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By Root 1517 0

first. Within days, the Tribune began to disappear mysteriously from people’s doorsteps, and its delivery boys simultaneously contracted a contagion. Meanwhile, new subscribers began to flock, like moths scenting pheromones, to the Times. Boyce was broken within months. Before Otis had much chance to gloat, however, he learned that the defunct Tribune’s printing plant had secretly acquired a new owner, whose name was Harry Chandler, and that the tactics that they had used together against Boyce could just as easily be turned against the Times. Otis, who bore lifelong grudges over provocations infinitely smaller than this, was realistic enough to know when he was had. Besides, this mild-appearing young man was the embodiment of every quality he admired. As a result, the Times acquired a new circulation manager and guiding light, whose name was Harry Chandler, and in 1894 Harry Chandler acquired a new father-in-law, whose name was Harrison Gray Otis.

William Mulholland came to Los Angeles more or less for the hell of it. He was born in 1855 in Dublin, Ireland, where his father was a postal clerk. At fifteen, he signed on as an apprentice seaman aboard a merchant ship that carried him back and forth along the Atlantic trade routes. By 1874 he had had enough, and spent a couple of years hacking about the lumber camps in Michigan and the dry-goods business in Pittsburgh, where his uncle owned a store. It was in Pittsburgh that Mulholland first read about California. He had just enough money to get to Panama by ship, and after landing in Colón, he traversed the isthmus on foot and worked his way north aboard another ship, arriving in San Francisco in the summer of 1877. Being back on a ship had renewed Mulholland’s taste for the sea, and, after a brief failure at prospecting in Arizona—where he also fought Apaches for pay—he decided to ship out at San Pedro, the port nearest Los Angeles. He had ten dollars to his name. Anxious to make a little extra money, he joined a well-drilling crew. “We were down about six hundred feet when we struck a tree. A little further we got fossil remains. These things fired my curiosity. I wanted to know how they got there, so I got hold of Joseph Le Conte’s book on the geology of the country. Right there I decided to become an engineer.”

In his official photograph for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which was taken when he was nearly fifty, Mulholland still looks young. He is wearing a short-brimmed dark fedora and a dark pinstripe suit; a luxuriant silk cravat circumnavigates a shirt collar that appears to be made of titanium; from a thick, bushy mustache sprouts a lit cigar. The face is supremely Irish: belligerence in repose, a seductive churlish charm. Once, in court, Mulholland was asked what his qualifications were to run the most far-flung urban water system in the world, and he replied, “Well, I went to school in Ireland when I was a boy, learned the Three R’s and the Ten Commandments—most of them—made a pilgrimage to the Blarney Stone, received my father’s blessing, and here I am.” He began his engineering career in 1878 as a ditch-tender for the city’s private water company, clearing weeds, stones, and brush out of a canal that ran by his house. One day Mulholland was approached by a man in a carriage who demanded to know his name and what he was doing. Mulholland stepped out of his ditch and told the man that he was doing his goddamned job and that his name was immaterial to the quality of his goddamned work. The man, it turned out, was the president of the water company. Learning this, Mulholland went to the company office to collect his pay before being fired. Instead, he was promoted.

The Sierra Nevada blocks most of the weather fronts moving across California from the Pacific, so that a place on the western slope of the range may receive eighty inches of precipitation in a year, while a place on the east slope, fifty miles away, may receive ten inches or less. The rivers draining into the Pacific from the West Slope are many and substantial, while those emptying