Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [51]
Its front page would have shrieked in poster type about “The Examiner’s solution to the water problem,” and the public would have been deafened with yawp about how the Examiner “discovered Owens River,” laid out plans to bring the water to Los Angeles and showed the engineers how to build the aqueduct. The line would have been dubbed, “The Great Hearst Aqueduct,” or “The Examiner Pipe-line,” and Loewenthal the Impossible would have been the Moses of Los Angeles, who smote the rock of Mount Whitney with the rod of his egotism and caused the water to flow abundantly. Deprived of the opportunity for mendacious self-glorification ... the foolish freak vents its impotent rage in snarling under its breath.... The insane desire of the Examiner to discredit certain citizens of Los Angeles has at last led it into the open as a vicious enemy of the city’s welfare, its mask of hypocrisy dropped and its convulsed features revealed.
In the end, though, the broadsides between the rival papers were all sound and fury, signifying not much. Ever since their foremost minister had fled prosecution for land fraud, the citizens of Los Angeles had grown accustomed to scandal, and the city’s temperament was quite comfortable with graft. Henry Loewenthal would later speak of a “spirit of lawlessness that prevails here, that I have never seen anywhere else.” Nature was also smiling on the Owens Valley scheme. On August 30, a week before the scheduled referendum on the aqueduct, the temperature climbed to 101 degrees. The city had gone its usual four months without rain, and there would likely be two rainless months to come. On September 2, Hearst himself rode down from San Francisco in his private railroad car for a quiet palaver with the city’s oligarchs. As men of commerce, they understood each other, and Hearst had recently been bitten by the presidential bug; if he was truly serious about the White House, he could use their help. When the meeting was over, the publisher strode into the Examiner’s offices, barked Loewenthal into acquiescence, and personally wrote an editorial recommending a “yes” vote. Samuel T. Clover’s Daily News, the only paper on record opposing the aqueduct, lobbed a potential bombshell when it reported that the city’s workers, under cover of darkness, were dumping water out of the reservoirs into the Pacific to make them go dry, thus assuring a “yes” vote. But Mulholland’s lame explanation that they had merely been “flushing the system” was widely believed.
On September 7, 1905, the bond issue passed, fourteen to one.
To the Los Angeles Times, it was a “Titanic Project to Give the City a River.” To the Inyo Register, it was a ruthless scheme in which “Los Angeles Plots Destruction, Would Take Owens River, Lay Lands Waste, Ruin People, Homes, and Communities.” That sensational headline actually belied the feeling in the valley somewhat. Few people thought, at first, that things would be so bad. A number of the ranchers had made out well selling their water rights, and they would be able to keep their water for years, until the aqueduct was built. The city had bought up nearly forty bank miles of the river and would probably dry up the lower valley, but the upper valley, except for Fred Eaton’s purchase of the Rickey estate, had been left mostly intact. When Eaton moved up from Los Angeles as promised and began his new life as a cattle rancher, the valley people were reassured. After a while, they even began to fraternize with him.
Mulholland, meanwhile, had begun his own campaign to mollify the people of the valley, a campaign in which he was joined, somewhat more bellicosely, by the Los Angeles Times, which featured headlines such as “Ill-feeling Ridiculous” and “Owens Valley People Going Off as Half-Cock.” Inyo County’s Congressman, Sylvester Smith, was an influential member of the House Public Lands Committee, and since the city would have to cross a lot of public land