Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [67]
As for Otis, Chandler, Sherman, and the rest of the syndicate that called itself the San Fernando Mission Land Company, they became rich—phenomenally rich. While presiding over the San Fernando Valley’s metamorphosis from desert to agricultural cornucopia, they used the profits to constantly acquire more land. In 1911, Chandler, Otis, and Sherman purchased another 47,500 acres nearby and began to develop them—the biggest subdivision in the world. Within a year, they were assembling the third-largest land empire in the history of the state, the 300,000-acre Tejon Ranch, straddling Los Angeles and Kern counties. (Besides the Los Angeles Times, the Tejon Ranch, undiminished in size, remains the principal local asset of the Chandler family.) In a speech given in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt singled out Otis as “a curious instance of the anarchy of soul which comes to a man who in conscienceless fashion deifies property at the expense of human rights.” But Roosevelt, as much as anyone, was responsible for setting this anarchic soul loose. No one knows how great a profit the syndicate realized from the initial seventeen thousand San Fernando acres, but one writer, William Kahrl, estimates that Chandler was worth as much as $500 million when he died, and the San Fernando Valley was the soil from which this incredible fortune grew. It may not have been the most lucrative land scam in United States history, but it ranked somewhere near the top.
Between the arrival of William Mulholland and his death, Los Angeles grew from a town of fifteen thousand into the then most populous desert city on earth. Today it is the second-largest, barely surpassed by Cairo. Its obsessive search for more water, however, was never to end. While Lake Crowley was filling, the city was already completing its aqueduct to the Colorado River, whose construction almost precipitated a shooting war with Arizona, a rival as formidable as the Owens Valley was weak. And though the first Colorado River aqueduct was supposed to end its water famines forever—as was the Owens River aqueduct—the city was soon planning a second Colorado River Aqueduct and plotting to seize half of the Feather River, six hundred miles away, at the same time. No sooner had it managed to do all of that than the city fathers were secretly meeting with the Bureau of Reclamation, mapping diversions from rivers a thousand miles distant in Oregon and Washington. Like the Red Queen, Los Angeles runs faster and faster to stay in place.
No one says or remembers much about the Reclamation Service’s involvement in the Owens Valley story, which is ironic, because nothing in its history may have affected the interests of the nation-at-large quite as much. Almost as soon as it was created—well before it metamorphosed into the mighty Bureau of Reclamation—the agency found itself working on behalf of the wealthy and powerful and against the interests of the constituency it was created to protect, the small western irrigation farmer. In California, to a surprising degree, it has done so ever since. Small farmers do not matter much in the worldly scheme of things; if they did, their numbers would not be declining by the tens of thousands every year. But large farmers do, and explosively growing desert cities do, too, arid the Bureau of Reclamation, after learning this lesson in the Owens Valley, would remember it well. Its largest dam is San Luis in central California; its most magnificent dam is Hoover. Above all, the Bureau loves to build great dams, and were it not for Los Angeles, the odds are low that either Hoover or San Luis would exist.
The Owens River created Los Angeles, letting a great city grow where common sense dictated that one should never be, but one could just as well say that it ruined Los Angeles, too. The annexation of the San Fernando Valley, a direct result of the aqueduct, instantly made it the largest city in the