The Dynamite Raids: When Farmers Fought the Aqueduct

By the early nineteen twenties, the Owens Valley ranchers had understood that the legal system was not going to help them. The city had the water. The state legislature had declined to intervene. The courts had affirmed the purchases. The valley's agricultural economy was dying by design.

In May of nineteen twenty-four, a group of landowners decided to do something about it.

They seized a section of the Los Angeles Aqueduct at a point called the Alabama Gates, near Lone Pine. They opened the floodgates, releasing water back into the dry Owens riverbed. The occupation lasted four days. While they held the gates open, the farmers celebrated at the water's edge. Their grievance was not hidden: local newspapers were present, and coverage spread across California. The state sent no one. The city negotiated, eventually. The ranchers released the gates and went home.

Nothing changed.

In nineteen twenty-seven, someone used dynamite on a section of the Alabama Spillway. The infrastructure was damaged. The California legislature, again, declined to act. By nineteen thirty, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had purchased most of the remaining farmland in the valley. The agricultural economy that had survived two decades of water diversion was finished.

Local newspapers gave the conflict a name: "the Little Civil War." The city never acknowledged the name. The state never reckoned with what it permitted. The aqueduct that was the cause of the fighting still carries water to Los Angeles today.

The Alabama Gates are still here. The water still goes south.