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CHAPTER TWO: The Red Queen
The story of how Los Angeles went to the Owens Valley for water has been told now and then, though not too accurately. The movie Chinatown, which came out in the mid-1970s, is a great film that may be responsible for misinforming a lot of people who consider it completely factual. (Oddly, Mulwray, the character whose name is a play on “Mulholland,” comes across as a hero in the movie—and is murdered for his honesty—so the film may actually have polished Mulholland’s reputation, which it probably did not intend to do.)
The most thorough and believable account, by far, of the whole Owens Valley—Los Angeles episode is William Kahrl’s Water and Power, which was not published until 1982. Kahrl’s prodigious research shows in the text. Remi Nadeau’s The Water Seekers is considerably less exhaustive than Kahrl’s book and is biased fairly heavily, in the end, in favor of Los Angeles. Nonetheless, it does contain some good anecdotal material, which I used in the chapter.
For a critical appraisal of Harrison Gray Otis, Harry Chandler, and the Los Angeles Times (the old Times, not the unrecognizably superior newspaper published by the third-generation Chandler, Otis), William Bonelli’s Billion Dollar Blackjack is recommended. David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be is also very good, though it deals more with the post-Otis newspaper. Anyone really interested in the mentality of the Los Angeles power structure at the turn of the century should peruse some old issues of the paper on microfilm; though more temperamental than most of his peers, Otis was no aberration.
Robert Matson