Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown

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Copyright © 2019 by Marc Weingarten

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Set in Minion

Printed in the United States

epub isbn: 9781942600176

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Names: Weingarten, Marc, author.

Title: Thirsty : William Mulholland, California Water,

and the Real Chinatown

/ by Marc Weingarten.

Description: First Hardcover Edition. | A Vireo Book. | New York [New York] ; Los Angeles

[California] : Rare Bird Books, 2015.

Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-942600-02-2

Subjects: LCSH: Mulholland, William, 1855-1935. | Water-supply—California—Los Angeles—

History. | Water-supply engineers—California—Los Angeles—Biography. | Los Angeles

(Calif.)—History. | California—Los Angeles. | Chinese Americans—California—Los Angeles—

History. | BISAC: Biography & Autobiography | Historical.

Classification: LCC HD4464.L7 W45 2015 |

DDC 979.4/9404092—dc23

To Mike, who taught me the right way to tell a story

And to Lynn, for everything else.

Contents

Run of the River

Part 1: Backwater, 1877–1904

Promised Land

Zanja Padre

Pueblo

Rainmakers

Reclamation

The General

Enemies

A Conduit

Part 2: Cresting, 1911–1928

The Wrath of Job

The Last Stand

Collapse

I Envy The Dead

Part 3: Downstream, 1928–2008

Decline, Rebirth

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

Run of the River

Fall 1904

The trip was brutal. William Mulholland and Fred Eaton were riding across the Western desert in a buckboard, a low-slung wooden carriage attached to four wagon wheels. The buckboard was strictly utilitarian; its bumpy ride made long distances a trial on the body and mind. As a symbol of Western settlement, however, the buckboard was apposite, having been a warhorse during the exploration and subsequent taming of the northwestern territories by the earliest homesteaders. Pioneers had dragged their families across the plains on these flimsy conveyances for hundreds of miles at a time. Now Eaton and Mulholland were about to embark on a trip that might have been described as settlement in reverse—that is, if everything went according to plan.

Eaton brought along a satchel of cigars; if the wind wasn’t picking up, the two men would smoke and reminisce about their salad days as young men on the make in Los Angeles, carving out careers for themselves in a place where all was new, and anyone with initiative could pave the road smooth for themselves. The two men had known each other since they worked in the old water company together. Both were brilliant engineers, with a high degree of self-regard. Impatient, petulant, ferociously driven, Mulholland and Eaton had taken jobs with the city because they wanted to help build it. A desk was death. They were men of action who wanted to erect the armature of an emerging Los Angeles.

And in the early years of the twentieth century, water was the fossil fuel of all great American cities.

Mulholland and Eaton had decamped from Los Angeles and slowly worked their way 233 miles to arrive at a place called the Owens Valley. Their city, Los Angeles, was still a backwater, yet full of incipient energies, run by municipal leaders who desperately wanted to turn it into a world-class metropolis. But the only way to effectuate that transformation—and there was nothing in the one-hundred-plus-year history of Western settlement that would lead them to think it could even work—was to supply Los Angeles with an abundance of water from somewhere other than Los Angeles. Hundreds of miles away, in fact. And it would have to be enough water to obviate the need for anyone in Los Angeles to think about water.

It was Eaton’s idea. He had tipped off Mulholland to this weirdly verdant patch of land in the middle of the most arid of Western territories. The vegetation was fed by a river from the snowpack of the majestic Sierra Nevada mountain range. Despite alkaline deposits that turned the river’s surface chalky, the water was fresh and potable. And there was a seemingly endless supply of it; the only obstacle was figuring out how to get it from Owens Valley to Los Angeles.

As the buckboard lurched across the desert, Mulholland saw no signs of life, just a vanishing point on the horizon and the sun high in the sky. Where was Eaton taking him? The longer they drove, the more Mulholland’s optimism turned to doubt.

Finally, after three days, they came upon the Owens River by way of the old mining town of Bishop. The evening sun had scored the sky pink. For the moment, Mulholland’s faith in Eaton was restored, for here was a vast body of water, snaking through the valley floor with no impediments inhibiting its flow; it was, to Mulholland’s eye, theirs for the taking.

As Eaton and Mulholland walked along the perimeter of the Owens River, Mulholland’s mind started whirring; what would it take to bring this water to Los Angeles? Money for the project was of secondary importance. That would come, if Mulholland sold the city on this river the way he knew he could. The prospect of connecting the Owens River to Los Angeles began to excite him. Mulholland looked out at the barren land surrounding the river, and saw nothing to prevent him from building an aqueduct of conduits, pipes, and siphons that would nourish his adopted home.

Fred Eaton had other ideas. As the scion of one of the founding Anglo families of Southern California, he carried with him a sense of geographic proprietorship. His father had figured out how to tap into the water supply to create thriving orange groves in Pasadena. And, as a member of Pasadena’s elite, it was Fred Eaton’s birthright to do as he pleased with that region’s resources. Fred Eaton didn’t bring Mulholland to Owens Valley because he felt it his civic duty to do so. He was only being true to his family’s ethos of self-gain and he needed Mulholland to help him get over.

The two men didn’t take the temperature of the citizenry on this trip, or even conduct any environmental tests. What mattered most was the river, which they both drank from and decided that it was the answer.

This trip was the start of an odyssey that would find the two men collaborating on one of the great civil engineering triumphs of the early twentieth century, which slaked the thirst of a city whose influence and muscle would radiate across every other major city in the world.

But then nearly four hundred people would die in the worst man-made disaster of the early twentieth century—a calamity in which they would both play a part.

But for now, in the gloaming of a fall day in 1904, there was only the river.

Part 1: Backwater, 1877–1904

Promised Land

William Mulholland arrived on the coast of San Francisco in January 1877. He had five dollars in his pocket and a vague notion of visiting acquaintances south of the city. He was twenty-two.

How did Mulholland get here? It was less a question of desire than need. Given young Mulholland’s straitened options in his hometown, the suffocating parochialism and class-based hierarchy, it only followed that opportunity was going to be found elsewhere. As the first of his family to vault his imagination beyond the reach of the Irish Sea, there was never a question that he needed to find a means of escape.

From the start, Mulholland was in search of his main chance. And if he was going to try and make something of himself, he might as well do it in an hospitable environment. Dublin, Mulholland’s hometown, was an inkblot, dank and grimy, a town that the industrial revolution had passed by. Guinness brewed their beer there; Jameson’s distilled their whiskey there, too. It was a city of manual labor and lateral mobility. To Mulholland, it was slow death.

So he flung himself out like a slingshot toward the sea.

He had left behind an emotionally barren domestic life. Mulholland regarded his father, Hugh, a guard with the Royal British Mail, as miserable and bitter. A cautionary tale for the son, then. So William clung to his mother, Ellen, a lively and nurturing spirit who passed away when Bill was only seven. At the time of her death, she had already buried two infant daughters.

School life wasn’t much better. As a teenager, William attended the O’Connell School; he dropped out before completing his course work.

For succor, Mulholland turned toward the Irish Sea. As a child, he had read about great battles that took place right outside his window. He would often cut school and hang out on the docks to listen to the sailors spin their maritime apocrypha. Now young William would try to write his own chapter in one of those stories.

Which is why he found himself on the west coast of California in 1877. But he took a circuitous route.

Mulholland quickly discovered that he was an adrenaline junkie, but that hard work was his true north. At eighteen, William joined the British Merchant Navy to sail on its grand, three-masted merchant ship Gleniffer. The wages were penurious: about ten dollars week. But that was enough for Mulholland to get by, and the education to be found onboard was invaluable. Mulholland learned how to read the ocean like he read his beloved history books. The weather became a living thing to him, and he studied meteorological patterns and the cycles of the sun and the moon. It was the start of his life as an autodidact of extraordinary reach and range.

Disembarking from Gleniffer in the fall of 1874, Mulholland landed in New York City (he marveled at the tall buildings, but also shirked from them) and from there moved on to Michigan, where the young seaman had heard tales of a thriving logging industry that needed young men with strong backs. Mulholland toiled on fishing boats in the Great Lakes in the summer, then moved onto the lumber camps in winter, working as a sawyer under frequently punishing conditions—subzero temperatures that numbed Mulholland’s hands as he sawed tree limbs into logs.

A logging accident put Mulholland in the hospital during his tenure in Michigan. Fearing amputation from an erysipelas infection in his leg, Mulholland slipped the nurses and made his way to Cincinnati. Mercifully, his infection eventually healed. As his leg got better, so the pace of Mulholland’s life quickened, as he moved from city to city for other lumber jobs and new adventures.

Mulholland had to keep moving forward—it was either that or the aimless nomadic life that had befallen those roughnecks he met on the Dublin docks. Mulholland picked up work where he could. He even hooked up with some gypsies for a spell and traveled around the Midwest fixing people’s clocks and lathing scissors and knives. He was inching west, but in a wayward fashion.

Arriving in Philadelphia, Mulholland found his uncle, Richard Deakers, who owned a dry goods store. Mulholland was welcomed into a well-ordered Christian household run with brisk efficiency by Deakers’s wife, Catherine. It was the placid domestic hearth that had eluded him at home, and he reveled in it.

Deakers’s dry goods job was the most remunerative work yet, if somewhat dull. Mulholland found, however, that he was quite good at it, and earned somewhat of a business reputation in the county. William’s younger brother Hugh Jr. eventually joined him, and the two went into business together. But Mulholland had no desire to be a small-business owner. Men of action didn’t run dry goods stores.

Tuberculosis was creeping into the Deakers residence. Richard’s two young children were wheezing and coughing up sputum striated with blood. Catherine’s brothers were ranchers in San Diego, and the best thing for TB was temperate weather. It was a wrenching decision to leave Pittsburgh for California, but Richard Deakers’s options were few and time was running out. The family shipped west.

William and Hugh Mulholland Jr. decided to cast their lot with the Deakers; they had little else holding them down in Pennsylvania. Lacking the money for proper passage, they would travel in steerage as stowaways.

Sneaking onto the Crescent City schooner in New York harbor on December 9, 1876, William and Hugh Jr. made it to Colón, Panama, before they were caught and left to fend for themselves. Lacking the twenty-five-dollar fee for train fare to Balboa, Panama, William and Hugh Jr. walked there instead—for forty-seven miles. It was to be a kind of crucible for Mulholland—if he didn’t make it through, then he would be flung back toward Dublin, back into a life with no open doors.

The dangers inherent in traversing the Isthmus of Panama were manifold in the late eighteen hundreds. The elevation of the terrain was both monotonously flat and dangerously steep; Mulholland had to hike up mountains wearing flat-soled shoes. The jungle was not only thick with vegetation but suffused with a kind of brackish sludge; Mulholland had to wade through muck up to his thighs in some places. And the heat was overwhelming, relieved only by great squalls that materialized at a moment’s notice, which meant Mulholland, when he wasn’t on the verge of heat prostration, was getting drenched to the bone. It felt like negotiating quicksand. Disease-bearing insects were omnipresent. Even if Mulholland made it through the jungle unscathed, there was also the ever-present danger of dysentery, cholera, and Chagres fever, a sandfly-borne disease characterized by vomiting, muscle pain, weakness, and crashing headaches.

By the time Mulholland and his brother made it to the port at Colón, William was so depleted that he couldn’t summon the strength to take a drink. But then Hugh and William cast their eyes upon the Pacific Ocean, and knew that the arduous trek had been worth it. Mulholland noted years later that I would walk that far today to make twenty-five dollars.

Eventually, the Mulhollands made their way to Balboa, the port city for ships heading west. From Balboa, Mulholland found work on a ship headed to Acapulco, but first it would make a stop in San Francisco. This arrangement worked well for the young Mulholland; from San Francisco, he could work his way south to Los Angeles and reconnect with the Deakers for steady employment. He would have to part ways with his brother Hugh, who decided to stay in Panama for the time being. The two brothers wouldn’t see each other for many years.

Mulholland’s ship sailed through the San Francisco Bay in February 1877. He was duly impressed with San Francisco and even found the time to make a brief visit to the University of California at Berkeley, which was under construction. It was the closest Mulholland would ever get to an institute of higher learning in the States, though Berkeley would confer an honorary degree to Mulholland years later.

Mulholland was taken by San Francisco, but he was determined to make it down to Southern California. In order to do so, he would have to travel through the San Joaquin Valley, in the state’s midsection. After eight days, Mulholland found himself in Bakersfield, a city in the Central Valley roughly two hundred miles from Los Angeles. From Bakersfield, Mulholland moved south via buckboard, then arrived in Los Angeles, exhausted but renewed by this alien, yet agreeable, new city.

It was as if Mulholland had passed over from L. Frank Baum’s dreary Kansas into the land of Oz. There was abundant vegetation, regal mountain ranges, a pristine shoreline: an empyrean, a wonderland. Some part of Los Angeles’s efflorescence connected Mulholland to his ancestral roots in Dublin, but it was bright and sunny here, not rainy and shrouded by clouds. He fell in love with it instantly. It was the most attractive town I had ever seen, he recalled years later. For the first time in his life, Mulholland would sit still and acclimate himself to his surroundings. He would make Los Angeles his home for the rest of his life.

William Mulholland had arrived in a city that had been jostled by overlapping waves of invasion, settlement, and retreat. Los Angeles was a vast region in terms of landmass, but the total population in 1881 was only eleven thousand. In many respects, Los Angeles was an outlier of the West, lawless and unruly. But William didn’t know any of this, at least not yet.

In some respects, Mulholland’s initial impressions were the observations of a rube. By any objective measure, Los Angeles was primitive—at least the developed, urbanized part of the city that had grown up around the Los Angeles River. In fact, Los Angeles was two cities: the rural countryside that Mulholland admired, and the grimy commercial core that was bisected by the river.

But to call Los Angeles a city at all in the 1870s was a misnomer. It was still in its troubled infancy, jostling its way into modernity. It was barely a city at all, having been formally incorporated into the United States in 1847, less than thirty years prior to Mulholland’s arrival.

Los Angeles was unmanageable for a start, lacking basic services and the resources to function properly. The sidewalks were just packed dirt, the curbs made of wooden boards. The dust that built up on the ungraded roads in town was so thick it climbed up to a man’s ankles. Wind was a constant terror. When it rained, the streets turned to slurry and were impossible to navigate. On the city’s busy commercial streets, pedestrians had to negotiate a riot of merchant stands, bootblacks, fruit hawkers, and patent-remedy hucksters. There was refuse, animals, and putrescence everywhere. Packs of mongrel dogs roamed the town like mangy sentries. If they became too much trouble or nipped at too many heels, they were either shot at or poisoned with strychnine.

And yet, Mulholland would always profess that his romance with Los Angeles began right on that first day, when he pulled into town from Bakersfield.

It was the most attractive town I had ever seen, he recalled years later. The people were hospitable. There was plenty to do and a fair compensation offered for whatever you did. In fact, the country had the same attraction for me that it had for the Indians who originally chose this spot as their place to live.

Navigating his way through the streets of the main business district, Mulholland would have seen signs of industry. There were low-slung storefronts similar to the dry goods store he left behind in Pennsylvania, as well as warehouses full of hay and grain; wheat was the predominant crop being grown by farmers at the time. At the end of the road was the International Savings and Exchange Bank—banks and hotels being the tallest structures in the city. But elsewhere, radiating outward from the town center, he would have observed the other Los Angeles—groves of oranges, acorns, currants, and blackberries, and fields of gillyflower, jessamine, and tuberose. The groves might have looked forlorn to him, as well as the walnut vineyards, which had just been pruned two months earlier. But it was more color than he had ever witnessed in Dublin.

The most conspicuous landmarks in the city were the various blocks, brick buildings where multiple businesses might set up shop, and around which other, smaller establishments clustered. Temple block was the most prominent of these zones. There was also Downey block, where a courthouse stood. On Main and Third, a brewery was housed in a two-story brick building, while another brick structure with a grocery store, assembly hall, and dancing hall could be found on the east side of the street. Main Street from the Plaza to Temple block was the place where most business transactions took place; beyond that it was adobe houses for the most part, inhabited by Mexican families who worked for penurious wages.

Moving north on Main Street toward Los Angeles Plaza, Mulholland would have seen the Pico House, a three-story hotel built in the Italianate style under the supervision of former Mexican governor of Alta Los Angeles, Pio Pico (it was known as the National Hotel at the time.) Crossing the road onto Los Angeles Street, there were a couple of dry goods stores, which furnished supplies for freighters. There was also John Goller’s blacksmith, wagon, and gun shop, one of the busier establishments in town.

There was one of virtually every type of business to be found. A dentist named J. C. Crawford had an office on Temple Street. There was a wine and brandy merchant called Vache Bros., which had a busy sample room in the back. Nordlinger’s jewelry store, Harper hardware store, the Workman brothers saddlery—Mulholland marveled at the variety of goods for sale in such a small business district.

Vestiges of the city’s Spanish and Mexican past were subtle yet present if Mulholland knew where to look. On the west side of the central plaza was a church that was built during Mexican rule bearing the name Nuestra Señora, Reina de Los Angeles, the full title of the city when it was christened by the Spanish. The church served as the gateway to Sonoratown, a Mexican enclave where families lived in whitewashed adobe houses with dirt floors. This was perhaps a none-too-subtle reminder that, despite its incipient polyglot flavor, Los Angeles was very much segregated along ethnic lines.

If Mulholland had made his way to the cross street below the Plaza church to a tiny hundred-foot-long block extending from Main to New High Street, he would have found a two-story building tucked away, with imposing windows running the length of the ground floor. These were the offices of Prudent Beaudry, a man who had made his fortune developing the hilly land northwest of the city center, a forbidding region that had no one else had dared to try and develop. In a few short years, Mulholland would be working for Beaudry. But at the moment, he was just a tourist looking for sustenance work.

Los Angeles was still in many ways a provincial town—Queen of the Cow Counties, as one wag put it. The city’s settlement came in fits and starts, with each new wave of conquering migrants imposing its own rituals and rules of law. Spain established dominion from the Native American population in 1769 when a Franciscan missionary named Juan Crespi landed on its shores and immediately envisioned the region’s potential as a large Catholic settlement. The first mission was built in 1771 by a Franciscan friar named Junipero Serra. Gabrielino Indians who had settled the land hundreds of years earlier were