J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

For many people, at least outside the far West, the mention of California’s water wars tends to conjure Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.” The 1974 film classic, starring Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston, is loosely based on the success of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in siphoning off most of the Owens River, a stream fed by the snowmelt of the Eastern Sierra, and bringing it to the Los Angeles basin about a century ago.

In an article that Adam Nagourney and I just wrote for The Times, we describe angry exchanges between San Diego’s water agency and a consortium of its neighbors over the roots of their 20-year fight over water. Lots of lawyers are involved.

But six decades before San Diego squared off in court with its neighbors — including the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power — over the cost and reliability of its water deliveries, an even more ferocious battle was under way. The farmers of the Owens Valley were actually dynamiting the aqueducts taking their water to Los Angeles, prompting the city to send in guards with machine guns to guard its infrastructure.

There are many fine accounts of this history, among them Marc Reisner’s well-known book “Cadillac Desert”, which describes water issues throughout the West and epic bureaucratic battles like one between the federal Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers over control of dam building.

But as this blog post by Christopher Hawthorne in The Los Angeles Times relates, Los Angeles’s resolve to win the rights to the Owens River by any means necessary arguably redefined the city and its character.



An alternative perspective is cogently summarized in this book by Gary D. Libecap, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who argues that the Owens Valley deal was the first major instance of water markets’ effectively working. He casts it as a farm-to-urban transfer in which the farmers got fair value for the water, particularly because the Owens Valley was not an agricultural paradise but a marginal area with alkaline soil and low productivity.

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Whichever version of the history is correct — the scriptwriters of “Chinatown” certainly took sides — no one was more crucial to the outcome than William Mulholland, the Irish-born civil engineer whose vision of finding water for his adopted town was as inspired as his methods were ruthless.

The movie splits his character virtually in two. One character is the visionary, careful and concerned civil engineer Hollis Mulwray, whose name lightly echoes Mulholland’s. The other is the charming, brutal magnate Noah Cross, who gets to utter one of the best bits of dialogue in the movie: “Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of anything.” Cross is the Machiavellian genius behind a scheme to torque political and economic forces to ensure the transfer of water from distant farmlands.

Mulholland was both a visionary and a tactician, finding a likely source of water for his city in an inland valley 200 miles away and arranging, with the help of a federal official who did double duty working for Los Angeles, to buy up strategic parcels of land. The property lay along the route of the aqueduct they hoped to build but also in the districts that could provide them with the political and economic power they needed to control more water.

When enough farmers who shared the responsibility for and the benefits of a particular water district were lured into selling to the water and power department, the financial pressure on the remaining farmers became intense. That was mainly because there were fewer people to share the cost of maintaining the plumbing that supported local agriculture.

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When 95 percent of the water rights along the river were in the hands of Mulholland’s department, an aqueduct some 233 miles long was built to take the water to the city. But because the amount that was flowing to Los Angeles was more than it could use, Owens Valley water soon made the San Fernando Valley bloom and enriched inside investors who were champions of Mulholland’s plans. (The relevant line from the movie, spoken by Jack Nicholson’s character, J.J. Gittes: “Do you have any idea what this land would be worth with a steady water supply? About $30 million more than they paid for it.”)

Eventually Los Angeles incorporated those farmlands into its boundaries. In an effort beginning in 1905, Dr. Libecap reports, the city acquired the land and water rights of 1,167 Owens Valley farms comprising 262,000 acres for about $20.7 million. (The latter figure is the equivalent of more than $220 million today.)

The one serious misjudgement in Mulholland’s plan was his calculation of how fast the newly watered city would outgrow the initial infusion of water. So Mulholland and Los Angeles came back for more of the river in 1926 and 1927, and some local farmers responded by repeatedly blowing up the pipeline. Mulholland then sent dozens of armed guards to protect his aqueduct. Soon, agricultural resistance dissipated. But the legend of injustice persisted.

For decades thereafter, the Owens River was reduced to a trickle; the department Mulholland built into a powerhouse still owns much of the floor of the Owens Valley. Public ownership proved handy when the federal government was looking for sites for interning Japanese citizens during World War II; the Manzanar War Relocation Center near Lone Pine was built on land leased from Los Angeles.

Mulholland’s legacy, then, is at best, ambiguous. (The catastrophic 1928 collapse of the St. Francis dam, built to hold some of the Owens Valley water, did not help.)

Whether or not the popular conception of this history, deeply reinforced by “Chinatown,” is correct — and Dr. Libecap’s book argues that it is not — there is no question that it still infects latter-day arguments about transfers of water from agricultural to urban uses in the West.

“The Owens Valley history is important for understanding the politics of water reallocation and the difficulties faced by water markets today,” Dr. Libecap writes.