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Water and Los Angeles: a Tale of Three Rivers, 1900-1941

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Water and Los Angeles: a Tale of Three Rivers, 1900-1941 DEVERELL & SITTON | WATER AND LOS ANGELES The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Lisa See Endowment Fund in Southern California History and Culture of the University of California Press Foundation. Luminos is the open access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org Water and Los Angeles Water and Los Angeles A Tale of Three Rivers, 1900–1941 William Deverell and Tom Sitton UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California Cover illustration: Crowds at the 1913 celebration of Owens River water finding its way to Los Angeles. From the C. C. Pierce Collection of Photographs, photCL Pierce 06844, courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons [CC-BY-NC-ND] license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses. Suggested citation: Deverell, William and Sitton, Tom. Water and Los Angeles: A Tale of Three Rivers, 1900-1941. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. doi: http://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.21 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Deverell, William, author. | Sitton, Tom, author. Title: Water and Los Angeles : a tale of three rivers, 1900–1941 / William Deverell and Tom Sitton. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016028675 (print) | LCCN 2016031387 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520292420 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 0520292421 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520965973 () Subjects: LCSH: Water-supply—Los Angeles—History—20th century. | Rivers—California—Los Angeles—History—20th century. | Los Angeles (Calif)—History—20th century. Classification: LCC HD4464.L7 D48 2016 (print) | LCC HD4464.L7 (ebook) | DDC 333.91/620979409041—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028675 Manufactured in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface vii Introduction 1 1. Rivers of Growth 17 2. Harnessing the Rivers 81 3. Rivers in Nature 117 Epilogue: What’s Next? What’s the Future? 139 Notes 145 Study Questions for Consideration 147 Chronology 149 Selected Bibliography 151 Acknowledgments 153 Index 155 Preface The two of us have been thinking and writing about Greater Los Angeles for a long time. Some of this work pertains to projects we have pursued separately: scholarly articles and books on this or that theme or topic pertaining to the history of South- ern California. But much of what we’ve done has been collaborative as friends and colleagues. We edited a collection of essays about Progressive Era California; we brought out a volume devoted to the 1920s in Los Angeles and all its attendant growth and cultural busyness. We worked together on a biography (which Tom authored) on Los Angeles harbor and transit pioneer Phineas Banning.1 Through many joint projects such as these, as well as what amounts to an ex- tended conversation stretching across many years, we have studied and thought about various facets of the institutional and infrastructural growth of the me- tropolis from the beginning of the American period forward. We approach the subject and themes of Los Angeles history differently, but those differences have been, in every instance, mutually reinforcing and, we think, enriching to our readers and students. Like they all seem to be, this project has been several years in the making. We knew that the primary source material on Los Angeles growth and metropolitan ambitions was rich and evocative and needed wider circulation among students. We also knew that the environmental history of Greater Los Angeles stood as a remarkably complex, hugely important feature of the history of the region, of Cali- fornia, of the nation, and of the world. Hence this project. In the pages that follow, we examine the growth of Los An- geles by way of the three rivers that play critical and fundamental roles in supply- ing freshwater to the landscape and its many millions of people. Our focus is on a vii viii preface riparian triptych: the Los Angeles River, the Owens River, and the Colorado River. They are, each in its own way and together as an interconnected system, of para- mount importance to the history and the future of the region we call home. In this volume, we limit our investigation of each river to a discrete and relatively short time period, from the start of the twentieth century to the coming of the Second World War. The era from World War II to the present is unquestionably important to the riparian history of metropolitan Los Angeles. We cast our analytical net ear- lier, however, because we believe that this four-decade period is especially critical to how Greater Los Angeles brought each river, in both different and related ways, to bear on the global future of Southern California. Perhaps a subsequent volume will pick the story up from the 1940s and carry it forward to the recent past. To be sure, the rivers and the ways in which they roll through Los Angeles and through Los Angeles history deserve far more than a single scholarly examination. We do not think that histories of these three rivers—so alike in some ways and so profoundly different at the same time—have ever been put together in the ways we try to do in this book. That seems odd to us: a missed, critical opportunity and obligation to deepen understanding about the region and the environmental and other challenges it faced in the past and which are growing more difficult with each passing year. Without the Colorado, the Owens, and the Los Angeles, there is no modern Los Angeles. Such a simple truism and statement of fact is but the first— important—insight about the region and its rivers. More complicated, and hardly less important, is to try to understand how and why the region developed such a complex technological, fiscal, political, and environmental relationship with three entirely different and diffuse riparian systems. The stories of Los Angeles and its namesake river, the stories of Los Angeles and the Owens River, and the stories of Los Angeles and the Colorado River are historical narratives that illuminate and illustrate broad sweeps of western and American history. That’s the purpose of this book—to know a region’s rivers and the ways in which those rivers explain historical change of gargantuan proportion and to know about broad themes in American history that these water stories illustrate and highlight. The prisms we bring to the river history of Southern California—political, envi- ronmental, technological—help us figure out the regional past and, at the same time, help us place the region into wider frames of western, national, and even international history. Putting this book together has been a pleasure, and we hope and expect that the documents (for the most part in their original grammar and syntax) and images that follow will help you think about, ask about, and better understand the South- ern California past. We hope, too, that in so doing you will find ways to think creatively about the Southern California present and future. William Deverell and Tom Sitton San Marino, California Introduction RIVERS OF GROWTH AND EMPIRE It all happened very fast. In but two generations, Anglo-Americans and the wildly expansive American nation established dominion over the arid landscapes of the far West (and the indigenous inhabitants who lived upon them) through inter- related, mutually reinforcing processes of conquest and violence. The brief and brutal war with Mexico (1846–48), a giant land grab ineptly disguised as a pa- triotic defense of national sovereignty, brought the entire northern third of the Republic of Mexico into U.S. possession, with California as the great prize. At the very moment of territorial cession, the discovery of Sierra Nevada gold suggested to many an American that Manifest Destiny’s fervent presumption—that God wished Americans and America to expand continentally from sea to sea—had been revealed and forever validated in the instant that it took startled James Mar- shall to pluck a small gold nugget from the millrace at Sutter’s mill in Northern California. “I have found it,” he said, and the world changed in the instant of his saying so. Our focus here in this book is on what we might call the next phase or phases of that conquering era, the consolidation and further incorporation of territory in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. In- stead of concentrating on gold and Northern California, we look here to Southern California, with a tight focus on water and the ways in which control of water is at the very foundation of Southern California’s meteoric rise to metropolitan power about a century ago. Just as the nation grew at a remarkable pace by way of territo- rial ambition and warfare with Mexico and Native America, so, too, did Greater 1 2 Introduction Los Angeles explode—in ways more urban and suburban than bellicose—from the latter nineteenth century through the early twentieth.
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