Rivers in the Desert by Margaret L Davis

Author:Margaret L Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1993-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

ASA KEYES (rhymes with “tries”), the city of Los Angeles’s young, ambitious, and colorful district attorney, quickly entered the case. As a politician of shrewdness and skill, the outspoken Keyes recognized immediately that public outrage over the bombings could build his own career, and he pounced on the occasion, calling for the immediate arrest and indictment of the dynamiters.

But Asa Keyes’s hot pursuit of the “anarchists” faded as his investigation ended in no arrests or indictments. In one heated press conference, Keyes fumed that every resident in the valley “knew damn well” who did the dynamiting, but no one would say.

There was more violence. The first bombings in May 1924, were random, disorganized affairs that did little damage, yet caught the eye of the national press and infuriated Mulholland. The Lone Pine Canal was bombed a few weeks later when twenty carloads of ranchers detonated three boxes of powder, breaching the canal wall. The warning was clear.

Over the next six months, William Mulholland received hundreds of death threats, delivered by telephone and in the mail, both at home and at the office, intimating that he would be killed if he visited the Owens district. Mulholland never appeared concerned, announcing defiantly that despite the threats against his life, he would accompany the president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce during his visit to the valley the following week.

In fact, Bill Mulholland probably did not take the threats against his life seriously or fear for his safety. But it is clear that he greatly underestimated the antagonism in the valley and the violent lengths to which the men would go to further their cause.

Led by brothers Wilfred and Mark Watterson, an organized Owens Valley citizenry posed a formidable threat to the new water system. The Wattersons’ Inyo County Bank was the region’s primary source of economic life. During the post-war recession of the early 1920s the brothers had gained control of other banks in the region and refinanced most of the valley’s farms and ranches. Although they were trusted by the Owens Valley people, who often boasted they never foreclosed on a valley farm or sued a valley debtor, many ranchers and farmers were beholden to the brothers because of the mortgages they held.

Meanwhile, city agents continued to checkerboard the valley by purchasing nonadjacent plots of land and urging holdouts to sell. Their patience and nerves worn out, and their very existence now in imminent danger of extinction, the ranchers reacted violently. Lynch mobs grew in size, and roamed the territory at night brandishing nooses before terrorized valley residents who dared to show signs of selling out. In Bishop, farmers forcibly withheld water from the streams that fed the aqueduct. These acts of terrorism at first were ignored by Los Angeles city officials, unaware that they were indicative of a collective valley sentiment of rage.

Frustrated, Mulholland urged Harvey Van Norman and W. B. Mathews to go to the Owens Valley and do what they could to strike a deal. Led by

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