William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles

Abstract

Catherine Mulholland was five years old when the career of her famous grandfather came to a sudden tragic end with the bursting of the Saint Francis Dam. The catastrophe of March 13, 1928, claimed at least four hundred lives, becoming “the greatest American civil engineering failure in the twentieth century.” Until that moment, William Mulholland had achieved a larger-than-life, Horatio Alger stature that leapt beyond bourgeois respectability to the Olympian heights of living legend. The story of the Irish immigrant's rise from ditch-digger to the “Chief” of the vast aqueduct and waterworks system of Los Angeles is the subject of this biography. More than filial piety but less than urban history, it contains prodigious research in newspaper archives and family scrapbooks. The result is a rather tedious chronicle that ultimately reveals little about the private side or family life of a very public man. Born in 1855, the Dubliner arrived in Los Angeles twenty-two years later, seeking his fortune. Finding a job with the water company, he learned the system, studied engineering, and worked his way up to become superintendent in 1887, when the city was fast approaching a population of fifty thousand. As the population doubled over the next decade, the exhaustion of indigenous supplies began to strangle further growth of the desert community despite Mulholland's conservation measures. Fred Eaton, the indefatigable engineer, booster, and mayor, led the way out of the difficulty not only by gaining municipal ownership of the waterworks but also by proposing to build a 240-mile aqueduct from the Owens Valley. While acting in secret made sense in order to keep the price of land and water rights at market values, some of the insiders including Eaton took advantage of their public roles to engorge their private bank accounts. They bought up huge chunks of desert in the San Fernando Valley just north of the city where the artificial river was planned to terminate since they knew that it would supply almost ten times the amount needed to meet the city's current demands. And here lay the local origins of endless conspiracy theories and political controversies that have spilled into national consciousness with ironically appropriate media productions such as Chinatown (1974) and Cadillac Desert (1997). Although Mulholland seems innocent of profiting personally from the scheme to suck dry the Owens Valley to make the San Fernando blossom, he does stand guilty of becoming obsessed with tapping every drop of water in the West for the profligate consumption of Los Angeles. In this respect, he personified the region's conservation movement in the twentieth century.