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By Root 1529 0

rose back to average—a measly fourteen inches—in 1921 and went slightly over that in 1922. Then it crashed. Ten inches in 1923; six inches in 1924; seven inches in 1925. In Florida, a seven-inch rainstorm may occur two or three times a year, but Los Angeles was trying to look like Florida, and grow even faster, on a fifth of its precipitation, and when the drought struck it kept going on a tenth. Mulholland had expected 350,000 people by 1925, but had 1.2 million on his hands instead. The city was growing fifteen times faster than Denver, eleven times faster than New York. And though the city at its core had become a metropolis, Los Angeles County led the nation in the value of its agricultural output. All of this agriculture depended on irrigation, which, together with the phenomenal urban growth, depended on a river draining Mount Whitney two hundred miles away.

As the drought intensified, the Owens River moved perilously close to overappropriation. The problem was not only that the river was small, but also that no carryover storage existed—nothing but some small receiving reservoirs around the basin and the snowfields in the Sierra. The Los Angeles Aqueduct was essentially a run-of-the-river project. If the river didn’t run, the city collapsed.

It the city and the Owens Valley were to continue sharing the river, carryover storage would have to be built; otherwise, one place or the other would lose its water during a drought. Mulholland, of course, knew this, but still refused to build the dam at Long Valley. He blamed it on the city’s fragile finances, but that was a poor excuse; the real reason was that he and his old friend Eaton had had a nasty falling-out.

Fred Eaton had not even bothered to attend the dedication of the aqueduct in 1913, though its existence was owed mainly to him. He had bought the initial water rights the city needed with his own money, taking a considerable risk; had the voters failed to approve the bond referendum, he would have been drowning in both unusable water and debt. The city had paid him quite adequately for the right, but it had not made him a multimillionaire. Originally, Eaton had hoped to operate the Owens Valley end of the aqueduct as a private concession, which could have made him incredibly rich, but Frederick Newell and Roosevelt had dashed that dream, insisting that the project be municipally owned from end to end. Eaton had also had some bad luck in the cattle business, and had to switch ignominiously to chickens. He was sixty-five years old; it was time things finally went right. The one item of real value Eaton owned was the reservoir site on the ranch he had purchased from Thomas Rickey. Ideally, a dam built at the site ought to be 140 feet high, the approximate depth of the gorge; that would create a reservoir large enough to provide for both the city and the valley during all but the worst droughts. A damsite of such importance to the city—a site which, if developed, would drown a good portion of his ranch—was worth a lot of money, as far as Eaton was concerned. When Mulholland asked him what his price was, Eaton said $1 million. Mulholland, who seemed personally indifferent to money (though he was reputedly the highest-paid civil servant in California), laughed him off. Time and time again he asked Eaton to accept a reasonable offer—$500,000, perhaps, or a little more—and each time his offer was more angrily refused. By 1917, the two old friends were no longer on speaking terms.

As the drought intensified, Mulholland begged the city fathers to end their abject deification of growth. The only way to solve the city’s water problem, he grumbled aloud, was to kill the members of the Chamber of Commerce. When he was ignored, he began to regulate irrigation practices in the San Fernando Valley. First he forbade the irrigation of alfalfa, a low-value, water-demanding crop; then he prohibited winter planting. When these measures proved inadequate, he swallowed his disdain for surface storage and began building reservoirs in the basin—first the Hollywood Reservoir, then a