A Conversation Across Time with the Man Who Kept the Ditch Running

The Docket's Climate Past section occasionally conducts interviews across the barrier of time. The following conversation never took place, which is the only honest thing we can say about it. Fennimore Gault is not a real person. He is, however, composed entirely of real conditions: documented land transactions, period newspaper coverage, federal land designations, and the physical infrastructure of irrigation ditches that organized life in California's Owens Valley between 1900 and 1910. Every detail of his world is sourced from the historical record. Only Fen himself is invented, which, if you think about it, is exactly what Los Angeles did to the valley's future.

We imagine finding him in the spring of 1909, at the headgate of a shared irrigation ditch somewhere north of Big Pine, California. He is 44. He operates and maintains the ditch for a company of seven farming families, though two have recently sold out. The Sierra Nevada rises to the west, still heavy with snow. Two thousand men are building an aqueduct 223 miles long, and Fen can hear the blasting from here.¹

You maintain a ditch. Can you explain what that actually means, beyond the obvious?

Fen: Beyond the obvious. Well, the obvious is a trench in the ground that moves water from point A to point B. The less obvious is that a ditch is a contract. It's a set of handshakes. Seven families, five now, each hold a share. I manage the headgate, I walk the ditch, I keep the banks from washing out. But what I'm really managing is the agreement between those families about who gets water when, and how much, and what happens in a dry year.² You take water out of a stream that comes down from those mountains and you send it where it's needed. The ditch doesn't work without the agreement, and the agreement doesn't work without the ditch. So when you ask what I maintain? I maintain the arrangement.

Two of your seven families have sold. What changes when a shareholder leaves?

Fen: The water still runs. The ditch still needs walking. But the share goes somewhere, and where it goes is where things get strange. A man came through last year, said he was looking to start a cattle operation. Bought the Hendricks place. Hasn't been seen since. The water right transferred with the land, so now I've got a shareholder I've never met, who doesn't farm, who doesn't need water for anything I can see. And I'm supposed to, what, send his allocation down a lateral to an empty field?

Do you know who actually bought it?

Fen: I know what I suspect. That's different from what I can prove, and both are different from what I'd say out loud at the store in Big Pine. You hear things. The Register ran a piece back in '04, small item, easy to miss, about Fred Eaton and Mulholland visiting the dam site with Lippincott from the Reclamation Service.³ Didn't mean much at the time. Then in '05 the Los Angeles Times runs this big announcement about a "Titanic Project" to bring the river south.⁴ And suddenly that little item in the Register looks like the first card turned over in a hand you didn't know was being dealt.

Fred Eaton lives in the valley now. He ranches.

Fen: He does. He ranches on land he bought for purposes he didn't disclose to the people he bought it from.⁵ Tips his hat. Runs cattle. You tell me what to do with that. I can't very well refuse to tip mine back.

The Reclamation project, the federal irrigation plan, that's dead now?

Fen: Dead and buried under a national forest. [He laughs, short and hard.] You know what the Inyo National Forest is? It's the land the Reclamation Service withdrew, over half a million acres, that was supposed to be opened for irrigated farming. Instead, Roosevelt and Pinchot made it a forest. A forest. I've ridden through it. It's sagebrush and alkali flat. You could ride for an hour and not find shade.⁶ But it's a "forest" now, which means it's off the market, which means Los Angeles can absorb it whenever they're ready. They named it like they were protecting something. What they were protecting was a future that doesn't include us.

That designation was two years ago, May 1907. How did people react?

Fen: How do you react when someone locks a door you thought was yours? You check the handle. You check it again. Then you start to understand that the lock was always the point. Some men went to the county supervisors. The supervisors wrote letters. The letters went to Washington. Washington is very far from here.

You still have water in your ditch right now, though.

Fen: I do. The intake for their aqueduct is below our ditches. They can't take what's already been diverted, not yet, not legally.⁷ So I've got water today. I'll have water tomorrow. But I'm irrigating land that has no future I can see. Who's going to buy a farm here? Who's going to move to a valley where the river's been promised to a city 230 miles away? The water runs and the land grows alfalfa and the alfalfa is worth what it was worth last year.

But the possibility of the place. That's what's been taken. Not the water. Not yet. The possibility.

There's a writer, Mary Austin, who published a book about this region. The Country of Lost Borders. Have you read it?

Fen: I know of her. She lived down in Independence, left a few years back.⁸ My wife read the earlier book, the one about the land of little rain. Said it was the first time she'd seen someone write about this country like it was worth writing about on its own terms. Not just a place to pass through on the way to somewhere better. Lost Borders I haven't read. But the title. Lost Borders. That's about right, isn't it? The lines on the map say Inyo County. The water says Los Angeles.

Some of your neighbors seem to have done well selling. The prices aren't bad.

Fen: [Long pause.] Some have. And I don't judge a man for selling. When someone shows up with cash money for land you've been scraping a living off of, and you've got children, and the Reclamation project that was going to make everything better is dead, and there's a "forest" where your future was supposed to be, selling is rational. Maybe it's the most rational thing anyone in this valley can do right now.

What are you going to do?

Fen: Walk the ditch. Fix the bank where the muskrats got into it last week. Open the headgate in the morning and close it at night. Keep the arrangement going for as long as there are enough of us to arrange.

Between 1905 and 1935, Los Angeles purchased land and water rights from approximately 1,800 property owners in the Owens Valley, eventually acquiring 95 percent of the valley's farm acreage.¹¹ The aqueduct was completed in 1913. When water first flowed to Los Angeles, William Mulholland reportedly said: "There it is. Take it." By the 1920s, the valley's agricultural economy had largely collapsed. Residents dynamited the aqueduct in protest in 1924 and 1927. The protests failed. The ditch companies dissolved.

Today, most of the original Inyo National Forest land is owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.¹² The city still draws water from the Owens Valley. The riverbed downstream of the aqueduct intake was dry for decades. Communities across the American West now face their own versions of Fen's question. In Phoenix, subdivisions sit on aquifers whose decline curves are public knowledge. Along the Gulf Coast, insurance markets are retreating from zip codes where people still have mortgages. The water runs, the house stands, the policy renews for one more year. But the possibility of the place has already started to leave.

Footnotes

1. History.com, "Los Angeles Aqueduct," https://www.history.com/articles/los-angeles-aqueduct — Mulholland directed construction with more than 2,000 workers digging 164 tunnels across 223 miles. ↩

2. Owens Valley Committee, "OV Water History," https://owensvalley.org/2-1-ov-water-history-ltwa/ — "Through an ingenious system of irrigation ditches and canals, the farmers had managed to send water wherever it was needed in the entire valley." ↩

3. Anderson Valley Advertiser, "The Origins of LA's Owens Valley Water Theft," https://theava.com/archives/237530 — The Inyo Register ran a small item on September 29, 1904 noting Eaton, Mulholland, and Lippincott's visit to the dam site. ↩

4. History.com, "The California Water Wars," https://www.history.com/articles/water-wars-los-angeles-aquaduct — The Los Angeles Times broke the story in July 1905 as a "Titanic Project to Give City a River." ↩

5. EBSCO Research Starters, "Farmers Dynamite the Los Angeles Aqueduct," https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/farmers-dynamite-los-angeles-aqueduct — Eaton moved to the Owens Valley to become a cattle rancher on the land he purchased; his close association with Lippincott led to the misapprehension that land was being purchased for the federal project. ↩

6. Wikipedia, "Inyo National Forest," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inyo_National_Forest — Established May 25, 1907 by Roosevelt, covering 221,324 acres, the forest was "one of the least wooded forests in the U.S. National Forest system." ↩

7. St. Francis Dam Memorial, "Los Angeles Aqueduct: A Comprehensive History," https://stfrancisdammemorial.org/history-of-the-los-angeles-aqueduct/ — Because the aqueduct intake was below the irrigation ditches, "the city cannot deprive the farmers of their water." ↩

8. Lady Science, "Mary Hunter Austin, Chronicler of the American West," https://www.ladyscience.com/essays/mary-hunter-austin-writer-american-west-birthday — Austin separated from her husband in 1905; The Country of Lost Borders was published in 1909. ↩

9. Gary D. Libecap, NBER Working Paper 10801, https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/10801.html — The scholarly record contains genuine disagreement about whether Owens Valley sales were voluntary market transactions or structurally coerced. ↩

10. History.com, "Los Angeles Aqueduct," https://www.history.com/articles/los-angeles-aqueduct ↩

11. Libecap, NBER Working Paper 10801; EBSCO Research Starters — Between 1905 and 1935, negotiations involved approximately 1,800 property owners; Los Angeles ultimately acquired 95% of farm acreage. ↩

12. Wikipedia, "Inyo National Forest," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inyo_National_Forest — "Most of the original lands designated as the Inyo National Forest are no longer part of the Forest and are now owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power." ↩