The availability of water proved to be of critical concern as the American Western frontier began to become settled and its natural resources became developed. While California was under Spanish and Mexican rule, and later when the first Americans started heading westward, the initial newcomers circumvented this problem by setting up homesteads and settlements near the sparsely located rivers and freshwater springs that dotted the landscape. This style of sporadic settlement by ranchers and farmers was able to maintain for a short period of time. However, this predated the 1848 discovery of gold in Coloma California at Sutter Mill, January 24, 1848, by James W. Marshall. This event reshaped the landscape of California both literally and figuratively. “The 1848 California discovery of gold caused an upheaval in the pattern of isolated communities separated by vast tracks of arid and semi-arid lands. Led by miners lusting for gold, westerners began to settle away from naturally existing water supplies” (Littlefield p.1). This eventually ignited a conflict that would last far longer than anyone could have anticipated. The Gold Rush marks the inception of the 'water wars' that have dominated California’s environmental politics ever since, due to the imbalance in where water resources (and people) are located in the state.
Shortly after James W. Marshall found that yellow metal at Sutter Mill, mass immigration the likes of which were almost incomprehensible descended upon California. What was once a thriving agricultural and largely pastoral economy ceased to exist almost overnight. Newcomers from all around the world sold everything they had and headed westward to try their hands at becoming rich. “Our best guess is that the non-native population of California rose from around 14,000 in mid-1848, to nearly 100,000 by the end of 1849, a figure that rose to one quarter million by the time a special census was taken in 1852” (Kanazawa p.4). The sudden influx of the new gold mining industry put an enormous amount of strain on the already short California water supply. Gold production and gold mining techniques require an exorbitant amount of water to function, water that California just couldn’t spare. Not surprisingly, when the demand for a product is so extremely high, and the supply is finite and dwindling, it resulted in a skyrocket in the value of local water. Because of this, a need for regulations, sanctions, and legal rules needed to be established to “protect” and define individuals' property rights and water rights claims for the first time. This constituted the inception of the so-called “water wars” in California. It is no secret in California that the issue of water, where it's coming from, where it's going to, and how it's going to get there has been of major concern since immediately after the Gold Rush of 1848.
To this day, the “water wars” and concerns over water rights and regulations have permeated nearly every facet of California’s environmental politics, and you would be hard-pressed to find an election that didn’t cover the water issue in California in some capacity. Following the gold rush in 1848, one event in particular really serves as a microcosm of what the ‘water wars’ are, and have become. Los Angeles, at the time of its founding in late September 1781, was just a small unassuming settlement in southern California. Los Angeles from the beginning was reliant on its own river system to provide water to the newly settled town. The river was dammed and channels were constructed to provide adequate water coverage and irrigation to the residence. Things changed, however, as the city began to grow it was clear that the river just couldn’t provide for a city that was flourishing into what would become a major American metropolis. This is where the precursors to “war” really begin to take shape. “It is a story of ideals rich in conflict, rich with incidents of great daring, deceit, achievement, betrayal and faith” (Kahrl p.1). The city leaders of Los Angeles had real aspirations of Los Angeles becoming a west coast metropolis. But, starting in 1900 until 1902 Los Angeles experiences a series of crippling droughts. These droughts served as urgent reminders that the problem of water needed to be solved before L. A could even think about being considered a metropolis going forward. With this in mind, the city of Los Angeles decided to try and remedy the situation. Up until this time, the water supply system had been controlled by a private entity called the ‘Los Angeles City Water Company’.
In 1902, the city of L.A. decided to buy the Los Angeles City Water Company and converted it into the newly formed Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. The new L. A Department of Water and Power absorbed and decided to keep the pre-existing head of the Los Angeles City Water Company William Mulholland. Two years later, the newly established ‘Board of Water Commissioners’ contracted Mulholland and a few other engineers to find or create possible new water sources that could sufficiently provide for the great Los Angeles area. After considerable deliberation, Mulholland landed in the Owens Valley area. Mulholland estimated that the Owens River if diverted could serve as the primary water source for all of Los Angeles. The Owens River area was a location that had not been passed over when early surveyors looked at possible prospects for areas of economic development in California. William E. Smythe, ‘the first executive secretary of the National Irrigation Congress, editor of Irrigation Age, and author of the seminal history of the American reclamation movement, The Conquest of Arid America’ surveyed the California landscape in early 1900 and commented that he saw zero “future for Los Angeles and other communities on the South Coast”(Kahrl p.10). Furthermore, he commented of the Owens River area that it was an “area holding special promise for the state's future economic growth” (Kahrl p.11). Smythe estimated that the Owens River area would become home to hundreds of thousands of residents in the coming century and be the epicenter of a “manifold industrial life”. Smythe was not alone in his optimism about the Owens River area, most notably the majority of federal engineers and irrigation specialists from the United States Reclamation service all shared the same positive outlook aspirations for the Owens Valley. However, William Mulholland of Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power had entirely different plans for the Owens Valley.
The Owens Valley presented a unique dichotomy between beautiful untouched green land situated in a virtual desert, while still being as Clausen (a University of California graduate and surveyor for the Reclamation Project) commented that the area was “barely removed from the frontier... the streets of Bishop, the main town, were still muddy tracks and for many residents, this was still a ‘country of Lost Borders [where] not the law but the lands set the limits’’(Kahrl p.29). It was a rugged and wild place where lynchings were common until 1908. Despite all of this, Clausen wrote back to his superiors and urged them to immediately drop all other courses of action, and devote all of their effort, time, and money to the Owens River area. While it is flattering that so many people took interest in the Owens River area the residents of Owens River had different plans for their water supply. This is where the real conflict starts to arise, the Owens River valley residents were majority farmers, and ranchers and the economy was mostly agricultural. At the same time the Mulholland was navigating and negotiating a way to somehow claim the valleys river water and divert it to Los Angeles, the Owens Valley residents were seeking federal funding from the Bureau of Reclamation for a public irrigation project in the region. Fred Eaton, Mulholland's former boss and Mayor of Los Angeles devised a scheme to bring the water from the Owens Valley directly to Los Angeles. “This was an idea that he had borrowed from two private surveys in 1885 and 1891 which had shown it would be technically possible to construct a canal running 235 miles between the two regions in which water would flow entirely by gravity” (Kahrl p.33). Eaton had been promoting this idea ad nauseum to Mulholland and anyone else who would listen.
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The Reclamation Service had heard of his idea, but like the officials in Washington, they too wrote it off as just another pipe dream to somehow bring water to Los Angeles that 'self-proclaimed” experts on the South Coast have been spouting off for years. Eaton shifted his idea to convince the city of Los Angeles to construct an Aqueduct to the Owens Valley River. He originally proposed an aqueduct that would be capable of carrying “twenty thousand miner’s inches of water, half of which would go to the city for domestic use under a long-term contract; the balance was to be distributed by Eaton himself to irrigators and private companies outside the city limits” (Kahrl p. 45). As fate would have it, the announcement of the Reclamation Project in the Owens Valley appeared to undermine and destroy all of the work that Eaton had put in over the course of ten long years. In a last-ditch attempt to somehow remedy the situation, Eaton went back to Los Angeles and convinced his longtime friend and associate Mulholland to set off with him in secret to the Owens Valley to convince him that this was the only suitable water supply capable of supply Los Angeles before it was reclaimed for agriculture. When the two men returned from there on a secret trip to the Owens River Valley, they both concluded that building an aqueduct from Owens River to Los Angeles was the best course of action. Using Eaton, who was the mayor of Los Angeles from 1898-1900 long list of extensive political contacts as well as the occasional kickback/bribe and back channel deals secured enough of the land and water rights in the valley to effectively block the irrigation plans proposed by the Owens residents.
By 1908 funding and loans had been secured and construction began. 4,000 laborers and construction workers descended into the valley to take on what would become the world’s largest aqueduct. 233 miles of water had been routed from the Owens river through a series of channels, canals, and tunnels onto a spillway in the San Fernando Valley. Mulholland of course gained national fame and attention for his design of the aqueduct, as the whole 233 miles were gravity fed, an unheard-of construction feat. in 1913 at the time of the aqueduct's completion the estimated population of Los Angeles was around 300,000 residents. The water provided was enough for millions more and lead to the explosive growth of Los Angeles as a western metropolis. Not everything was happy-go-lucky, however. The residents of the Owens River Valley saw their farms, ranches, pastures, and waterways all but shrivel up and dry out. Growing more and more frustrated seeing their precious liquid resource being diverted and dumped into the San Fernando Valley, protestors took action. In 1924 and 1927 a series of bombings along the aqueduct occurred lending, even more, credence to the term “water wars”. All of this culminated from the 1848 discovery of gold in California which inundated the area with millions of people and forced those in charge to somehow, someway provide enough water to the exploding numbers of residents. The 1848 discovery of gold in Coloma, California didn’t just lay the foundation for the “water wars” of the last century. The “water wars” are alive today and still permeate California legislation and environmental politics.
Former California Governor Jerry Brown in his years of service to California has been dealing with the “water war” since entering into office. In Brown’s 2016 “state of the state” speech he is quoted as saying “water goes to the heart of what California is and what it has been over centuries”. Under Jerry Brown the ‘water wars’ heated due in part to his 2016 16-billion-dollar plan to build two tunnels underneath the Delta to transfer water from northern California to southern California, which sounds familiar. The governor ensured everyone that his new plan would ensure a reliable water supply while not affecting the Delta’s ecosystem, however, not everyone agreed with Mr. Brown. Congressmen John Garamendi has been fighting against this proposal from Jerry Brown since the 1970s. Garamendi in an interview with VICE responds in opposition to Brown's proposal “you want to build a system that would destroy the largest estuary on the west coast of the western hemisphere. It’s the North vs. The South, it’s the war of water in California and it's been going on since the Gold Rush and it's continuing to this day”. In even more recent examples of the California water wars, our current Governor of California, Governor Newsome has had to answer some tough questions and critics in response to his dealings with the war on California's water. In a very recent article published by “USA Today” titled California's Water War Reignited in April of 2020, while the state and world are being changed daily trying to adapt and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, “one aspect of life in California appears immune to change: the state’s perennial war over water”.
Among other promises, Newsome ran on the promise to restore and revitalize California's water delivery system and put an end once and for all to the ongoing water wars. However, three of the most powerful groups in California water sued the state this week over Newsom’s April 2020 plan for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the hub of California’s complex water delivery network. These serve as examples to illustrate that the water war is something that has been ongoing since the Gold Rush of 1848. Water itself has been at the heart of California since its inception, and the fight to control the water has been a major issue in California politics that persists to this day. There is an old saying out west that goes “Steal my horse, carry off my wife, but don’t touch my water”. For California, I don’t think there has ever been a quote that encapsulated the state and its essence more than that. The 1848 California discovery of gold caused an upheaval in the pattern of isolated communities separated by vast tracks of arid and semi-arid lands. Led by miners lusting for gold, westerners began to settle away from naturally existing water supplies” (Littlefield p.1). While California was under Spanish and Mexican rule, and later when the first settlers began heading westward, the availability of water was a question that loomed heavily on their minds. Even at that time water scarcity was already a clear and present issue.
The newcomers to California circumvented this problem by setting up outposts, towns, and settlements near riverways and freshwater springs. This style of permanent and semi-permanent residency worked for a time as the state provided just enough freshwater to sustain them. The little rainfall and water that California did provide were enough for the sporadically dotted villages and towns near the state's riverways. However, that was a short-lived luxury by the time James W. Marshall discovered gold at Sutter Mill in 1848. In just four short years California saw its population go from about 14,000 people in 1848 to nearly 250,000 in 1852. That type of strain on the state's natural resources and ecosystem had to reach a breaking point, and it did. Since then, men, mayors, organizations, corporations, and conglomerates have been fighting over the most precious resource California has to offer, water. It is no secret that he who controls the water in California controls California itself. As a source told Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert in California “water flows uphill toward money”. The more I researched this topic the more disheartened I became at the results. As I read reports and sources from 1848 clear on to the present, one common thread ran through every single article, newspaper clipping, interview, and archival report I could get my hands on, and that was money. Before I thought this was a “war” that could be won. Now I don’t think it can be. The amount of money tied up in preserving who gets the water, how its distributed, and when is just too fiscally lucrative to give up. The reality is that the San Joaquin Valley Farmers control the interest of the water in the state which is essentially one company, Paramount Farms. The owners Lynda and Stewart Resnick use more water than anyone else in the state of California, including the entirety of Los Angeles. That stat is so mind-boggling it’s hard to even attempt to wrap your mind around it. Taking a step back a bit and looking at California’s “water war” it seems like a new name for an ages-old struggle. A precious resource with an incredible demand and a finite and ever-diminishing supply. California isn’t getting a major influx of rainwater any time soon, in fact, studies show California trending towards another long drought season. The “water war” will inevitably continue as the population, demand, and cost value continue to rise each coming year. I remain optimistic, but realistic in my pessimistic view of our “war” here in California. This research project provided me with an opportunity to delve deep into a subject I would have otherwise never researched on my own. It helped round out my view of California the resources and the residents who reside here. It has piqued my interest to look into this subject matter further and given me the resources to do so. A successful project or assignment in my mind is one that encourages the student to go beyond just what is required and engage and interact with the material and this research paper created an atmosphere to do just that.
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