Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [64]
To say that the Wattersons had played fast and loose with their investors’ capital was an understatement. For at least the past two years, they had been using the amalgamated capital of the Owens Valley to shore up their failing financial empire—their resort, the mineral water company, their tungsten mine. They had recorded deposits in other banks that were never made, recorded debits that were already paid, entered balances that never existed on ledger sheets. They had loaned the entire life savings of their friends and neighbors to enterprises which were, at best, unlikely to succeed. When it was all tallied, there was a $2.3 million discrepancy between the bank books and reality. The brothers had always been the valley’s best and last hope. Now they were going to go to jail for embezzlement and fraud.
They had done it, they said, for the good of the valley, and as outrageous as it sounded, it was probably true. None of the money had ever left Inyo County. With the irrigation economy dying at the hands of Los Angeles, the valley’s only chance of surviving at all was to develop its minerals, its mining, its potential for tourism. During the trial, people who had lost everything nodded and agreed. Even as the Wattersons were being charged with thirty-six counts of embezzlement and grand theft, the citizens of Owens Valley were pledging $1 million to keep them in business.
It was too late. On August 4, 1927, all five banks were permanently closed. People wandered over to gawk at their final sign of defeat, a bitter message posted on the door: “This result has been brought about by the past four years of destructive work carried on by the city of Los Angeles.”
The prosecuting attorney was a lifelong friend of both Wilfred and Mark. If he had not been the prosecutor, he said, he would have agreed to be a character witness. He cried openly as he made his final argument, and the judge and jury wept along with him. On November 14, the Wattersons were sent to San Quentin for ten years, later reduced to six. As the train taking them to San Francisco passed outside Bishop, someone was putting up a sign. It read, “Los Angeles City Limits.”
William Mulholland had only four months to savor his triumph.
By refusing to pay Fred Eaton the $1 million he wanted for his reservoir site, Mulholland had left himself short of water storage capacity. It was a serious situation to begin with, and it was compounded by the drought, the dynamitings, and the phenomenal continuing influx of people. His power dams were also running day and night, spilling water into the ocean before it could be reused. The water he had obtained at such expense and grief was being wasted. As a result, he turned to the dam he had under construction in San Francisquito Canyon, and, ignoring the advice of his own engineers, decided to make it larger.
The reservoir behind the enlarged Saint Francis Dam reached its capacity of 11.4 billion gallons in early March of 1928, and immediately began to leak. Few dams fail to leak when they are new, but if they are sound they leak clear water. The water seeping around the abutment of the Saint Francis Dam was brown. It was a telltale sign that water was seeping through the canyon walls, softening the mica shale and conglomerate abutment.
It was also a sign that William Mulholland chose, if not exactly to ignore, then to disbelieve. After all, it was his dam. Would the greatest engineering deparment in the entire world build an unsafe dam? To reassure the public, Mulholland and his chief engineer rode out to the site on March 12 for an inspection. The