Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [59]
With the tens of thousands of people pouring in each year, everything was a stopgap measure. By the early 1920s, Mulholland was already lobbying for an aqueduct from the Colorado River. This, however, put him on a collision course with Harry Chandler, who owned 860,000 acres in Mexico that relied on the Colorado, and who was so greedy that, despite his enormous wealth, he put the interests of his Mexican holdings above the welfare of the city he had created out of whole cloth. Chandler’s opposition, together with fierce feuding among the Colorado River Basin states, kept the Boulder Canyon Project Act, which would create the storage reservoir that any Colorado River aqueduct would need, bottled up for years. Frustrated at every turn, Mulholland reached the end of his tether sometime in 1923. The only answer, he decided, was to do what Mary Austin had predicted the city would ultimately do—dry the Owens Valley up.
The trouble began where troubles usually begin, in the heart. Wilfred and Mark Watterson, the brothers who symbolized the Owens Valley’s mortmain and its success, had a young uncle named George, only ten years older than Wilfred. George’s attitude toward his nephews was less avuncular than competitive. Somehow, in competition, George always lost. When Wilfred and George had filed rival claims on a mining right, Wilfred won. George had always wanted to own the first automobile in the valley, but one day he looked down the street and saw Wilfred drive up in a yellow Stanley Steamer, mobbed by adoring crowds. Wilfred and Mark were treasurer of this, president of that; George Watterson was not even a has-been—he was a never-was.
George Watterson had an ally in bitterness. Some years earlier, a lawyer with an adventuresome bent named Leicester Hall had wandered into the Owens Valley from Alaska, taken one look at Wilfred and Mark’s sister Elizabeth, and fallen helplessly in love. Elizabeth, however, had spurned him and married Jacob Clausen, Lippincott’s former assistant—a symbol, like the Watterson brothers, of resistance to Los Angeles. The Owens Valley was a gossipy place, and the hatred that George Watterson felt for his nephews and the bitterness that Hall felt toward Jacob Clausen were well known. The city had its agents in the valley, and they had ears. When William Mulholland invited George Watterson, Hall, and their friend William Symons down for dinner at his club one evening, they were happy to come.
The tactic was the old reliable one: the lightning strike. Symons was the president of the McNally Ditch, which held the oldest and largest water right among all the irrigation cooperatives in the valley. Hall and George Watterson were officers in the Bishop Creek Ditch and the Owens River Canal Company. On March 15, 1923, the three men returned to the valley and went immediately to work. “Leave none of the ranchers out,” Mulholland had told them. “We want them all.” Within twenty-four hours, Watterson, Symons, and Hall owned options on more than two-thirds of the McNally Ditch’s water rights. They had paid as much as $7,500 per cubic second-foot of water, and the total cost to the city was more than $1 million—the price Fred Eaton had wanted for access to his damsite.
The size and length of an irrigation ditch depend critically on the number of people who use it. Since all the irrigators must spend a substantial amount of time maintaining it—clearing out weeds, desilting it, repairing earthslides—losing just a few farmers can put a terrible burden of responsibility on those who remain. So many farmers who belonged to the McNally Ditch had sold out that the cooperative was quickly put out of its misery; those who remained couldn’t possibly maintain it by themselves, so ultimately they would have to sell out, too. By the time the three men moved on the other ditch companies, however, pockets of resistance had formed, and they had to seek out the more avaricious or vulnerable souls. Hall had