The Thirst That Drained a Valley
California
Picture a city that needs water, and a valley it has decided to take.
It begins around nineteen oh three, quietly. Agents working for the City of Los Angeles move through the Owens Valley, three hundred miles north of the city, buying farmland. They introduce themselves as private buyers. They mention no employer and no intended use. Some of them use intermediary names. The man orchestrating the campaign is William Mulholland, an Irish immigrant who taught himself engineering from borrowed textbooks and rose to run the Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works. His partner in acquisition is Fred Eaton, a former mayor of Los Angeles, who uses old friendships with valley farmers to make introductions and broker sales.
By the time Owens Valley landowners understand what is happening, the city controls enough water rights to drain the river.
The aqueduct is completed in nineteen thirteen: two hundred thirty-three miles of concrete channels, tunnels, and siphons carrying the Owens River across the Mojave and into Los Angeles. At the opening ceremony, Mulholland reportedly says only five words to the assembled crowd. "There it is," he tells them. "Take it."
Within fifteen years, Owens Lake, once one of the largest lakes in California, is an alkali flat. The agricultural valley that had fed Southern California for three decades is gone. The ranchers and farmers who stayed are watching their land turn to dust while the city they never asked to serve grows larger on their water.
Some of them fight back, and we will come to that.
By nineteen thirty, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has purchased most of the remaining valley farmland. The Owens River, which had sustained a hundred-mile agricultural economy, now runs south through a concrete pipe. The valley it drained is the valley you are driving through.
The nineteen seventy-four film "Chinatown" is a fictionalized account of how a city steals a river. Robert Towne, who wrote the screenplay, changed the names and the details. He kept the shape of the thing exactly right.
