Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [35]
Los Angeles, meanwhile, remained a torpid, suppurating, stunted little slum. It was too far from the gold fields to receive many fortune seekers on their way in or to detach them from their fortunes on the way out. It sat forlornly in the middle of an arid coastal basin, lacking both a port and a railroad. During most of the year, its water source, the Los Angeles River, was a smallish creek in a large bed; during the few winter weeks when it was not—when supersaturated tropical weather fronts crashed into the mountains ringing the basin—the bed could not begin to contain it, and the river floated neighborhoods out to sea. (For many years, Santa Anita Canyon, near Pasadena, held the United States record for the greatest rainfall in a twenty-four-hour period, but it may be more significant to state that the twenty-six inches that fell in a day were nearly twice the amount of precipitation that Los Angeles normally receives in a year.) Had humans never settled in Los Angeles, evolution, left to its own devices, might have created in a million more years the ideal creature for the habitat: a camel with gills.
The Spanish had actually settled Los Angeles long before they ever saw the Golden Gate. It was more convenient to Mexico and, from an irrigation farmer’s point of view, it was a more promising place to live. By 1848, the town had a population of sixteen hundred, half Spanish and half Indian, with a small sprinkling of Yankees, and was twice the size of San Francisco. A decade later, however, San Francisco had grown ten times as large as Los Angeles. By the end of the Civil War, when San Francisco was the Babylon of the American frontier, Los Angeles was a filthy pueblo of thirteen thousand, a beach for human flotsam washed across the continent on the blood tide of the war. One of the town’s early pioneers, a farm boy whose family had emigrated from Iowa, described it as a “vile little dump ... debauched ... degenerate ... vicious.”
If anything could be said to have saved Los Angeles it was its reputation as a haven from persecution, a place where one could lose oneself. Since the ranks of the persecuted include those who are too virtuous for their fellow citizens, as well as those who are not virtuous enough, sooner or later the city was bound to attract the victims of mobocracy. And the most persecuted among the virtuous in nineteenth-century America were, besides peaceful Indians and runaway slaves and Mennonites and Quakers, the members of the Mormon faith.
After fleeing Illinois for Utah, the Mormons had always been obsessed with finding escape routes to the sea. The first irrigation canals were still being dug beside the Wasatch Range when Brigham Young dispatched a party of his most loyal disciples, in 1851, to follow Jedediah Smith’s old route to the coast. When they crossed the San Bernardino Mountains, they found themselves in a huge arid basin that reminded them of home and was only a day or two from the sea. The streams were less reliable than those in Utah—the southern mountains received a scantier snowpack that never lasted halfway through the summer—but the San Bernardinos got decent winter rain, and artesian wells below them flowed like geysers. With money earned by selling food and supplies at usurious prices to adventurers bound through Utah for the gold fields, the Mormons purchased a huge chunk of land from an old Spanish rancho. The soil was good, the climate was ideal, and no one was better at irrigation farming than Mormons. Before long they were supplying much of the basin with food. In 1857, the U.S. Cavalry marched on Utah and Brigham Young ordered all distant settlements abandoned, but the Mormons’ achievement had left its mark. A Presbyterian colony was soon established nearby, then a Quaker colony, then an ethnic colony of Germans. In this freakish climate—semitropical but dry, ocean-cooled but lavishly sunny—you could grow almost anything. Corn and cabbages sprouted next to oranges, avocados, artichokes, and dates. The capitalists of San Francisco did not remain oblivious;