William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles (review)

William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles. By Catherine Mulholland. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xxi+411. $35.

Throughout the history of much of the American West no issue has been as important as water. A case in point is Los Angeles from the late nineteenth through the first decades of the twentieth century, when millions of migrants stretched local resources beyond their capacity. In this book Catherine Mulholland recounts Los Angeles's growth and resulting water problems during those years and her grandfather William's attempts to solve them. Her efforts have produced a work that is thorough, balanced—not an easy task given her intimate relationship to this controversial subject—rich in detail, and a good read.

Catherine Mulholland has four objectives: to show how Los Angeles acquired the water that was necessary for its growth; to examine the accuracy of the popular account of the Owens Valley controversy; to discuss her grandfather's role in the construction of Boulder Dam; and to reassess his culpability in the collapse of the St. Francis Dam in 1928. She tackles these subjects in fairly short chapters that follow William Mulholland's life chronologically.

An immigrant from Ireland, where he was born in 1855, Mulholland began his Los Angeles career in 1878 as a ditch tender for the Los Angeles Water Company. Then, water for the pueblo came primarily from the Los Angeles River through a contract the city let to the privately controlled company. Through several chapters Catherine Mulholland charts the course of citizens' complaints and officials' concerns about quality and supply that ultimately resulted in municipal ownership and made William Mulholland an employee of the city water department.

Though he was totally self-educated in engineering matters, over the years Mulholland's talents and work ethic were rewarded as he improved both the supply and quality of the water through the construction of reservoirs and pipelines, the introduction of metering, and completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The reader gains an understanding of how difficult it was to start and complete public-works projects because of the number of governmental bodies involved and the contentiousness of Los Angeles politics. Also, the public was always receptive to charges of official malfeasance because of the growing gulf between ordinary citizens and officials as the city's population exploded, and because of the difficulty citizens had in finding objective reports on civic issues.

The heart of the book concerns the Los Angeles Aqueduct, understandable given the controversy it engendered. Catherine Mulholland undercuts much of the popularly accepted story of the project, such as is depicted in the movie Chinatown and in Mark Reisner's Cadillac Desert, namely, that speculators in San Fernando Valley land created an artificial shortage of water in order to develop public support for the aqueduct, and that the majority of ranchers in the Owens Valley were cheated out of their water rights and fair compensation for their land. Instead, she presents a more complex story of competing interests. Some Owens Valley residents willingly sold their land while others did so only when it became clear that the aqueduct would be built irrespective of their wishes. In addition, some opponents of the project were land speculators who resided in Los Angeles—including prominent figures in its business circles—who aimed to manipulate the city into paying higher prices for Owens Valley acreage.

Also opposed to the project were the city's socialists, who believed that the greatest beneficiaries were San Fernando Valley land speculators, including friends and supporters of William Mulholland—this more or less in keeping with the Chinatown version of the story. There was constant criticism of Mulholland's work by an investigatory board as well as unremitting claims that aqueduct water was not safe to drink. While I commend Catherine Mulholland for telling a more nuanced story, her chronological framework makes if difficult to follow the course of opposition, some of...