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By Root 1555 0

Smith knew what he was up against, however, and realized that his best defense was to appear utterly reasonable. As a result, he said that he was willing to acknowledge the city’s need for more water, that he was willing to let it have a substantial share of the Owens River, and that he was willing to grant the aqueduct its necessary rights-of-way. He was not willing, however, to do any of this in the way the city wanted. He suggested a compromise. Let the Reclamation Service build its project, including the big dam in Long Valley—a dam that could store most of the river’s flow. The water could then be used first for irrigation, and because of the valley’s long and narrow slope, the return flows would go back to the lower river, where they could be freely diverted by Los Angeles. The city would sacrifice some of the water it wanted, the valley would sacrifice some irrigable land. It was, Smith argued, an enlightened plan: sensible, efficient, conceived in harmony. It was the only plan under which no one would suffer. He would add only two stipulations: the Owens Valley would have a nonnegotiable first right to the water, and any surplus water could not be used for irrigation in the San Fernando Valley.

Smith’s proposal was obviously anathema to the San Fernando land syndicate, and to the city as well. The chief of the Geologic Survey doubted that it would work, and even if it did, for the West’s largest city to settle for leftover water from a backwater oasis of fruit and cattle ranchers was, to say the least, humiliating. The city might have to beg for extra water in times of drought or go to court to try to condemn it. If the Owens Valley held on to its first rights and expanded its irrigated acreage, Los Angeles might soon have to look for water again, and the only river in sight was the Colorado, a feckless brown torrent in a bottomless canyon which the city could never afford to dam and divert on its own. Smith’s proposal led directly to one unthinkable conclusion: at some point in the relatively near future, Los Angeles would have to cease to grow.

What was William Mulholland’s response? He took a train to Washington, held a summit meeting with Smith and Senator Flint, and decided to do what any sensible person would have done: he accepted the compromise.

If it was a smokescreen, as it appears to have been, it was a brilliant move. (Mulholland seems to have been a far better political schemer than he was a hydrologist and civil engineer.) For one thing, it put Sylvester Smith off guard, making him believe that the reconciliation he wanted to effect was a success. For another, it gave Los Angeles some critical extra time to plead its case before the two people who might help the city get everything it wanted: the President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, and the man on whom he leaned most heavily for advice—Gifford Pinchot.

Pinchot was the first director of Roosevelt’s pet creation, the Forest Service, but that was only one of his roles. He was also the Cardinal Richelieu of TR’s White House. Temperamentally and ideologically, the two men fit hand in glove. Both were wealthy patricians (Pinchot came from Pittsburgh, where his family had made a fortune in the dry-goods business); both were hunters and outdoorsmen. Though their speeches and writings rang of Thomas Jefferson, at heart Pinchot and Roosevelt seemed more comfortable with Hamiltonian ideals. Roosevelt liked the Reclamation program because he saw it as an agrarian path to industrial strength, not because he believed—as Jefferson did—that a nation of small farmers is a nation with a purer soul. Pinchot espoused forest conservation not because he worshiped nature like John Muir (whom he privately despised) but because the timber industry was plowing through the nation’s forests with such abandon it threatened to destroy them for all time. Roosevelt was a trust-buster, but only because he feared that unfettered capitalism could breed socialism. (For evidence he only had to look as far as Los Angeles, where Harrison Gray Otis was whipping labor radicals