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By Root 1442 0

he was to give to the most powerful city on the Pacific Coast. When the Reclamation Service officially annulled the Owens Valley Project in July of 1907, the hundreds of thousands of acres it had withdrawn were not returned to the public domain for homesteading, on Roosevelt’s orders—just as Mulholland wished. It was a decision without precedent, and its result was that the handful of rich members of the San Fernando syndicate could continue using the surplus water in the Owens River that thousands of homesteaders might have claimed instead. Ethan Hitchcock had promised that such a decision, which he already foresaw when Roosevelt closed ranks behind Los Angeles, would be made over his dead body, but Roosevelt spared his life by firing him first. And when the city, immensely satisfied with the result, asked Pinchot whether he couldn’t go a step further, the chief of the Forest Service decided to include virtually all of the Owens Valley in the Inyo National Forest.

The Inyo National Forest! With six inches of annual rainfall, the Owens Valley is too dry for trees; the only ones there were fruit trees planted and irrigated by man, some of which were already dying for lack of water. This didn’t seem to bother Pinchot, nor did the fact that his action appears to have been patently illegal. The Organic Act that created the Forest Service says, “No public forest reservation shall be established except to improve and protect the forest ... or for the purpose of creating favorable conditions of water flow, and to provide a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of the United States; but it is not the purpose of these provisions ... to authorize the inclusion ... of lands more valuable for the mineral therein, or for agricultural purposes, than for forest purposes” (emphasis added). The valley’s irrigated orchards were infinitely more valuable than the barren flats and scattered sagebrush that characterized the new national forest, so Pinchot’s action was incontrovertibly a violation of the legislation that put him in business. He lamely countered that he was simply acting to protect the quality of Los Angeles’ water; but since much of the treeless acreage he included in the Inyo National Forest lay below the intake of the aqueduct, it was a flimsy excuse. As a formality, Pinchot was obliged to send an investigator to the Owens Valley to recommend that he do what he had already made up his mind to do. He sent three before he found one who was willing to go along. “This is not a government by legislation,” lamented Sylvester Smith on the Senate floor, “it is a government by strangulation.”

In July of 1907, with the reclamation project in its grave and the Owens Valley imprisoned inside a national forest without trees, Joseph Lippincott resigned from the Reclamation Service and immediately went to work, at nearly double his government salary, as William Mulholland’s deputy. He remained utterly unchastised. “I would do everything over again, just exactly as I did,” he said as he departed.

The one thing that no one seems to have thought about in all this was that the people of Owens Valley were only human, and there was just so much they could take.

The aqueduct took six years to build. The Great Wall of China and the Panama Canal were bigger jobs, and New York’s Catskill aqueduct, which was soon to be completed, would carry more water, but no one had ever built anything so large across such merciless terrain, and no one had ever done it on such a minuscule budget. It was as if the city of Pendleton, Oregon, had gone out, by itself, and built Grand Coulee Dam.

The aqueduct would traverse some of the most scissile, fractionated, fault-splintered topography in North America. It would cover 223 miles, 53 of them in tunnels; where tunneling was too risky, there would be siphons whose acclivities and declivities exceeded fifty-grade. The city would have to build 120 miles of railroad track, 500 miles of roads and trails, 240 miles of telephone line, and 170 miles of power transmission line. The entire concrete-making