Tracy McGrady|

Blame immediately fell on Mulholland, who had supervised the dam's construction. One of the flood's survivors, having watched the waters swallow her husband and babies, put up a sign which affirmed "KILL MULHOLLAND" in blood-red letters. A board of analysis blamed Mulholland for filling the pond too quickly and ignoring signs that it was leaking dangerously. Shortly afterward, he was forced to resign in scandal. He died in 1935.
As Los Angeles boomed and its business leaders began to envision endless prosperity, Mulholland and his former boss, Fred Eaton -- a one-time Los Angeles mayor -- advised that the city would need more water to sustain its growth. They began to see longingly at the Owens River, more than 200 miles away, but the residents of Owens Valley had maneuvers for that water as well. Most of them heaved crops and ranched, and they were anticipating an economic bonanza once the newly-founded Reclamation Service completed its Owens Valley irrigation project. Mulholland and Eaton realized that to earn the Owens River for Los Angeles, they would must put an end to this irrigation project -- a mission for which Eaton was well eligible.
Resistance flared up afresh in 1927, while 4 masked men captured guards and blew up a 45-foot section of the aqueduct. Mulholland sent out horseback patrols armed with machine pistols, and issued shoot-to-kill arrays while the aqueduct was bombarded again. But by the next year the warfare was over. The Owens Valley Bank collapsed, wiping out the leaders of the against, and Mulholland's triumph once and for all seemed complete.
With millions to spend, Mulholland could after all begin the task that would phone ahead the deepest resources of his character: organization, vision and dogged determination. Over the next eight years, he would direct an militia of thousands across more than two-hundred miles of desert and mountain as they blasted out tunnels, carved out sluiceways, removed roads, laid railroad trail and ran power lines. When machines broke down, he used mules. When men vanished, he hired more. He was creating one of the engineering miracles of the old, and naught would get in his access.
What was quickly dubbed "the Owens Valley War" approached its climax on November 16, 1924, when seventy armed Valley men collared control of a critical aqueduct gate and entirely shut off the flow of the river. By the next daytime, about 700 of their friends and neighbors had added them for a massive demonstration of municipal solidarity. The California leader refused to sbring an end to ... the state militia, antagonism the demands of Los Angeles business leaders; the local sheriff declared himself a "friend and sympathizer" of the rebels. Newspaper journalists from as far away as Paris came to report on the picturesque scene. Even the Los Angeles Times editorialized that the planters were "credible, ardent, hardworking American inhabitants who look upon Los Angeles as an Octopus about to choke out their lives."
But the residents of the Owens Valley were not the merely ones out-maneuvered along Mulholland and Eaton. Mulholland of special note had characterized the accretion of the Owens River as a life or death material for Los Angeles. In reality, however, much of the water was to be accustomed because irrigating the handy San Fernando Valley, where a federation of private investors, numerous the personal friends of Mulholland and Eaton, had been furiously purchasing up land with the assurance that its merit would skyrocket. This same group of investors was fussy in securing corridor of the 1905 bond issue that would pay because the Owens River diversion.
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Born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1855 into a family of meek means, Mulholland spent his childhood in Dublin. He left family at age fifteen to become a sailor,Tracy McGrady, arriving in New York City in the early 1870s. He worked for a time in the Michigan timber camps and at a dry-goods business in Pittsburgh, and arrived in San Francisco in 1877. After a summarize stint as a miner in Arizona, during which he was hired to fight the Apache, Mulholland migrated to the Los Angeles area.
The completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913 was a private triumph for William Mulholland and the 1st step toward production his city the worldwide metropolis it is today. But this staggering fulfilment brought no end to the intrigue that had long surrounded the project. Despite Mulhollands's dire forecasts of forthcoming water famine, once the project was complete, Los Angeles base it had no need to draw all the water it had the rights to from the Owens River. Indeed, during the eight years it took to build the aqueduct, the city's population had more than doubled with no apparent strain on the regular water afford. But when the city had enough water, the San Fernando Valley did not, so Mulholland began to squeeze every drip possible from the Owens River, draining the harvests of the Owens Valley to make the lands owned by his monetary backers flower.

In 1878, Mulholland started what was to be a lengthy engineering profession with an inauspicious beginning -- as a ditch-cleaner for Los Angeles' private water company. Eight years after, the self-educated engineer had chance superintendent. When the city took over the water system, Mulholland was retained as brain of the Department of Water and Power, a rank he would capture until 1928.
Then, on March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam collapsed, releasing a 15 billion gallon flood that was one of the greatest civilian disasters in American history. The water began as a 75-foot high wag and scoured a route to the sea 2 miles wide and 70 miles long. In its wake it left much of Ventura shire beneath yards of muck. The last death toll was approximately 500; weeks later, bodies continued to wash up on beaches as distant away as San Diego. A horrified reporter wrote of the flood's aftermath: "Thousands of people and automobiles are slushing through the debris looking for the dead. Bodies have been washed into the isolated canyons. I saw one alive stuck in the mud to his neck."

ulholland's legacy stretches further his achievements and career. Much of the West's farming is dependent upon irrigation, and maximum of the revenues of such agriculture stream to landowners such as the wealthy San Fernando Valley growers who first benefitted from Mulholland's plan. The federal administration, through such agencies as the Bureau of Reclamation, enormously subsidizes maximum of this creation. While the construction of hundreds of river dams across the West has produced colossal agricultural bounties, it has too had an enormous environmental clash and given heave to large concentrations of economic and political power. The original goals of the Reclamation Bureau, to foster widely-shared small landholdings, make this outcome appear deeply ironic. While the rhetoric of the West has emphasized the solitary pioneer, through the fatigue of such men as William Mulholland, state agencies and the prosperous have continued to prevail the land.

As they saw workers of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power destroy the dams and locks of their irrigation system, the residents of Owens Valley decided to fight back. Early on the morn of May 21, 1924,Dwyane Wade, dynamite destroyed the Los Angeles Aqueduct by a structurally critical point. The city sent out personal investigators and attempted a $10,Ray Allen,000 reward, merely no an in Owens Valley would turn in a neighbor for what many considered one act of self-defense. The sabotage proceeded for months, and Mulholland received hundreds of intimidating letters, but his only comment was that he "half-regretted the demise of so many of the valley's orchard trees, for immediately there were no longer enough trees to hang always the troublemakers who live there."

A male obsessed with an engineering challenge of epic proportions, William Mulholland brought the Owens River to Los Angeles via a composition of decision and pretence.

The regional deputy of the Reclamation Service was a political crony of Eaton's, and he allowed his friend to examine critical land and water rights documents on the pretense that it was necessary for the orderly advancement of the Owens Valley project. Eaton, in turn, employee his friend -- at a generous salary -- to amplify the city's plan to take the Owens River. In this way, by the end of 1905, through a combination of natural land purchases and close bribery, the city had acquired enough land and water rights to stop the Owens Valley project.




PEOPLE A-C D-H I-R
S-Z William Mulholland
(1855-1935)