The Water Seekers by Remi A

Los Angeles gets first Owens River Water, 1913 Ranchers dynamite aqueduct, 1927 St. Francis Dam fails, 1928 Concreting at Hoover Dam, 1934 Drought intensifies Colorado controversy, 1 948 San Francisco fights Colorado flood, 1 906 From the collection of the J f z n ill o Prelinger h v Uibrary s t w San Francisco, California 2006 The Water Seekers by Remi A. Nadeau The Water Seekers City-Makers ^CV"' Dam NEVA INDEPENDENCE Alabama Gates v. Death Valley No Name Siphon A::\ >6 Jawbone Siphon \ A\^ %% M OJ %^ Tunnel ..;':". *-;y.E. ' ' D E ' St "Francis Dam : ''- *\\ ,' SAN BERNARDINO B REDLAt RIVERSIDE LaheMatherts II T PALM SPRING III LONG INDIO JahJacinto SANTA CATALINA III! ::::::::::: ill OCEANS1DE P A C F Cl FERRY/Glen Canyon Dam Site I ZS-&0 N A i J Bridge Canyon Dam Site Davi,s Dam a evcltDam (JraniteReef Dam CooJidge Dam ARIZONA TUCSON O lite!: ':*.. Copyright, 1950, by Remi A. Nadeau All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States at the Country Life Press, Garden City, N.Y. First Edition To my loving wife, Margaret Part 1 The Troublemaker, 3 Winning of Owens River, 21 The Big Ditch, 44 The Seeds of Conflict, 63 California's Civil War, 76 "We Who Are About to Die," 93 Flood and Drought, 115 Part 2 The Desert Blossoms, 137 Runaway River, 147 Dividing the Waters, 167 Tempest in Washington, 191 A Day for the Engineers, 218 California's Lost Battle, 245 At the Last Water Hole, 256 The Water Quest, 281 Bibliography and Acknowledgments, 296 Index, 303 Part 1 1: The Troublemaker Bleak ruins stand today in the cliff country of southwestern Colorado and northeastern Arizona, uninhabited for more than six hundred years. From the time of Charlemagne to the last Crusades the cliff dwellers flourished there, making advances in irrigation, architecture, rudimentary engineering. But, beginning in 1276, an appalling twenty-three-year drought struck the South- western country. It cut the roots of the cliff dwellers' civilization. Defeated by nature, they moved southward in quest of water, leaving behind the shells of their communities in the Colorado cliffs. In the sun-drenched Gila Valley of Arizona are the remnants of another Southwestern society the Hohokam people. A thousand years ago they had achieved an advanced civilization through the wise use of water. By patient, plodding labor they built elaborate canals up to twenty-five miles long, irrigating more land than any other people on the American continent in their time. They were fast developing an agricultural empire of the kind which founded the first-known civilizations of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates valleys. From about 1450 the Southwest was stricken once more with long years of drought. The great irrigators failed to find an answer to the terrible water famine which gripped their homeland. They migrated elsewhere, leaving their parched canals to stand unused for several hundred years. To the men who bear the responsibility of bringing water to the giant cities and agricultural empires of the modern South- west these stark monuments are dreadful admonitions. They offer unavoidable reminders that in this corner of the world civilizations have perished in ages past because they failed to solve the problem of water. For despite the technical complexity of our own South- western society, in one way it is more dependent on water than were the ancient ones. More than five million people now subsist in a region where native sources could serve only a few hundred thousand. Long, slim water arteries, with their dozens of capillary branches, bring the country its lifeblood from as far away as four hundred miles. Extending across arid desert and through mountain ranges, they are patrolled and maintained with scrupulous care. Should their faithful flow be choked off for more than a few months' time the civilization they nourish would have to migrate as surely as did the cliff dwellers and the Ho- hokam. Thus the lack of water, as the chief obstacle to growth in a society which is by nature determined to grow, continues to be also its chief problem. Since the beginnings of civilization man has tended to thrive most easily in regions of mild climate, where scarcity of water provides an immediate obstruction. Evidently it has been easier to search for water than to fight off the worst inflictions of nature in wetter regions. Thus the earliest societies in the eastern Medi- terranean were precariously dependent on a dogged development of water supply. Irrigating canals were the fundamental source of life in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. The master engineers of Rome supplied their city with a dozen aqueducts, delivering water from sixty miles away. Until the rise of modern cities these Roman aqueducts were unrivaled. In the early i6oos the spreading metropolis of London turned afield for more water, building a twenty-mile conduit from two great springs in Hertfordshire. The United States saw its first big water quest when the rising city of New York, bursting with a population of 200,000, launched its forty-mile aqueduct to the Croton watershed in 1832. On its completion ten years later, most New Yorkers agreed with the earlier prophecy of De Witt Clinton: "It is not at all probable that the city will ever require more than it can provide." But New York proceeded to ignore his words and perplex her water engineers with an astonishing growth. Her population had passed 1,200,000 when drought struck in 1880. The city was separated from thirst by a ten-day water supply in the reservoirs when timely rains forestalled disaster. Having experienced water famine, New York lost little time in reaching out for a new supply. A second aqueduct, tapping the full limit of the Croton watershed, was finished barely in time to save the city from another desperate drought in 1891. The Big Town's resolute expansion sent water engineers farther afield by the early 19005. A hundred miles north of New York lay an enormous new source in the wooded and sparsely settled Catskill Mountains; in the ten years from 1907 to 1917 the city built a third great aqueduct over the route, more than doubling its Croton supply. While construction was in progress another drought visited New York in 191 1, forcing house-to-house checkups on leaky faucets. Only by careful water conservation did its citizens hold off water famine until the completion of their Catskill Aqueduct, which served a population of more than 5,000,000. Outpacing all other American cities in size, New York was also pointing the way in the business of seeking water. It is in the western two thirds of the United States, however, that water has been scarce enough to call forth the most monu- mental aqueducts the world has ever seen. Finding water their greatest limitation in the arid West, Americans have gone after it with typical imagination and boldness. Denver, metropolis of the Rockies, had reached the end of its local water sources by the close of the nineteenth century. It first built a great reservoir in the upper reaches of the Platte River, causing such a rebirth in local irrigation that a new supply was imperative by the early 19205. With all possibilities exhausted on the eastern slope of the Rockies, Denver looked in desperation beyond the Continental Divide. By 1928 it had completed a giant six-mile bore, parallel- ing the famed Moffat railroad tunnel, to tap headwaters of the mighty Colorado River. California's bustling port of San Francisco, surrounded by the salt water of its own magnificent bay, was forced to go abroad for new water by the early 1 9003. Across the wide Central Valley the snowy Sierra Nevadas beckoned as an almost limitless water source. Organizations of nature lovers, however, fought to pre- serve the proposed reservoir site on Tuolumne River, and the city did not get the necessary land grant from Congress until 1913. After spending a third of a century and more than $100,000,000 in the struggle, San Francisco received its first Sierra water from the 155-mile Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct in October 1934. Yet it is in California's southern region that water has been the most important history maker. Here the arid Southwestern country of America has met the tempering influence of the Pacific Ocean. The wedding of these two factors has made Southern California one of the most desirable spots on earth to live and has been the basic impetus for an irresistible tide of immigration. But these same climatic factors have produced a crucial limitation water. Like the ancient races of the arid eastern Mediterranean, Southern Californians must root all growth on a hard-won water foundation. Their long campaign for this precious element has extended beyond California's own borders, has involved the ambitions of the entire West and the politics of the nation. To a large extent the story of Southern California's economic development is the story of its water quests and its water fights. Some of its most revered heroes are the bold water men who went to far-off rivers and, like Hezekiah, "made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city. ." Southern California's sparse water supply less than two per cent of the state's total might be less a troublemaker if it were delivered evenly. But the land suffers from recurring droughts, when the Los Angeles region may get as little as six inches of annual rainfall. And in the wet years much of the water volume runs to waste in uncontrollable floods, inflicting harsh damage and even loss of lives on the Southland community.

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