred was busy working on his city contracts. But now, you hate to admit it, things have gotten a little stale. Same cattle, same house, same games of solitaire while Fred does business in town. Honey, you all right? You're rising from the chair just as your fiancé Fred bursts inside the house. Oh, thank God. What is it? Has anyone been by? Just Mrs. Tinsley this morning, but you need to get out a suitcase and pack yourself up. We're going to San Francisco. What's wrong? You look scared. We should leave as quick as we can. You and Fred frantically throw what you can into a pair of old heavy trunks. He won't answer any of your questions, but finally, once you've loaded the

wagon and set off into the deepening darkness, he finally responds. Please tell me what's going on. A group of ranchers cornered me at Independence this evening, just as I was leaving the land office. They read the Los Angeles newspaper. They said I bilked them, that I misrepresented the city's land purchases. When I tried to explain, they made it clear they were not interested in anything I had to say. What about the ranch? We'll come back, I swear. But will it still be there?

Fred doesn't answer. They say I sold them out, that I'm only interested in the water, and if I come back, they'll drown me in the river. At this moment, you hear something. The sound of horses, a gang of them, coming up in the distance. You take the rifle out from behind your seat and hold it across your lap. The steel feels ice cold in your hands. You tense up.

Fred tries to keep you calm. Just pretend like nothing's wrong. I'm not going to sit here and get shot, Fred. I think they just want to make sure we leave. Did you make a terrible mistake trusting your fiancé? In the wide open canyon, you close your eyes and listen to the sounds of the wagon wheels and the buggy sighing underneath the weight.

And somewhere behind, the steady hooves of a posse following you out of town. Fred Eaton and his fiancée made it to San Francisco, but it would be some time before Eaton could return to his cattle ranch. Ranchers and farmers had actually done quite well in their transactions. They'd made $1.5 million. It was the ones who hadn't sold, the ones who had put down roots and invested in the growth of their small community who felt cheated, left high and dry, certain that their land would soon become a desert. Though the purchases had been perfectly legal, it was the methods that they

thought were despicable. They suffered yet another humiliation when President Theodore Roosevelt stepped in on the side of the city. But even after its sweeping land purchases, the city's plan still could not move forward. It first needed to gain a right-of-way so that work on the aqueduct could cross federal lands. A bill was drawn up in the California State House, but Representative Sylvester Smith of Inyo County added an amendment stating that the city of Los Angeles would be able to use water from the Owens River only after the irrigation needs of the valley were met. Additionally, Los Angeles could use the water for domestic use, not irrigation. Smith knew he wouldn't be able to stop the city from drinking and bathing with Owens River water, but he could at least keep the city from turning an agricultural profit.

As with the arbitration hearings over the water company, Mulholland found himself having to testify once again, only this time his audience lived in the White House. After long meetings and deliberation, President Roosevelt would decide in favor of a city of a quarter million people over a valley of just 5,000. The interests of what Roosevelt termed the few settlers in the Owens Valley were genuine, but he concluded they must unfortunately be disregarded in view of the infinitely greater interest to be served by putting the water in Los Angeles. And for the residents of Inyo County, insult was added to injury when Roosevelt also ordered the creation of the Inyo National Forest to speed along the aqueduct right-of-way claims. The so-called forest sat on a wide swath of clear, treeless land. Outnumbered and outmatched,

the citizens of Inyo County found their interests disregarded and would have to retreat and regroup. The city might have won this battle, but the war was far from over. As 1905 drew to a close, Mulholland had begun assembling the pieces of his gargantuan creation. The city's path to water was now wide open. The aqueduct would require a system 226 miles long, from Charlie's Butte in Inyo County to the San Fernando Reservoir in Los Angeles, roughly 22 miles of unlined canal, 164 miles of concrete conduit, 12 miles of steel pipe, and 28 miles of tunnels, all for the cost of $24 million, or about $700 in today's dollars. The only thing he had left to do was build it. On the next episode of American History Tellers, Mulholland begins the multi-year undertaking of

engineering his ambitious aqueduct. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a campaign builds to discredit the entire operation, threatening his dream and the future of the city. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free

on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. Sound design by Derek Behrens. This episode is written by George Ducker. Edited by Dorian Marina. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marshall Louis. Created by Hernán López for Wondery.

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