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By Root 1514 0

sense of pride-in-place. Fred had gone into hydrologic engineering, which is to say that he pretty much taught it to himself, and by the time he was twenty-seven, he was superintendent of the Los Angeles City Water Company. As San Francisco had bloomed into pseudo-Parisian splendor, Fred Eaton had chafed. When Los Angeles finally began to take on the appearance of a place with a future, he had been intensely proud. But he was one of the few people who understood that this whole promising future was an illusion. With artesian pressure still lifting fountainheads of water eight feet into the air, no one believed that someday the basin would run out of water. Few understood that the occasional big floods in the Los Angeles River were testimony to the absence of rain: that the basin was normally so dry there wasn’t enough ground cover to hold the rain when it fell. The annual flow of the Los Angeles River (that which ran aboveground) represented only a fifth of 1 percent of the runoff of the state, and because of the pumping the flow was dropping fast, from a hundred cubic feet per second in the 1880s to forty-five cfs in 1902. If growth continued, the population and the water would fall hopelessly out of balance. Everyone was living off tens of thousands of years of accumulated groundwater, like a spendthrift heir squandering his wealth. No one knew how much groundwater lay beneath the basin or how long it could be expected to last, but it would be insane to build the region’s future on it.

There was no other source of water nearby. Deserts lay on three sides of the basin, an ocean on the fourth. The nearest large rivers were the Colorado and the Kern, but to divert them out of their canyons to Los Angeles would require pumping lifts of thousands of feet—an impossibility at the time. It would also require a Herculean amount of energy.

But there was, 250 miles away, the Owens River. It might not be quite sufficient for the huge metropolis forming in Eaton’s imagination, but it was large enough; there was water for at least a million people. Indeed, Eaton was one of the few Los Angeleans who knew the river even existed. Its distance from Los Angeles was staggering, but its remoteness was overshadowed by one majestically significant fact: Owens Lake, the terminus of the river, sat at an elevation of about four thousand feet. Los Angeles was a few feet above sea level. The water, carried in pressure aqueducts and siphons, could arrive under its own power. Not one watt of pumping energy would be required. The only drawback was that the city might have to take the water by theft.

During their years together at the Los Angeles City Water Company, Fred Eaton and Bill Mulholland became good friends, thriving on each other’s differences. Eaton was a western patrician, smooth and diffident; Mulholland an Irish immigrant with a musician’s repertoire of ribald stories and a temperament like a bear’s. Eaton thought so much of Mulholland that he groomed him to be his successor, and when Eaton left the company in 1886 to pursue a career in politics and seek his fortune, Mulholland was named superintendent. In the years that followed, Fred Eaton would become messianic about the water shortage he saw approaching. The only answer, he told Mulholland, was to get the Owens River. At first, Mulholland found the idea preposterous: going 250 miles for water was out of the question, and Mulholland didn’t much believe in surface-water development anyway. Damming rivers meant forming reservoirs, and in the heat and dryness of California, reservoirs would evaporate huge quantities of water. It made more sense to slow down the rainfall as it returned to the ocean and force more of it into the aquifer. Mulholland preached soil and forest conservation thirty years before its time. He wanted to seed the whole basin, and when he said that the deforestation of the mountainsides would reduce the basin’s water supply, everyone thought he was slightly nuts. He had his men filling gullies and installing infiltration galleries and checkdams all over the place.