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By 1900, Los Angeles’ population had gone over 100,000; it doubled again within four years. During the same period, the city experienced its first severe drought. Even with lawn watering prohibited and park ponds left unfilled, the artesian pressure, as Eaton had predicted, began to drop. Gushes became gurgles, then dried up. Pumps were frantically installed. By 1904, the pressure was low enough to prompt Mulholland to begin shutting irrigation wells in the San Fernando Valley, which lay across the Hollywood Hills and fed both the aquifer and the river. The farmers were furious, and Mulholland began spending a lot of time in court. The Los Angeles City Water Company was eventually taken over by the city, and Mulholland was retained in command. (The city didn’t have much choice in the matter. Mulholland was such a seat-of-the-pants engineer that the plan of the entire water system resided mainly in his head; the most elemental schematics and blueprints did not exist.) In late 1904, the newly created Los Angeles Department of Water and Power issued its first public report. “The time has come,” it said, “when we shall have to supplement the supply from some other source.” With that simple statement William Mulholland was about to become a modern Moses. But instead of leading his people through the waters to the promised land, he would cleave the desert and lead the promised waters to them.

There is a widely held view that Los Angeles simply went out to the Owens Valley and stole its water. In a technical sense, that isn’t quite true. Everything the city did was legal (though its chief collaborator, the U.S. Forest Service, did indeed violate the law). Whether one can justify what the city did, however, is another story. Los Angeles employed chicanery, subterfuge, spies, bribery, a campaign of divide-and-conquer, and a strategy of lies to get the water it needed. In the end, it milked the valley bone-dry, impoverishing it, while the water made a number of prominent Los Angeleans very, very rich. There are those who would argue that if all of this was legal, then something is the matter with the law.

It could never have happened, perhaps, had the ingenuous citizens of the Owens Valley paid more attention to a small news item that appeared in the Inyo Register, the valley’s largest newspaper, on September 29, 1904. The item began: “Fred Eaton, ex-mayor of Los Angeles, and Fred [sic] Mulholland, who is connected with the water system of that city, arrived a few days ago and went up to the site of the proposed government dam on the [Owens] River.” The person who took them around, the story continued, was Joseph Lippincott, the regional engineer for the Reclamation Service. It wasn’t so much this small piece of news that should have aroused the valley’s suspicions. It was the fact that Lippincott had already taken Eaton around the valley twice before.

The valley had no particular reason to distrust J. B. Lippincott, although a search into his background would have dredged up a revelation or two. As a young man out of engineering school, he had joined John Wesley Powell’s Irrigation Survey, the first abortive attempt to launch a federal reclamation program in the West, but had lost his job soon thereafter when Congress denied Powell funding. Embittered by the experience, Lippincott migrated to Los Angeles, where, by the mid-1890s, he had built up a lucrative practice as a consulting engineer. In 1902, when the Reclamation Service was finally created, its first commissioner, Frederick Newell, immediately thought of Lippincott as the person to launch its California program. He had a good reputation, and he understood irrigation—a science few engineers were familiar with. The post, however, meant a substantial cut in salary, and Lippincott insisted on being allowed to maintain a part-time engineering practice on the side. Newell and his deputy, Arthur Powell Davis (who was John Wesley Powell’s nephew), were a little wary; in a fast-growing region with little water,