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By Root 1412 0

into the Great Basin from the East Slope are few and generally small. The Owens River is an exception. It rises southeast of Yosemite, near a gunsight pass that allows some of the weather to come barreling through, heads westward for a while, then turns abruptly south and flows through a long valley, ten to twenty miles wide, flanked on either side by the Sierra Nevada and the White Mountains, which rise ten thousand feet from the valley floor. The valley is called the Owens Valley, and the lake into which the river empties—used to empty—was called Owens Lake. Huge, turquoise, and improbable in a desert landscape, it was the shrunken remnant of a much larger lake that formed during the Ice Ages. Due to a high evaporation rate and, for its size, a modest rate of inflow, the lake was more saline than the sea, but it supported two species of life in the quadrillions: a salt-loving fly and a tiny brine shrimp. The soup of shrimp and the smog of flies attracted millions of migratory waterfowl, a food source whose startling numbers were partially responsible for inducing some of the valley’s first visitors to remain. “The lake was alive with wild fowl,” wrote Beveridge R. Spear, an Owens Valley pioneer. “Ducks were by the square mile, millions of them. When they rose in flight, the roar of their wings ... could be heard ... ten miles away.... Occasionally, when shot down, a duck would burst open from fatness which was butter yellow.”

The greater attraction, however, was the river. When whites arrived in the 1860s, Paiute Indians who had learned irrigation from the Spanish were already diverting some of the water to raise crops. In traditional pioneer fashion, the whites trumped up some cattle-rustling charges against the Indians, which appear to have led to the murder of a white woman and a child. The pious Owens Valley citizens then murdered at least 150 Paiutes in retaliation, driving the last hundred into Owens Lake to drown. They then took over the Indians’ land, borrowed their irrigation methods, and began raising alfalfa and pasture and fruit. By 1899, they had established several ditch companies and had put some forty thousand acres under cultivation.

The huge new silver camp at Tonopah, Nevada, consumed most of what the valley grew. With prosperity, several thriving towns sprang up: Bishop, Big Pine, Lone Pine, Independence. The irrigated valley was postcard-pretty, a narrow swath of green in the middle of the high desert, with 14,495-foot Mount Whitney, the highest peak between Canada and Mexico, looming over Lone Pine and the river running through. Mark Twain came to visit, and Mary Austin, who was to become a well-known writer, came to live. But the entrance that most excited the valley people was that of the United States Reclamation Service (later renamed the Bureau of Reclamation). The Service was an unparalleled experiment in federal intervention in the nation’s economy, and was being watched so closely by skeptics in Congress that it could not afford to have any of its first projects fail. To Frederick Newell, the first Reclamation Commissioner, the Owens Valley looked like a place where he could almost be guaranteed success. The people were proven irrigation farmers—a rarity in the non-Mormon West; the soil could grow anything the climate would permit; the river was underused; and there was a good site for a reservoir. Sixty thousand additional acres were irrigable, and all of them could be gravity-fed. In early 1903, just a few months after the Service was created, a team of Reclamation engineers was already trooping around the valley, gauging streamflows and making soil surveys. Sixty thousand new acres would even make it worthwhile to run a railroad spur to Los Angeles. Los Angeles, everyone thought, was going to make the Owens Valley rich.

Fred Eaton thought differently. Eaton had been born in Los Angeles in 1856; his family had founded Pasadena. Most of the Eaton men were engineers, and when they looked around them it seemed that half of what they saw they had built themselves; it gave them an overpowering