River in Ruin: The Story of the Carmel River

4. Water Demand Increases: A Second Dam Is Built

32 As Crocker lay dying in his room at the Hotel Del Monte, construction of a second, larger reservoir was underway in the confines of Del Monte Forest. In August 1888, about one hundred Chinese workers were again called on to perform the labor of excavation, burning brush, cutting down pine trees, hauling them off, dynamiting the stumps that remained, and driving a ten-horse plow. By October their numbers had increased to a staggering seventeen hundred when the midday train carrying another three hundred Chinese workers arrived in Monterey. The main work camp was pitched at the north end of the reservoir under some trees. The Chinese encampment was a short distance away. However, within a week some of the workers were taken to Templeton, California, to extend Southern Pacific ’s railroad line further south. Templeton, south of the Monterey Peninsula and in San Luis Obispo County, was a two-yearold town and was named for Crocker’s grandson. Originally, the town was to be named “Crocker.” At the time the Chinese workers were sent there, Templeton was the last stop on the southbound Southern Pacific’s railroad line. And, to the north across Monterey Bay, in Santa Cruz, observers were shocked at the Pacific Improvement Company’s investment: Not only was the water supply system to the Hotel Del Monte and burgeoning Pacific Grove and Monterey already larger in size than Santa Cruz’s, the company had also built a reservoir that cost more than the entirely new water system being proposed for Santa Cruz. A Second Dam Is Built 4 water demand increases Water Demand Increases 33 Everything was now in place: the Chinese Dam, the pipeline , the reservoirs. In a year the Southern Pacific increased its passenger schedule to three departures a day from Monterey, Sundays excepted. In 1889 Chinese laborers built a Southern Pacific branchline from Monterey to Pacific Grove, and with that the Pacific Improvement Company’s holdings on the Monterey Peninsula were fully opened to development. Crocker’s plan was irreversibly set in motion; the Monterey Peninsula was being transformed from a forgotten bypass to a major tourist destination that demanded more and more water from the Carmel River. Pacific Grove, becoming a religiously regulated town, was four years into a real estate boom. Monterey was expanding into neighboring New Monterey on one side and Oak Grove on the other, and there was pressure on the city to improve Alvarado Street, the main street. The Hotel Del Monte was booked to its Victorian rafters with the carriage trade. What Crocker had started was now in perpetual motion: the original building of the Hotel Del Monte and its rebuilding (a reincarnation that took just six months), transporting tourists to the Monterey Peninsula by the Southern Pacific trainload , constructing the first dam on the Carmel River, trenching a twenty-three-mile pipeline and excavating a sixteen-milliongallon reservoir to capture the water, and most importantly, creating a publicity campaign that would become dogma for ensuing decades. But the publicity campaign would not have succeeded as easily without the local newspaper’s zealous support for Crocker and the Pacific Improvement Company’s plans. The fact that the weekly Monterey Argus, Monterey’s sole newspaper between September 1883 and October 1888, when Crocker was putting his vast plan into action, was supportive of developing the Monterey Peninsula is one of the critical reasons—in addition to the support of the business community—why he was so successful. California newspapers at the time were rabidly partisan. Publishers had three political or editorial options. They were either Democrat, Republican, or Independent. The 34 Four newspapers, unlike their modern successors, made no effort at presenting “balanced” news to their readers. An Independent newspaper, for example, did not necessarily adhere to party line, nor was it neutral. It would switch from one political side to the other depending on the publisher’s view of what was best for developing the area. The Monterey Argus was Republican. The Salinas Index, twenty-five miles inland and the only competition to the Argus, was also Republican. If there was opposition to Crocker’s development dreams, it wasn’t obvious in the Monterey or Salinas newspapers. An example of journalistic bias was the effusive reasoning disguised as reporting by the Monterey Cypress in 1888, after the Argus folded. The Cypress, another Republican newspaper , boasted in a headline (all in capital letters) “a great...