Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [44]
Wilfred’s suspicions that Los Angeles was engineering a water grab had begun to simmer when word got around that Fred Eaton, the would-be cattle rancher, was offering some astonishingly generous sums for land with good water rights. There were stories that Eaton would make an offer that already seemed generous, and, if a landowner gambled and tried to raise him, Eaton would readily meet his terms. It was hard for Wilfred to nail any of this down, because no one wanted to let the Wattersons know that he was thinking of selling out—not after they had loaned money with such abandon up and down the valley—but the stories were enough to make Wilfred skeptical about Eaton’s true intentions. Was he rich enough to pay those prices? Where did he get the money?
Watterson’s suspicions became intensely aroused one day in the early summer of 1905 when an unidentified young man arrived in the valley, went directly to the Inyo Bank, and displayed a written order from Fred Eaton to pick up a parcel in a safe deposit box. As soon as he had it in his hand, the young man left with unseemly haste and stalked down the street in the direction of the post office. Watterson sprang up from his desk and asked the teller who the man was. He was Harry Lelande, the Los Angeles city clerk—the official legally charged with handling any transactions for the city that involved transfers of water or land.
Watterson burst out the door and ran down the street in the direction in which Lelande had disappeared. He found him across the street from the post office.
Watterson ambled up to Lelande, accosted him in his disarming manner, and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Lelande, but there’s a small formality we forgot to carry out at the bank.”
Lelande looked perplexed. Watterson asked him to follow him back to the bank.
Once they were safely inside the president’s office, Watterson offered the clerk a seat and some coffee, then walked casually to the door and locked it. “We want the deed back,” he said.
Lelande looked stricken. “What deed do you mean?” he asked.
“The deed by which your city is going to try to rape this valley,” Watterson answered.
“I haven’t any idea what you’re talking about.”
“Maybe this will help,” said Watterson. He opened his desk drawer, removed a revolver, and put it on top of the desk.
Lelande’s mouth opened. “I can’t give you something I don’t have,” he begged.
Watterson stood up and hovered menacingly over the clerk. “Take off your coat and trousers,” he said.
Lelande, badly frightened, obliged.
Watterson turned all of his pockets inside out and found nothing. He ordered Lelande to get dressed and take him to his room at the Hotel Bishop.
“Eaton’s been buying land in an underhanded way to secure water for the city of Los Angeles, hasn’t he?” Watterson said to Lelande on the way over. He was inventing the theory as he walked, but Lelande’s agonized expression told him he was right. “You’ve paid high prices not because you’re dumb but because you’re smart. You’re masquerading as investors and all you’re going to invest in is our ruin.”
Lelande kept insisting that he didn’t know what Watterson was talking about. At the hotel, Watterson nearly tore apart his room, but found none of the documents Lelande had extracted from Eaton’s box. It was obvious that Lelande had been so fearful of being discovered that he had immediately run to the post office and mailed the deed. Without the document, Watterson had nothing to go on but his hunches, and he was forced to let Lelande go. But, his temper notwithstanding, he knew he would have had to let him go anyway; the clerk had done nothing against the law. Neither, from what he knew, had Eaton. Was it possible, Watterson asked himself, that a distant city could destroy the valley he and his family had worked so hard and gambled so recklessly to build up, and never step outside the law?
Meanwhile, the $2,500 contract accepted by Joseph Lippincott from