• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“It was the tone of his voice that surprised me,” Albright said. “The laughingly arrogant tone. I don’t think he was joking, you see. He was absolutely convinced that building a dam in Yosemite Valley was the proper thing to do. We had few big dams in California then. There were hundreds of other sites, and there were bigger rivers than the Merced. But he seemed to want to shake things up, to outrage me. He almost wanted to destroy.”

It was the same tone, the same bitter and unreasoning quarrelsomeness, that Mulholland displayed when a reporter from the Times asked him why there was so much dissatisfaction in the Owens Valley. “Dissatisfaction in the valley?” said Mulholland mockingly. “Yes, a lot of it. Dissatisfaction is a sort of condition that prevails there, like foot and mouth disease.” It was the same unreasoning rage that made him say, when his war of attrition against the Owens Valley had finally caused events to take a drastic turn for the worse, that he half regretted the demise of so many of the valley’s orchard trees, because now there were no longer enough live trees to hang all the troublemakers who lived there.

Trees or no trees, that George Watterson, Leicester Hall, and William Symons had not yet been lynched themselves said something about the valley’s self-restraint. Symons and Watterson had prudently taken to carrying sidearms, but, aside from an occasional curse or jeer, they were left alone. The valley thought it had a better means of taking revenge on the city than assassinating its agents. Soon after the McNally Ditch coup was engineered, the ditch companies that still had control of their water began opening their headgates and letting water flood uselessly over their fields. Before long, only a trickle was reaching the intake of the aqueduct. Mulholland demanded that the diversions stop, but the farmers refused. In exasperation, he tried a bit of double psychology: he sent more purchasing agents to reinforce Watterson, Symons, and Hall, and at the same time sent his attorney, William Matthews, to meet with the ranchers to see if the matter could still come to an amicable settlement. Just hours before Matthews was scheduled to sit down with the ditch companies, however, Mulholland went into one of his sudden fits of anger and telephoned his maintenance crews to demolish the intake of the largest diverter, the Big Pine Canal.

The reaction was instantaneous. The leaders of the Big Pine Company were the worst people Mulholland could have chosen to antagonize: the Watterson brothers, a resort operator and speculator named Karl Keough, and Harry Glasscock, the incendiary editor of the Owens Valley Herald. As soon as news arrived of what was happening, a posse of twenty men, bristling with guns, roared out to the canal intake. As guns were trained on Mulholland’s crew, the rest of the men dumped their equipment into the Owens River. The valley mood veered suddenly from bitterness to wild exuberance. “Los Angeles, it’s your move now,” exulted the Big Pine Citizen. And yet the Big Pine farmers were soon to prove as indifferent to the valley’s fate as the members of the McNally Ditch. When Mulholland shrewdly responded with ever higher offers for the cooperative’s water rights, a majority (not including the Watterson brothers) finally agreed to sell out for a price of $15,000 per second-foot, twice what the city had paid for the McNally Ditch rights. Mulholland was jubilant, but victory carried a heavy price. To satisfy his vendetta against his oldest friend, he had now spent twice what the Long Valley damsite would have cost, and made himself evil incarnate throughout an entire valley as well.

As the farmers who held out felt increasingly alone, their methods grew more and more violent. On May 21, 1924, a group of men “broke” into the Watterson brothers’ warehouse, “stole” three cases of dynamite, and blew a large section of the aqueduct to smithereens. From that moment on, William Mulholland refused to refer to anyone in the Owens