Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [57]
It was the high point of Mulholland’s life and career.
Very little of the water that was, according to Theodore Roosevelt, a hundred or a thousandfold more important to Los Angeles than to the Owens Valley would go to the city for another twenty years. All through the teens and early twenties, the San Fernando Valley used three times as much aqueduct water as the city itself, the vast part of it for irrigation. During one particularly wet year, every drop of the copious flow of the aqueduct went to irrigate San Fernando Valley crops; the city took nothing at all. Understandably, this news enraged the people of the Owens Valley. For Los Angeles to take their water to fill their washtubs and water glasses was one thing. For it to turn their valley back to desert so that another desert valley, owned by rich monopolists, could bloom in its place was quite another.
The teens and early twenties, however, were extraordinarily wet years—the same wet years that caused the Reclamation Service to overestimate dramatically the flow of the Colorado River—and there was water enough for everyone. The irrigated acreage in the San Fernando Valley rose from three thousand acres in 1913—the year both the completion of the aqueduct and the annexation of the valley occurred—to seventy-five thousand acres in 1918. Even so, the Owens Valley lost few of its orchards and irrigated pasturelands, and the new railroad to Los Angeles and the silver mine at Tonopah fed in enough wealth to allow the town of Bishop to build a grand American Legion Hall and Masonic Temple, those cathedrals of the rural nineteenth century.
The same uncharacteristically engorged desert river that was keeping the Owens Valley green was responsible, in Los Angeles, for the most transfixing change. Santa Monica Boulevard, once a dry dusty strip, became an elegant corridor of palms; in Hollywood, where the motion picture industry had risen up overnight, outdoor sets resembled New Guinea; and since most Los Angeleans were immigrants from the Middle West, every bungalow had a green lawn. The glorious anomaly of a fake tropical city with a mild desert climate brought people from everywhere. Dirt farmers came from Arkansas; Aldous Huxley moved from England. The Chamber of Commerce, an Otis creation, kept them coming. They arrived on the Union Pacific, a Harriman railroad, and once they were there, the Times, an Otis and Chandler newspaper, urged everyone to settle in the San Fernando Valley, an Otis and Chandler property. Few could afford automobiles, so they got around on Sherman and Huntington trolley cars between Sherman-and-Huntington-built homes and Sherman and Huntington resorts in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains.
As Otis never tired of saying, this was the promised land. All things were possible; anyone could get rich; the cardinal sin was doubt. During the nadir of the Depression, when the city was invaded by homeless Okies so destitute they sat hollow-eyed in the parks and gnawed on the crusts thrown out for the pigeons, the Times sent them this holiday greeting: “Merry Christmas! Look pleasant! Chin up! A gloomy face never gets a good picture. The great battles are fought by Caesars and their fortunes, by Napoleons and their stars. Faith still does the impossible! Merry Christmas! Catch the tempo of the times. You have your life before you, and, if you are growing old, the greatest adventure of all is just around the corner. Earth may have little left in reserve, but heaven is ahead! Merry Christmas!” The only greater fraud than such blather from Otis and Chandler’s newspaper was the overflowing desert river on which all depended.
In the West, drought tends to come in cycles of about twenty years, and the next drought arrived on schedule. The years 1919 and 1920 were a premonition; rainfall was slightly below average. It