Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [63]
Events were finally swinging to the Owens Valley’s side. To Mulholland’s disgust, even the Los Angeles Times, now that Otis was dead, was sympathizing with the lawbreakers. “These farmers are not anarchists or bomb throwers,” it said in an editorial, “but in the main honest, hardworking American citizens. They have put themselves hopelessly in the wrong by taking the law into their own hands, but that is not to say that there has not been a measure of justice on their side.” Meanwhile, as Mark Watterson led the seizure of the Alabama Gates, Wilfred had wisely gone to Los Angeles to closet himself with the Joint Clearinghouse Association, a roundtable of the city’s bankers. After several hours, he emerged and sent Mark a telegram. “If the object of the crowd at the spillway is to bring their wrongs to the attention of the citizens of Los Angeles, they have done so one hundred percent,” he wired. “I feel sure that the wrongs done will be remedied.”
But such a simple happy ending could occur only on a Hollywood movie lot. As soon as the Alabama Gates were released and Wilfred Watterson had returned home, the bankers with whom he had met rejected his price for the consolidated valley water rights, to which he swore they had agreed. Meanwhile, Mulholland’s public relations department was flooding the state with a booklet “explaining” the Owens Valley crisis. “Never in its history has the Owens Valley prospered and increased in wealth as it has in the past twenty years,” it said. And it was true, as long as you looked at only the first nineteen of those years; in the twelve subsequent months, the city had almost brought the valley to its knees. Shops and stores were closing for lack of business—thousands of people had already moved out—but Mulholland dismissed pleas for reparations out of hand. If business was down, he said, the shopkeepers could move, too.
The first order to shoot to kill came on May 28, 1927, a day after the No Name Siphon, a huge pipe across a Mojave hill, lay in shards, demolished by a tremendous blast of dynamite. As city crews hauled in 450 feet of new twelve-foot pipe, another blast destroyed sixty feet of the aqueduct near Big Pine Creek. On June 4, another 150 feet went sky high. In response, a special train loaded with city detectives armed with high-velocity Winchester carbines and machine guns rolled out of Union Station for the Owens Valley. Roadblocks were erected on the highways; all cars with male occupants were searched; floodlights beamed across the valley as if it were a giant penitentiary. Miraculously, though the Owens Valley water war had gone on for more than twenty years, though it had turned violent during the past three, there were still no corpses. Harry Glasscock, however, was predicting in his editorial columns that the aqueduct would “run red with human blood,” and no one was prepared to argue with him. But before it could happen fate cast a plague on both houses. First came the collapse of the Watterson banks, and the revelation that the Owens Valley’s leading citizens were felons. Then, a few months later, came the collapse of the Saint Francis Dam.
The relationship between George Watterson and his two nephews had gone from one of competitiveness to one of bitterness to one of rancid hatred. In the early months of 1927, George saw his opportunity to invest in their final ruin. Four years of drought and rapidly declining business had left all five branches of the Inyo County Bank severely weakened. At the same time, the election of a new governor, Clement Young, on a huge infusion of campaign cash from A. P. Giannini and his Bank of Italy had resulted in the liberalization of the state banking laws, mainly to Giannini’s advantage. It was no surprise, then, when George Watterson filed, in the name of the Bank of Italy, an application to launch a competitive bank in Inyo County. But