On July 29, 1905, the lead story in the Los Angeles Daily Times announced the city’s purchase of land and water rights in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and an ambitious plan to pipe fresh mountain water 250 miles to a thirsty Los Angeles.
“This new water supply, immense and unfailing, will make Los Angeles forge ahead by leaps and bounds, and remove every spectra of drought or doubt,” wrote the Times. “With such an enormous stream of the purest mountain water pouring in here, Los Angeles will have one of the best supplies in the land… she will have assured her future for a century.”
When the Los Angeles Aqueduct was completed in 1913, it was celebrated as an engineering marvel, and its creator, Los Angeles water superintendent William Mulholland, was hailed as a hero. With tens of millions of gallons of freshwater flowing into the city each day, Los Angeles surged from a frontier outpost of 200,000 to a sprawling metropolis of more than a million in less than 20 years.
But to some, Mulholland wasn’t a hero, but a thief. In the Owens Valley, the source of Los Angeles’s water, lakes and irrigation canals dried up as the city diverted more and more water to feed its growth.
Then in 1924, amid a raging drought, desperate farmers and ranchers in Owens Valley took matters into their own hands. Armed with 500 pounds of dynamite, they blew up a section of the aqueduct and demanded their water rights back. Los Angeles responded with mounted police and armed guards to defend the pipeline from “terrorism and sabotage,” as the Times put it.
LA Water Wars Fuel a City, and Later Inspire 'Chinatown'
The Los Angeles “water wars” captivated the nation and decades later became the inspiration for the Oscar-winning movie Chinatown. But while the century-old conflict is usually cast as a “David vs. Goliath” struggle between poor, small-town farmers and moneyed, big-city bureaucrats, the reality was far more complicated.
The legacy of the “water wars” is a modern megacity that hosts more than 12 million people and continues to drain the Owens Valley and other distant watersheds.
“Mulholland was lauded for his engineering achievement,” says Lauren Kelly, a PhD candidate in history at the University of Southern California, “but I think the way he transformed Los Angeles and fueled LA's population growth really needs to be paired with an understanding of the enormous environmental and human harm that water extraction has created for over 100 years now.”
Before 'Water Wars,' Tribes Forced Off Lands
The Owens Valley is the ancestral home of the indigenous Nüümü people, also known as the Northern Paiute. The valley was once home to a wide river and a massive, 110-square-mile lake—all of it fed by seasonal snowmelt from the white-capped Sierra Nevadas. For centuries, the Paiute fished the waters and raised native crops in the valley using an intricate system of hand-dug canals.
When white settlers arrived in the 1800s, they called Owens Valley the “American Switzerland” for its verdant valley floor ringed by towering mountains. Ranchers and farmers seized tribal lands and used federal laws to lay claim to the water rights. The Paiute fought back, clashing with settlers in the 1860s. But with the help of the U.S. Cavalry, the settlers not only defeated the Paiute, but drove them off their ancestral lands.
With the “Indian problem” solved, Owens Valley became a prosperous agricultural community. Following the pattern of the Paiute’s hand-dig ditches, the settlers built an expansive canal and irrigation system. According to federal law, each landowner in the valley held water rights that were carefully managed and protected.
“By the turn of the 20th century, the settlers had irrigated the valley extensively,” says Kelly. “They created local water and power associations. They struck sophisticated deals with each other about water management and really understood water in the valley quite deeply.”
Los Angeles Buys Up Land in Owens Valley
In 1904, William Mulholland made his first trip to the Owens Valley. He was brought there by Fred Eaton, a former mayor of Los Angeles who shared Mulholland’s concern that LA’s accelerated growth rate required a new water source, and fast.
“At the time, the city relied on the Los Angeles River, which kind of comes and goes with the seasons,” says Kelly. “They were pumping with wells and driving the river further underground. With the visions of growth that Muholland and Eaton had in mind, they started looking farther afield.”
According to Owens Valley residents, this is when the thievery began. With Mulholland’s enthusiastic support, Fred Eaton started buying up tens of thousands of acres of land in the Owens Valley. Some sellers thought that Eaton was going into the cattle ranching business, while others believed he was working on a federal land reclamation project.
“My understanding is that it's not quite as shady and underhanded as people make it sound,” says Kelly. “Most of the Owens Valley residents saw what was happening as it was happening. The problem was that Los Angeles had a lot of money to buy people out, so the number of people who resisted selling their land was slowly being chipped away.”
Mulholland Builds Aqueduct, But More Water is Needed
With enough water rights secured in the Owens Valley, Mulholland convinced Los Angeles voters to pass more than $24 million in bond measures to fund the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. An impressive feat of engineering, the aqueduct uses nothing but gravity to transport water from the Owens Valley 233 miles to the San Fernando Valley via a series of canals, flumes, tunnels and siphons.
Construction of the canal ran from 1907 to 1913 and employed thousands of laborers. At the dedication ceremony on November 5, 1913, Mulholland opened the aqueduct gates, and as the water rushed forth, he famously declared, “There it is; take it!”
Over the next decade, Los Angeles grew at an explosive rate, exceeding even Mulholland’s calculations. By the early 1920s, Los Angeles topped 1 million residents. At the same time, Southern California was experiencing a prolonged drought. The flow from the Los Angeles Aqueduct dropped by 50 percent and city officials returned to the Owens Valley to secure more water rights.
By now, the residents of Owens Valley were determined to hold on to their remaining water. They formed the Owens Valley Irrigation District to present a united front. But many residents saw no future in the valley, especially as farms began to fail and neighbor after neighbor sold their land and moved away.
For the last holdouts in Owens Valley, the final straw came in May 1924 when the City of Los Angeles filed a lawsuit against the Owens Valley Irrigation District, claiming that farmers and ranchers were illegally using water that belonged to the city. That’s when the fight over water in the Owens Valley became a war.
'Water Wars' Bring Notoriety, But No Results
At 1:30 a.m. on May 21, 1924, a massive explosion ripped through a section of the Los Angeles Aqueduct near the town of Lone Pine. By the time authorities arrived, millions of gallons of water destined for Los Angeles were spilling across the desert floor. The Owens Valley had launched its first salvo in the “water wars.”
The unnamed perpetrators of the bombing were labeled “terrorists” and the mayor of Los Angeles offered a $10,000 reward for their capture. Armed guards were stationed along the entirety of the aqueduct.
The city continued to refuse to negotiate with Owens Valley farmers and ranchers, and in November the residents staged their most brazen act of rebellion. In broad daylight, 70 men took control of the Alabama Gates spillway near Lone Pine. They opened up the spigots and let the precious water run to waste.
The occupation drew sympathetic news coverage nationwide and the Owens Valley ranchers were hailed as folk heroes, but that didn’t stop Los Angeles officials from continuing to buy up land and water rights. More acts of sabotage followed, including bombings of power stations and canals along the aqueduct, but they failed to stop the inevitable. By 1926, 90 percent of the Owens Valley was owned by the City of Los Angeles.
A Growing City Reaches Further North
The Los Angeles Aqueduct was not the city’s only effort to import water from the Sierra Nevada. In the 1940s, the city dug tunnels through miles of volcanic rock to access the Mono Basin watershed north of Owen Valley. And then in 1970, it built a second Los Angeles Aqueduct that runs parallel to the first and increased the city’s water capacity by 50 percent.
“It’s amazing to consider just how much infrastructure LA has built up there,” says Kelly. “There has been this ongoing effort to push further and further north, and to use all of this engineering to extract as much water as they can.”
Today, the once-verdant Owens Valley is a dust bowl and Owens Lake, which was 30 feet deep in the days of the Paiute, has largely dried up.
