Rivers in the Desert Read online

  It was always slow going navigating the sandy, rocky road to reach the power plant at Cottonwood, and repeatedly, Taylor would have to stop and re-start his car. By afternoon, his temper would grow short with the Franklin—and with the never-ending flies and the heat—and he would forget the beauty of the land. Cussing, he would wonder why he had ever left Los Angeles to go to work in such a godforsaken area.

  It was at the Cottonwood Creek plant that Taylor had first met Harvey Van Norman. The young engineer was in charge of building the critical generating facility to supply power for the aqueduct. One afternoon, Taylor arrived to find Van Norman in a tirade. “The thing that was griping him,” Taylor said later, “was that he had come up there to work on the promise that the officials would bring his wife up. He had been married only about three weeks.” He had suffered uncomplainingly the delays and shortages that hampered his work but he was livid that he could get no word about his wife.

  “If my wife isn’t up here inside of a week I will quit and come on down,” Van Norman told Taylor. Taylor had immediately liked the man’s frank and open manner. He looked at the primitive conditions surrounding the Cottonwood Creek plant and felt sympathy for Van and his lost bride.

  When Taylor left Cottonwood Creek later that afternoon, he had driven four miles in the Franklin when he saw a woman driven by motorcar coming up the steep grade. As they got closer, the two cars stopped. Taylor lowered his driving goggles and tipped his hat.

  “Good afternoon, ma’am,” he said warmly. I know a man who’s going to be pretty darn happy you’re here.” Bessie Van Norman smiled and Taylor saw the fine features and sparkle that had made Van a nervous wreck waiting for her arrival. Taylor noted she was wearing a wine-colored jacket with a pert hat and scarf to match. From her fresh appearance, he surmised that she had not been in the desert long, having made most of the trip by train.

  “Terrible place for a woman,” Taylor often said. “Two or three of them I know of nearly went crazy in the desert and had to leave entirely.”

  On his travels, Taylor would also take time out to watch the growing squads of workmen arrive on the standard-gauge railway that had been constructed to haul 320,000 tons of materials along the line. Taylor winced each time he read romantic portrayals of the workers in the newspapers. Behind the manufactured images of heroic crews laboring in efficient relays and surviving the dangers of hazardous operations was a different story, one with which Taylor was all too familiar.

  The new men usually arrived on the job half-starved, tired, and very drunk. Many of them hadn’t seen a square meal in weeks. Upon their arrival, they would sit down at the long tables of a crowded mess hall to gorge on what was probably the most food they’d seen in months. After a hasty meal, the men were introduced to a bathtub and told to scrub with lye soap and a washcloth. Their clothes and blankets were disinfected, and they were issued two clean bed sheets.

  At each of the fifty-seven camps were portable wooden structures that housed drafting offices and cook shacks, double-roofed to fight the summer heat and “wire-guyed to resist the brutal cold northers.” Alongside the portable structures stood rows of tented bunkhouses with dirt floors and no insulation. The bunkhouses were divided into rooms; sheets of rough cotton served as dividers.

  Two men were assigned to each room; the lowest-paid workers, known as “crumbucks,” cleaned these rooms for $2 a day. Sheet-iron stoves warmed the bunkhouses in winter and outdoor faucets from communal water reserves dribbled drinking water. The camps were peopled with draftsmen, cooks, skinners, stakepunchers, chain-men, muckers, and various craftsmen who made up the construction crews. The typical lowly mucker was white, usually Irish, and around forty years old, although some were in their fifties and sixties. He wore woolen undershirts and drawers, dungarees, hobnailed shoes and, if he could afford it, a jaunty-looking derby that he would use as a hard hat. Though a falling tool would cave in the helmetlike derby, it might spare cracking a worker’s skull.

  With men’s appetites to satisfy, wild saloon towns known as “rag camps” were built as close to the aqueduct line as safely possible. In the southern division, the largest of the boom towns, Mojave, became a mecca for ditchdiggers and muckers. On payday, the town roared, as though from a scene right out of an old Tom Mix movie. The town’s streets were dotted with saloons, gambling joints, and whorehouses. Hordes of gritty workers crammed the tented saloons to drink, gamble, wench, play prairie pianos, and sing off-key with scratchy phonograph records. Fist-fights, knifings, shootings, and murders were commonplace.

  One frustrated tunnel foreman admitted to Taylor that he constantly had to deal with “one crew drunk, one crew sobering up, and one crew working” To the consternation of alarmed city and water officials trying to keep the image of the aqueduct sparkling clean, Mulholland publicly admitted that it was whiskey more than anything that was powering the aqueduct’s construction. “No man will do the hard, hazard-filled work of driving tunnels or skinning mules through canyons, while putting up with the blistering heat, biting cold, and dust storms without some relief,” he said. Even Hugh Patrick II, Mulholland’s teenaged nephew, was spotted in the taverns—where the proprietors graciously paid for his drinks.

  Sadly, most aqueduct workers spent their money as fast as they earned it. “Today he is mucking in the tunnels of the Coast Range, recovering from yesterday’s debauch in Los Angeles. Next week he will be at work in the ditch behind a steam shovel someplace on the desert.… The unknown always calls to him, and always he obeys the summons. Too parsimonious to purchase a pair of three dollar blankets or a pair of shoes, he spends a month’s pay check with the munificence of a millionaire at the first point where he comes in contact with civilization and a saloon. He begins life anew with a raging headache and empty pockets,” wrote Mulholland’s secretary, Burt Heinley.

  Stakemen, as the roaming miners were known, worked in as many as nine camps during three or four-week periods; some gave different names each time. Each miner had his own goal, his own idea of what was called a stake, and the “short-stake” finished his tour of duty in a day or a week. Others would spend several months on the job, content with drinking their earnings in Mojave. And still others would work for several years and, after having saved a thousand dollars, return to Los Angeles, check into a hotel, and carouse until the money ran out. Some only reached the 18 Mile House, a bawdy saloon near Cinco. After a few days of severe insobriety, they would return to the line, unshaven and red-eyed, begging the crew chief to hire them back.

  A large percentage of the aqueduct workers every summer packed up and departed for the other side of the Sierras or headed to the Pacific Northwest, where the weather was milder and the work easier. When temperatures cooled, they returned, drifting back on the trains bound for Mojave. As a result, Mulholland found that the winter months brought his most efficient labor. With that in mind, he rescheduled his construction plans to capitalize on the seasonal fluctuation.

  As with any great enterprise, there were “human problems,” as Dr. Taylor called the persistent troubles in the saloons. He knew the workers were “easy customers for sorry whiskey,” and “it was a poor night when somebody wasn’t knocked over the head, robbed, and thrown out in the back alley after he had gotten good and drunk. Then he would either bum his way out of town or return to the job.” Men with bleeding heads were frequent sights at Dr. Taylor’s office the night after payday, and the steward from the headquarters camp in Cinco would have to go down to Mojave three or four evenings a week to “sew somebody up or once-in-a-while pronounce somebody dead.” The doctor was often paid for his work by saloonkeepers wishing to get rid of the “carcass” that lay crumpled on their floor.

  Workers were able to obtain whatever medical care they needed, including hospital and surgical services, although Taylor and his fellow doctors were not contractually required to treat “venereal disease, intemperance, vicious habits, injuries received in fights, or chronic diseases acquired before employment.�
�� Laughingly, Taylor knew that if he and his partners were to take the contract’s exceptions seriously they would have very little work left to do.

  “I knew I didn’t have to do it, but I just felt sorry for the poor cusses. They would work, many of them, until they got what they called a stake and then go to town and blow it on a big drunk if somebody didn’t get it away from them the first night. They all love a fight, in fact, I think they get more fun out of scrapping than anything else, except getting drunk.” But eventually, the saloon situation in Mojave grew so serious that even Taylor was leery about being on the streets at night. When required to sleep over, he stayed inside his hotel room, fearing to venture outside.

  More than once Taylor lent twenty-five cents to a miserable, broke, hung-over hell-raiser so he could buy a can of stewed tomatoes. The tomatoes, eaten directly out of the can, were believed to be an antidote for drunkenness. “At first I thought the stewed tomato idea was pretty far-fetched and with no medical foundation,” said Taylor. I don’t know why, but it certainly did work, and I always had a can or two in my bag to hand out.” Not surprisingly, the demand for stewed tomatoes in Mojave grew so great that their price soared to over a dollar a can.

  Fearing for the aqueduct’s progress, the Board of Public Works eventually passed laws prohibiting saloons within four miles of any aqueduct construction. Thirty establishments were forced out of business. Proprietors challenged the law as unconstitutional, and the case went to the California Supreme Court, where it was upheld. After that, the saloons continued to thrive, but were constructed further away from the aqueduct’s line. Whenever a new camp was established, a saloon inevitably opened nearby for business.

  Taylor’s partners openly disliked the outdoor life and gladly left the ugly side of field medicine in Taylor’s capable, sympathetic hands. His city-slicker partners, with their Ivy League educations and lucrative medical practices, detested the primitive conditions in the field and the ailments associated with the rough laborers, in particular, alcoholism and venereal disease. But venereal disease was the least of the doctor’s long-term concerns. What Taylor and company feared most was a sweeping epidemic of more common contagions that could pass from man to man, then jump from camp to camp. Not soon after his partners had departed, Taylor was confronted with his first full-scale epidemic.

  Initially, he found that many men were repeatedly coming to him with painful, infected hands. At first, he was unable to make a diagnosis, but after examining dozens of men with similar open sores, Taylor concluded they were infected with impetigo, and that the men were passing the disease to one another with pick and shovel handles in contact with the open sores on their sweaty hands. Fearing that the disease would spread like wildfire hundreds of miles up and down the line, Taylor ordered all men with sores on their hands to immediately report for treatment. When the spread of the disease was not stayed, Taylor insisted that the pick handles and shovels be cleaned with antiseptic at least once a day. “This was hard to put across,” Taylor wrote later. “The ordinary hard-rock miner is resistant to anything whatever that seems to took like an order, especially from someone they figured didn’t know a pick axe from a shovel.” Taylor was forced to enlist the help of some of the toughest men in the camps in his efforts to stop the impetigo. Eventually he succeeded in eradicating the disease.

  For a short time, Taylor’s duties returned to normal; he was making routine inspection trips up the aqueduct line twice a month. But one day, he discovered a worker at the Sand Canyon camp afflicted with typhoid. When others at the camp heard the word “typhoid,” they approached Dr. Taylor with loaded shotguns and demanded that their co-worker be removed from their midst or be killed. But after examining the infected worker, Taylor realized that moving the patient to Los Angeles would kill him; the trip was too treacherous and grueling. First, the man would have to be transported on a cot in a horse-drawn wagon to a railroad station five miles away, then put into a baggage car and transported to Mojave. Then, after a six to eight-hour delay, he would have to be transferred to a train bound for Los Angeles, then delivered by horsecart to the hospital.

  The sick man was already racked with diarrhea; since outhouses were used at all the camps, Taylor speculated that the man may have already infected many other workers.

  After placating the armed men, Taylor administered the “Brand Treatment” for typhoid, used routinely since 1861, consisting of a strict diet, nursing, and hydrotherapy. Since no ice was available, Taylor and his stewards soaked sheets in a tub of tap water, placed a rubber sheet underneath the patient, added a wet cotton sheet on top of him, then set up an electric fan nearby.

  When the patient was finally stabilized, Taylor had the man transported to a Los Angeles hospital. He had succeeded in controlling a potential epidemic, and had allayed the workers’ fears by urging some of the toughs who had helped combat the impetigo epidemic to support him in his efforts.

  Exhausted, Taylor left Sand Canyon, and headed north to meet friends for a fishing expedition at Rae’s Lake, near Independence. But on the way, while stopping at the Water Canyon camp, he diagnosed a driller with smallpox. The patient was put into the infirmary, isolated, and quarantined. Remembering well the lesson of Sand Canyon, Taylor placated the workers by offering free vaccinations. Trusting nature and luck more than any inoculation, only four out of three hundred men stepped forward to request the vaccination.

  Ten days later, Joseph Lippincott arrived on the scene fuming with anger because Taylor had failed to quarantine the whole camp. “I had quite a time convincing J.B. that was a very foolish thing to do. I told him that the only quarantine that is effective in a camp is a shotgun quarantine with guards. The minute the men got word of a quarantine, they would attempt to leave, and shoot anyone who dared try to stop them … if there were latent cases of smallpox, it would tend to spread it all over the country as well as throughout our own camps.” Despite Lippincott’s apprehension, Taylor calmed the men, and prevented the spread of the disease. Taylor understood his rowdy and rugged patients and had a natural instinct for his unusual and sometimes dangerous medical practice.

  5

  Noise of Many Waters

  We are laborers

  together with God.

  1 COR. 3:9

  “JUST A MINUTE, NOW,” John Gray chuckled deep inside the Elizabeth Tunnel, “and we’ll light up our little Christmas tree.” Covered in sticky clay like the rest of his crew, he activated the detonator, and nodded his head with each pop of the three exploding charges, counting each one as tons of three-billion-year-old granite and basalt were thrown into surprisingly well-ordered heaps, and clouds of black smoke and noxious gases billowed forward in the tunnel.

  Once the big electric air blowers were moved into place and the smoke started clearing, the muckers, followed by Gray and the blasters, quickly returned to check how deep they had wounded “the beast”—the blasters’ description of the granite core that they had been burrowing into for almost two years. Relaxing and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, the blasters waited patiently for the mucking gang to remove the rock trimmings.

  Suddenly, a massive cave-in occurred behind them, releasing tons of granite and debris. One and a half miles deep into the shaft, Gray and his crew shouted at one another in horror as a fifteen-foot-high torrent of water roared toward them. Scrambling for their lives, they clawed at the mounds of rubble, trying desperately to climb atop them to safety.

  Thirty minutes later, a mucker, the first man to escape the deluge, staggered out of the mouth of the north portal. Ashen-faced and retching, the man told the workers who rushed to him that there had been a cave-in and Gray and the rest of the crew were trapped inside.

  Immediately a rescue team was formed and entered the tunnel. Someone yelled to get hold of Mulholland and fetch a doctor. An old-time woolly tunneler, John O’Shea, now working as a crumbuck, moved to the mouth of the tunnel, dropped to his knees, and began to utter Hail Marys. After two hours, rescuers brought o
ut four blasters dripping like wet dogs, bloody, and gasping for air. The rescuers went back into the tunnel, but the rescued men, bent over and heaving, said they were afraid Gray and the others had drowned.

  At Jawbone Siphon, at Cinco, forty-five miles north, Dr. Taylor was informed of the cave-in. There had been other cave-ins at the Elizabeth, but none apparently as serious as this. Leaving behind the Franklin, Taylor quickly borrowed the Cinco superintendent’s big, fast-moving Stoddard Dayton sedan and sped away.

  By nightfall, Taylor arrived at the scene. There he saw William Mulholland pacing outside the tunnel, puffing nervously on his cigar. Taylor quickly walked over to him, shook his hand, and introduced himself.

  “We’re glad you’re here, doctor,” Mulholland said softly.

  Taylor learned that Mulholland had been pacing in front of the tunnel for the past three hours. Grief-stricken, Mulholland told Taylor that it was like having his own sons trapped inside. Although Taylor had been working the line since commencement of the primary work, this was the first time he had actually met Mulholland, and was deeply impressed by his concern for the trapped men.

  During the past ten years Taylor had heard and read so much about the legendary Mulholland and his amazing career that he was almost disappointed to see him in the flesh. The strain of the disaster, Taylor speculated, made Mulholland appear stoop-shouldered, and his frame smaller than he had imagined. Still, Taylor could barely conceal his excitement, hearing firsthand the thick, lilting Irish brogue that was described so often in the many articles and profiles he had read about the great engineer.

  The two men, they would later discover, had much in common. Besides a love of the outdoors, both shared the vision of developing the city of Los Angeles through the creation of the aqueduct. When the bond issue came up for vote, the civic-minded Taylor was one of the first at the polls in his neighborhood, encouraging everyone he knew to vote yes.