Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [36]
They came by ship, they came by wagon, they came by horse. They came on foot, dragging everything they could in a handcart, but the real hordes came by train. In 1885, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad linked Los Angeles directly with Kansas City, precipitating a fare war with the Southern Pacific. Within a year, the cost of passage from Chicago had dropped from $100 to $25. During brief periods of mad competition, you could cross two-thirds of the continent for a dollar. If you were asthmatic, tubercular, arthritic, restless, ambitious, or lazy—categories that pretty well accounted for Los Angeles’ first flood of arrivals—the fares were too cheap to pass up. Out came Dakota farmers who despaired at the meager profits they made growing wheat. You could grow oranges. Out came Civil War veterans looking for an easy life, failures looking for another chance, and the usual boom-town complement of the slick, the sharp, and the ruthless.
The first boom began in the early 1880s and culminated in 1889, when the town transacted $100 million worth of real estate—in today’s economy, a $2 billion year in Idaho Falls. Fraud was epic. Hundreds of unseen, paid-for lots were situated in the bed of the Los Angeles River, or up the nine-thousand-foot summits of the San Gabriel Range. The boom was, predictably, short-lived. In 1889, a bank president, a newspaper publisher, and the town’s most popular minister all fled to Mexico to spare themselves jail terms, and a dozen or more victims took their own lives. By 1892, the population had dropped by almost one-half, but the bust was followed quickly by an oil boom, and enough fortunes were being made (the original Beverly Hillbillies were from Beverly Hills, then a patch of jackrabbit scrub overlying an oil basin) to pack the arriving trains again. Los Angeles soon drew close to San Francisco in population and was crowing with glee. “The ‘busting of the boom’ became but a little eddy in the great stream,” enthused the Los Angeles Times, “the intermission of one heartbeat in the life of ... the most charming land on the footstool of the Most High ... the most beautiful city inhabited by the human family.” Only one thing stood in the way of what looked as if it might become the most startling rise to prominence of any city in history—the scarcity of water.
The motives that brought Harrison Gray Otis, Harry Chandler, and William Mulholland to Los Angeles were the same that would eventually bring millions there. Otis came because he had been an incontrovertible, if not quite an ignominious, failure. He was born in Marietta, Ohio, and as a young man held a series of unspectacular jobs—a clerk for the Ohio legislature, a foreman at a printing plant, an editor of a veterans’ magazine. His one early taste of glory came during the Civil War, in which he fought on the Union side, acquired several wounds and decorations, and ultimately rose to the rank of captain. Captain Harrison Gray Otis. He liked the title well enough to think himself deserving of a sinecure, and after the war he drifted out to California in search of one. What he got was an appointment as government agent on the Seal Islands, some frigid, treeless, wind-blasted humps of rock in the Bering Sea. His chief duty there was to prevent the poaching of walrus and seals, an assignment that suited Otis better than he knew, since he bore an odd resemblance to the former and had a disposition to match. He was a large blubbery man with an intransigent scowl, an Otto von Bismarck mustache and a goatee, and a chronic inability to communicate in tones quieter than a yell, whether he was debating the American role in the Pacific or telling someone