Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [46]
Los Angeles now had most of what it needed, but Mulholland still wanted some additional water rights in order to kill the Reclamation project once and for all. Within hours of receiving Eaton’s telegram, he was frantically organizing an expedition of prominent Los Angeleans to the Owens Valley, using the pretext that they were investors interested in developing a resort. The group included Mayor Owen McAleer and two prominent members of the water commission. For them to see the river firsthand was crucial, Mulholland reasoned, because he and Eaton would need more money to buy the last water rights they wanted, and the city could not legally appropriate money toward a project that hadn’t even been described, let alone authorized. A group such as this could easily free up some money in the Los Angeles business community if they fathomed how much water there was.
It went exactly as planned. The group arrived in the valley on the cusp of spring, when even small tributaries of the Owens River were overflowing; days after they returned, Eaton and Mulholland had all the money they needed. They requisitioned an automobile and raced off to the valley by the shortest route, across the Mojave Desert—probably the first time anyone crossed it by car. After a week of frantic, furtive buying, the two men returned. “The last spike has been driven,” Mulholland announced to the assembled water commissioners. “The options are all secured.”
Like all the other newspaper publishers in the city, Harrison Gray Otis had been operating under a self-imposed gag rule. Although the publishers knew what was going on, not a word of Mulholland and Eaton’s stealthy grab of water options had appeared in the papers. However, on July 29, the same day the Reclamation panel reached its verdict, Otis could no longer contain himself. Under a headline that read, “Titanic Project to Give the City a River,” the whole unauthorized story spilled out in the Los Angeles Times.
Otis seemed to take particular satisfaction in the way Fred Eaton had hoodwinked the greedy but guileless rubes in the Owens Valley. “A number of the unsuspecting ranchers have regarded the appearance of Mr. Eaton in the valley as a visitation of Providence,” the Times chortled. “In the eyes of the ranchers he was land mad. When they advanced the price of their holdings a few hundred dollars and he stood the raise, their cup of joy fairly overflowed.... The farmer folk in the Owens River Valley think that he has gone daffy on stock raising. To them he is a millionaire with a fad.” The paper even admitted that the town of Independence, whose neighboring ranchers had been made offers they couldn’t refuse, was faced with financial ruin, but it refused to let such a fact spoil its enjoyment of a good joke. The paper also recalled in excruciating detail Joseph Lippincott’s career as a double agent, apparently thinking it was doing him a favor. “In the consummation of the great project that is to supply Los Angeles with sufficient water for all time, great credit is given to J. B. Lippincott,” it said. “Without Mr. Lippincott’s interest and cooperation, it is declared that the plan never would have gone through.... Guided by the spirit of the Reclamation Act ... he recognized the fact that the Owens River water would fulfill a greater mission in Los Angeles than if it were to be spread over acres of desert land.... Any other government engineer, a nonresident of Los Angeles and not familiar with the needs of this section, undoubtedly would have gone ahead with nothing more than the mere reclamation of the arid lands in view” (emphasis added). It was praise that was to damn Lippincott for the rest of his life.
There was nothing quite as revealing in the Times’s story, however, as its very lead sentence: “The cable that has held the San Fernando Valley vassal for ten centuries to the arid demon,” it gushed in a spasm of metaphorical excess, “is about to be severed by the magic scimitar of modern engineering skill.”
There was something very strange about that sentence. All along, the Owens