Rivers in the Desert Read online

  Los Angeles voters had decided the future of what would become the principal metropolitan trading center on the West Coast. They turned to the man who would guide the entire mega-million-dollar undertaking to its conclusion. Mulholland now devoted himself entirely to the construction of one of the largest and most unique water systems in the world.

  4

  Faithful Servant

  Glorious is the fruit

  of good labours.

  SOL. 3:15

  NOT SINCE ROMAN TIMES had such an immense water project been undertaken, and the Romans themselves no doubt would have been flabbergasted at the gargantuan project’s details. The eighteen months of massive preparations, begun in the fall of 1907, would rival the excavation itself in magnitude and precision. Before work could begin, it was necessary to build roads and trails, power plants, telegraph and telephone lines, and to provide a water supply for camps established along 150 miles of waterless desert.

  “The desolate barren sandy waste that for centuries upon centuries has felt only the light tread of the skulking coyote today crunches and creaks under the iron wheels of weary, heavily laden lumber freighters, and greasewood-bedecked steep canyons that had heard only the wailing cry of the solitary mountain lion resound with the tatter of thousands of hammers,” described the Examiner as 500 miles of paved roads and rails, 240 miles of telephone wire, the world’s largest municipal-owned cement factory, and more than 2,300 buildings (which included tent houses for workers, power plants, lumber mills, warehouses, barns, and hospitals) sprung up like magic over the vast terrains of mountains and desert.

  Steam power could not be used in the desert because water was so scarce, so two hydroelectric plants near the Owens Valley intake, one at Cottonwood Creek and the other at Division Creek, were constructed to power the dredges, excavators, drills, shop machinery, and cement mills, and to light the camps and tunnels, making the aqueduct the first major engineering project in America constructed primarily using electric power.

  As preparations began, Mulholland’s overriding concern was not so much the immensity of the job, but rather whether bureaucratic officials would leave him alone long enough to do it. Principal excavation was scarcely under way in December 1908 when the powerful Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, apparently ignoring the huge engineering preliminaries involved, anxiously demanded to know why so much time had been wasted and so little earth moved. Its chairman asked Mulholland for an informal report on the aqueduct’s progress.

  “Well, we have spent about $3 million all told,” Mulholland answered tersely before the gathered members of the Chamber of Commerce, “and there is perhaps 900 feet of Aqueduct built. Figuring our expenses, it has cost us about $3,300 per foot so far.” He paused as the shocked members gasped. Then he continued. “But by this time next year,” he said, “I’ll have fifty miles completed and the cost will drop to $30 a foot, if all of you here will let me alone.”

  The point was well taken. After a heavy silence, the chairman replied, “All right, Bill. Go ahead, do your job. We’re not mad about it.”

  At first, Mulholland and water officials worried that the city would never be able to find enough skilled workers to construct the aqueduct, but a financial crisis in eastern markets had prompted the shutdown of dozens of mining companies in the western states just as major construction was about to get under way. By the summer of 1908, news of the Los Angeles Aqueduct had reached the beleaguered mining camps, and troops of transient labor forces from Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona traveled to Los Angeles to work on Mulholland’s aqueduct. Newspapers fondly called them “blanket stiffs,” a roisterous, whiskey-swilling bunch seasoned in the “drill and shovel work of great engineering achievements.” Fresh from western mining colleges came a different but no less hardy breed—”eager young engineers who gained their first field experience in the rigorous desert life on Mulholland’s Big Ditch and who proved their mettle as the backbone of aqueduct construction.”

  The living drama of five thousand men moving as one in the searing desert heat for the common good was a public relations bonanza for the city. Already, hopeful working families from eastern and mid-western states were packing up and heading to Los Angeles to reap the opportunities it would offer once the Owens water reached its and boundaries. But the completion of the great aqueduct still lay years ahead. And the Chamber of Commerce extolled: “This is a public work without any politics. All employees are American. There is no contract labor employed. There are no men on the payrolls who have outlived their usefulness, or have been failures in life and have a berth because of friendship at city hall. Youth and virility fill the ranks of the 5,000.”

  In vivid portraits of words and photographs, rival newspapers issued progress reports and chronicled exciting derring-do details of life along the great aqueduct trail. The work, citizens were told, had no parallel in history, and day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, these citizens would thrill and marvel at the heroic advance of their “Big Ditch.” They, too, eagerly awaited the great arrival of the sparkling water that would irrigate 125,000 acres of land and harness 100,000 horsepower units of electrical energy, driving the city to unrealized heights of comfort and commerce.

  Back in New York, publications like Scribner’s and Literary Digest were also caught up in aqueduct fever. They sent their starched collar correspondents to such Western locales as Jawbone, Grapevine, Mojave, Tehachapi, Olancha, and Haiwee to cable firsthand accounts of the antics of workers with names like “Goose,” “Gunny-sack Joe,” and “Powder Face Kelly.” These men, wrote the scribes, worked from dawn to dusk in the searing desert heat and bitter Mojave sandstorms, blasting, hammering, and drilling for their Chief and for the city.

  From the start, William Mulholland’s long experience and success supervising water projects in Los Angeles and elsewhere in southern California made him the logical choice to head up construction of the aqueduct. And it was no surprise to the disgruntled citizens of the Owens Valley that the congenial and accommodating Joseph B. Lippincott was chosen to be his assistant. A capable engineer, painstakingly patient with the paperwork that Mulholland abhorred, Lippincott was the ideal candidate. Former Los Angeles City Attorney W. B. Mathews was appointed special counsel for the aqueduct and later for the Department of Water and Power. Long after the immense task had been completed, Mulholland would chortle, “I did the work, but Mathews kept me out of jail.”

  Water resources in Los Angeles were still severely depleted at the time of the aqueduct’s ground-breaking, but thanks to Mulholland’s previous attempts to conserve the precious liquid through metering and installing underground pumps, the present supply could meet consumption demands. When finished, the giant aqueduct would deliver 260 million gallons of water daily, and it was believed the city could continue to grow indefinitely without taxing the system’s capacity.

  The general plan of the aqueduct called for a straight cut of 22 miles of open canals, 43 miles of tunnels, 125 miles of steel siphons and concrete flumes, 137 miles of concrete-covered conduit, 13 miles of reservoirs, and a final 20 miles of connecting riveted steel main pipeline. This schema, as mapped out by Mulholland and the Advisory Board of Engineers, would be subject to such modifications and changes of location as might be found advisable during progress of the work. When finished, the route would stretch nearly 250 miles.

  Thirty-five miles from the mouth of the Owens River, the aqueduct water would be diverted into an open canal, 50 feet wide and 10 feet deep, then for 20 miles it would travel above the river bed. Next, it would enter a concrete ditch, 18 feet wide and 15 feet deep, where it would be carried along the range of the Sierra foothills for 40 miles. The water then would pour into the 15-square-mile Haiwee Reservoir (where enough water was stored to satisfy Los Angeles’s water demands for three years), and from Haiwee, it would travel a distance of 125 miles, through the desert via a series of closed tunnels and steel siphons laid into the rugged slopes of the western Mojave, where it
would enter the Fairmont Reservoir, under the north slope of the Coast Range.

  Released again, it would plunge into the mountainside, and for 5 miles course through the massive Elizabeth Tunnel, emerging on the southern slope of the mountains. At this point, it would tumble 800 feet onto the turbines of the two hydroelectric plants, enter another 7-mile-long conduit, then drop 700 feet to generate more power, pour through 16 miles of tubing to the wheels of a third power plant, and finally, come to rest in the San Fernando Reservoirs.

  The Sierra Madre mountain range, which climbs to a height of 6,100 feet, was the greatest natural barrier to the construction of the aqueduct. The momentous task of conquering it would require considerable boring to create the Elizabeth Tunnel beneath a small, water-filled crater called Lake Hughes, 67 miles north of Los Angeles. The tunnel was the great connecting link to the whole aqueduct and by far the most difficult engineering challenge. But when completed, it would carry water from the Fairmont Reservoir in the Antelope Valley on the north side of the Sierra Madre to the San Francisquito Canyon. From there, the water would easily flow southward to Los Angeles.

  Mulholland recognized that the time required to complete the entire aqueduct was in large measure dictated by the completion of the longest tunnel’s construction, so he ordered that the north and south portals of the Elizabeth Tunnel be begun simultaneously in September 1907, at the same time preparational work began. Mulholand put two of his ablest men in charge to oversee the five-mile-long granite bore. The excavation was supervised by field engineer W. C. Aston at the tunnel’s south end, and by experienced miner John Gray at the north portal.

  A native of Pennsylvania, John Gray was hand-picked by Mulholland to attack the more difficult north portal because of his years of wet-tunneling experience in the mines of Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico. He was a good choice. Possessing limitless energy, he loved his work. He had hired his only son, Louis, to work as a tunneler in the Saugus Division, thirty miles south, and was proud of the work Louis was doing there.

  Despite the inherent danger from falling rocks and dynamite blasts, the two Elizabeth Tunnel crews welcomed the work inside the excavation, where the temperature was a constant 58 degrees. Outside, the extreme desert conditions could range from a freezing cold 10 degrees at midnight to a searing 120 degrees by midday. Other than the cement plant at Monolith where 250 men worked, the makeshift living structures in the camps were without insulation and did little to protect workers from the elements. One engineer recorded a temperature in excess of 130 degrees during the hottest part of the 1908 summer.

  As Mulholland had hoped, by pitting the aggressive John Gray against Aston, he kicked off an intense rivalry between the men to be the first to reach the tunnel’s center mark. A great game of nerve and skill developed between the north and south crews, placing them at additional risk in an already dangerous task. At first, the crews drilled powder holes for the dynamite charges with antiquated hand tools. Later, when the hydroelectric plants were completed, they were able to employ electric-powered air hammers which, although facilitating their work, were so loud that orders had to be given in hand signs. At the end of each day, every inch of excavation of the Elizabeth Tunnel was painstakingly measured by the crews. The strain of the toil was severe and the work painfully slow: if five feet were gained in a twelve-hour shift, it was considered a real achievement.

  By mid-July 1908, the impatient and pressured Mulholland established a bonus system to hasten the snail-like pace at the Elizabeth Tunnel. A goal was set of eight feet per day; any crew which tunneled in excess of this rate would receive an extra forty cents per foot per man. Affording the men happy thoughts of extra pocket money, Gray and Aston organized highly efficient workshifts, Each progressed to nearly eleven feet of advancement per day. Any tunneler who could not keep up with the pace was given his walking papers.

  The team tunnelers were a tough bunch, often violent and crude, and Gray handled their boisterous egos without favoritism. In turn, they respected his fairness, pluck, and dogged determination, knowing he would never ask them to go where he dared not go himself.

  To be the first to reach the center mark in the Elizabeth Tunnel became an obsession for Gray, and despite the ever-present dangers posed by falling rocks and flooding, he drove his crews in a relentless pace to beat Aston’s south portal crew. At times, Gray was able to double his gang’s advance over the base goal. But he knew the going was generally easier at the south portal—there was less flooding and the bedrock was not as dense. This had allowed Aston to drive his men 604 feet forward in one month, setting an American record in hard-rock tunneling.

  But such was Gray’s zeal that during the period of Aston’s record-making achievement, he worked through five straight shifts to try to catch up. He and his men ate their meals standing waist deep in mud, sleeping only a few hours at a time, working round the clock to gain precious inches. Continuing to hit pockets of water, they were forced repeatedly to flee for their fives. They timbered the sides of the shaft, and drove overlapping steel rails ahead of the coring to hold back future possible cave-ins.

  By sheer strength of will, Gray pushed his crews almost beyond their endurance, and with a little luck in the guise of an unexpected disaster, he managed to keep pace with the ever-advancing Aston. In August 1909, Gray again struck deep water when his crew hit a large pocket of saturated sand and gravel. As one workman later described it, the tunnel shaft caved in with a loud, long “swoooosh,” and thousands of gallons of water rushed into the tunnel. Work on the north portal was halted for forty-five days while Mulholland ordered an auxiliary shaft drilled into the tunnel at a spot 3,000 feet from the north portal entrance. This enabled Gray’s men to attack both sides of the caved-in section simultaneously.

  At first Gray threw up his hands in despair, thinking he had already lost the contest, but Mulholland’s move actually gave him an advantage. The loose debris of the caved-in pocket merely had to be cleaned out by Gray’s muckers while others of his crew gained additional footage by boring in from the north side. Despite continued flooding, the north portal crew was soon advancing almost as fast as Aston’s. Relentlessly, Gray worked teams of between nine and twenty-five men in eight-hour shifts, eliminating downtime by developing a highly efficient relay system. As one crew of blasters completed its task, a new crew immediately arrived to begin work once the huge electric blowers cleared out toxic smoke and gases, then filled the tunnel with fresh air. Muckers would shovel the loose blasted rock into waiting electric boxcars, while drillers set up dynamite blasts for the next team.

  In the ensuing months, the steady sunset-to-sundown sound of distant muffled “pop-pop-popping” of the competing teams’ charges was literally music to Mulholland’s ears. Each “pop,” he knew, signaled one more arduous step toward victory.

  DR. RAYMOND TAYLOR was a familiar figure in the little northern towns of Lone Pine, Independence, and Bishop. His Franklin coupe with the alkali-stained water bag strapped around its hood ornament was frequently spotted rumbling along the gravel and dirt expanses of the aqueduct route. Born in Sycamore, Illinois, in 1872, Taylor had been hired by the city in 1907 to oversee the aqueduct’s hospital system. He and his staff set up nine field hospitals at various points on the line. They recruited attending physicians and erected medical stores on hospital grounds. At each large construction camp, Dr. Taylor employed on-site medical stewards to ensure sanitary conditions and render first aid. When necessary, they would send severely injured and ill workers to the California Hospital in Los Angeles for treatment.

  Taylor later said jokingly that he had joined the aqueduct to make money and for adventure—but he couldn’t remember which was more important. Money wasn’t Taylor’s prime consideration—he relished life in the desert. Like Mulholland, he was an avid reader and spent most of his leisure time reading history books. Joining the aqueduct team as physician-in-charge not only offered him a chance to escape the boredom of city practice, but also gave him a
once-in-a lifetime opportunity to be a participant in what Taylor was sure would be one of the greatest historical engineering feats of the new century.

  As work continued at a tumultuous pace, Dr. Taylor and his partners, Drs. Rea E. Smith and Edward C. Moore, examined nearly 5,000 men scattered over the 235 miles of aqueduct line. Each man had up to $1 a month in health care fees deducted from his pay. Meanwhile, Taylor and his partners’ income soared. “We were beginning to make some good money. I had given myself a salary, about $500 a month, which was very nice for me.” With it, Taylor was able to buy a two-story bungalow in Pasadena and eventually, as the project neared completion, his partners opted to retire to their comfortable suites at the elegant new Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles to handle paperwork. Only when emergencies warranted their presence would they travel to the line to aid Taylor.

  The repeated trips up and down the growing length of the aqueduct route made Taylor an expert in desert driving techniques. The “four-banger Franklin” with its lightweight frame and underinflated tires could bounce its way over sand and rocks and through the dry sagebrush where heavier cars could not pass. Desert temperatures might soar to boiling point, but the Franklin’s air-cooled engine would keep purring as long as Taylor stopped every so often to raise the hood and let the breeze cool it off.

  Here in Owens Valley, Taylor witnessed the same natural grandeur that had smitten Fred Eaton and William Mulholland during their momentous buckboard trip of 1904. When duties allowed, Taylor visited Owens Lake, taking hundreds of photographs of the magnificent lake and its wildlife. Whenever he visited the aqueduct power plant at Cottonwood Creek at the foot of Owens Lake, Taylor sidetracked through the settlement of Olancha, an old stagecoach station named after the Shoshone tribe which lived south of Inyo County. Olancha’s one-lane road was lined with tall cottonwood trees that cast cool shadows upon Taylor and his Franklin as they emerged from the desert sun.