Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [52]
There was one person who knew that it was. She was Mary Austin, the valley’s literary light, who had published a remarkable collection of impressionistic essays entitled Land of Little Rain that won her recognition around the world. In the course of her writing she had spent long hours with the last of the Paiutes, the Indians who had lived in the valley for centuries until they were instantly displaced by the whites. The Paiutes showed her what no one else saw—that order and stability are the most transient of states, that there is rarely such a thing as a partial defeat. In a subsequent book, a novella about the Owens Valley water struggle called The Ford, she wrote about what happens when “that incurable desire of men to be played upon, to be handled,” runs up against “that Cult of Locality, by which so much is forgiven as long as it is done in the name of the Good of the Town.” Mary Austin was convinced that the valley had died when it sold its first water right to Los Angeles—that the city would never stop until it owned the whole river and all of the land. One day, in Los Angeles for an interview with Mulholland, she told him so. After she had left, a subordinate came into his office and found him staring at the wall. “By God,” Mulholland reportedly said, “that woman is the only one who has brains enough to see where this is going.”
No sooner had the city gotten the aqueduct past the voters than it faced the more difficult task of getting it past Congress. Most of the lands it would traverse belonged to the government, so the city would have to appeal for rights-of-way. The Reclamation project, though moribund, was still not officially deauthorized, which was, at the very least, a nuisance to the city. But deauthorization could prove to be even worse, because tens of thousands of acres that the Service had withdrawn would return to the public domain and be available for homesteading. Homesteading in California was another name for graft; half of the great private empires were amassed by hiring “homesteaders” to con the government out of its land. If the withdrawn lands went back to the public domain, every available water right would be coveted by speculators for future resale to the city. Mulholland seemed to believe that the city would never require more water, but others, notably Joseph Lippincott, thought him wrong. The withdrawn lands had to be kept off-limits at all costs.
The instrument for achieving this wishful goal was a bill introduced at the behest of Mulholland’s chief lawyer, William B. Matthews, by Senator Frank Flint of California, a strong partisan of Los Angeles and urban water development in general. The bill would give the city whatever rights-of-way it needed across federal lands and hold the withdrawn lands in quarantine for another three years, which would presumably give the city enough time to purchase whatever additional water or land it might need. Flint’s bill reached the Senate floor in June of 1906, and flew through easily. Its next stop, however, was the House Public Lands Committee, where it crashed into Congressman Sylvester Smith. Smith was an energetic and charming politician, a former newspaper publisher from Bakersfield with a sense of public duty and enough money to maintain an ironclad set of principles. The idea of Harrison Gray Otis and Henry Huntington becoming vastly richer than they already were on water abducted from his district inflamed his well-developed sense of outrage.