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By Root 1552 0

Valley by any other name than “dynamiter.” Then, in August, Leicester Hall, who had been warned to stay away forever, returned to the valley and was abducted from a restaurant as he ate. He was driven blindfolded to a road’s end, where he found himself facing a grim-looking group of men and a noose strung over a tree. Hall saved himself by uttering the Freemason’s distress call; there were so many Masons among the valley population that one was in the gang of would-be lynchers, and he managed to talk the others out of murder. But the dynamitings continued. When the Department of Water and Power released a report that recommended “destroying all irrigation”—those were the exact words—in the valley, and it turned out that the main author was Joseph P. Lippincott, the response was a fresh series of blasts. Glasscock’s paper was now openly counseling sabotage. The Ku Klux Klan, sensing a perfect battle stage between “Hollywood”—which was to say, cities, big business, liberalism, and Jews—and the small-town, revanchist values it cherished, was sending recruiters into the valley and getting good results. Even Fred Eaton, after holding himself aloof, finally entered the fray against the city of which he had been mayor. “Wherever the hand of Los Angeles has touched Owens Valley,” he wrote in a letter to the editor, “it has turned back into desert.”

Joseph Lippincott, whose one admirable quality may have been prescience, had said twenty years earlier that the Owens Valley was doomed as soon as Los Angeles obtained its first water right. Mulholland, however, kept insisting blindly that the valley could live on—he didn’t say how—even as he turned life there into a kind of hell.

No one knew when his neighbor would be approached and persuaded to sell out; no one knew when the city would move to condemn; no one knew when the armed guards who patrolled the aqueduct would receive orders to shoot to kill. “Suspicions are mutual and widespread,” a visitor from Los Angeles observed. “The valley people are suspicious of each other, suspicious of newcomers, suspicious of city men, suspicious, in short, of almost everybody and everything.... Owens Valley is full of whisperings, mutterings, recriminations....” It seemed only a matter of time before the onset of real war.

On November 16, 1924, as the drought continued to hold Los Angeles in a deadly grip, a caravan of automobiles rumbled slowly southward through the town of Independence. In the first car, behind drawn blinds, sat the grim figure of Mark Watterson. The cars turned toward the Alabama Hills, a small range of barren rises at the foot of the Sierra escarpment. Weaving through the hills was the Owens River aqueduct, and somewhere along its course were the Alabama Gates. In wetter times, the gates had turned floodwaters in the aqueduct onto the desert to keep them from straining the capacity of the siphons below. They hadn’t been used in years, but they still worked. When the caravan arrived at the gatehouse, a hundred men got out of the cars, walked up to the spillway, and turned the five huge wheels that moved the weirs. For the first time in many years, the Owens River flowed back across the desert into Owens Lake.

The effect of the seizure was electrifying Mulholland was in a murderous rage. He dispatched two carloads of armed city detectives to take back the gates, but news of their imminent arrival prompted the local sheriff to go down to meet them. “If you go up there and start trouble,” he told the detectives, “I don’t believe you will live to tell the tale.” They never went. Mulholland, in the meantime, secured a court injunction against the seizure, but when the papers were served to the men at the gates they threw them into the water.

And then, to everyone’s surprise, what could easily have produced bloodshed turned into a picnic. Wives, children, grandmothers, and dogs joined the lawbreakers. Tom Mix was filming a movie nearby, and when he heard what was happening he sent over his salutations and his orchestra. By evening a huge cloud of smoke began to rise from the scene,