Due to Mulholland’s Drive, Water Flowed

The year was 1876 and Los Angeles, as the history books tend to say, was just a “dusty pueblo” of 10,000. William Mulholland, a young Irish immigrant who’d come west working on railroad bridge projects, landed a job as a zanjero--a tender of water ditches.

Mulholland’s name now looms large in both the history and myth of Los Angeles, and for good reason. As L.A.’s population swelled toward 200,000 at the turn of the century and it became obvious that the region’s natural water sources would soon be exhausted, Mulholland embarked on an ambitious, surreptitious scheme to reroute the Owens River more than 200 miles south.

The self-taught engineer secretly surveyed the terrain and concluded that an aqueduct was feasible. L.A. civic leader Fred Eaton, who owned a ranch in the Owens Valley, quietly began to buy up water rights from neighbors without revealing the agenda. In 1905, L.A. voters approved the construction of Mulholland’s 233-mile aqueduct, an engineering marvel in which the flow was driven entirely by gravity and siphons.

When water cascaded into Sylmar in 1913, Mulholland tried to speak above the roar. “There it is,” Mulholland said. “Take it.”

In retrospect, his five-word speech spoke volumes about the city’s imperialistic sense of destiny.

Several businessmen enriched themselves by purchasing Valley property in anticipation of the water. Mulholland himself built a ranch in the northwest Valley on land he began acquiring in 1912.

The engineer’s critics blamed him for causing the deaths of more than 400 people in 1928, when the St. Francis Dam, a new structure along the aqueduct, collapsed not long after its reservoir had been filled. Family members say that Mulholland, who designed the dam and supervised its construction, was haunted by the tragedy until his death in 1935 at age 79.

To make suggestions for this series, write to Valley 200, Los Angeles Times, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311. Telephone: (818) 772-3303. Fax: (818) 772-3385. E-mail: valley@latimes.com