Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown
280
Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown
280Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781947856349 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rare Bird Books |
| Publication date: | 04/16/2019 |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Sales rank: | 619,861 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Thirsty
By Marc Weingarten
Rare Bird Books
Copyright © 2016 Marc WeingartenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-942600-02-2
CHAPTER 1
PART 1: BACKWATER, 1877–1904
PROMISED LAND
William Mulholland arrived on the coast of San Francisco in January 1877. He had five dollars in his pocket and a vague notion of visiting acquaintances south of the city. He was twenty-two.
How did Mulholland get here? It was less a question of desire than need. Given young Mulholland's straitened options in his hometown, the suffocating parochialism and class-based hierarchy, it only followed that opportunity was going to be found elsewhere. As the first of his family to vault his imagination beyond the reach of the Irish Sea, there was never a question that he needed to find a means of escape.
From the start, Mulholland was in search of his main chance. And if he was going to try and make something of himself, he might as well do it in an hospitable environment. Dublin, Mulholland's hometown, was an ink blot, dank and grimy, a town that the industrial revolution had passed by. Guinness brewed their beer there; Jameson's distilled their whiskey there, too. It was a city of manual labor and lateral mobility. To Mulholland, it was slow death.
So he flung himself out like a slingshot toward the sea.
He had left behind an emotionally barren domestic life. Mulholland regarded his father Hugh, a guard with the Royal British Mail, as miserable and bitter. A cautionary tale for the son, then. So William clung to his mother Ellen, a "lively and nurturing spirit" who passed away when Bill was only seven. At the time of her death, she had already buried two infant daughters.
School life wasn't much better. As a teenager, William attended the O'Connell School; he dropped out before completing his course work.
For succor, Mulholland turned toward the Irish sea. As a child, he had read about great battles that took place right outside his window. He would often cut school and hang out on the docks to listen to the sailors spin their maritime apocrypha. Now young William would try to write his own chapter in one of those stories.
Which is why he found himself on the west coast of California in 1877. But he took a circuitous route.
Mulholland quickly discovered that he was an adrenaline junkie, but that hard work was his true north. At eighteen, William joined the British Merchant Marine to sail on its grand, three-masted merchant ship Gleniffer. The wages were penurious: about ten dollars week. But that was enough for Mulholland to get by, and the education to be found onboard was invaluable. Mulholland learned how to read the ocean like he read his beloved history books. The weather became a living thing to him, and he studied meteorological patterns and the cycles of the sun and the moon. It was the start of his life as an autodidact of extraordinary reach and range.
Disembarking from Gleniffer in the fall of 1874, Mulholland landed in New York City (he marveled at the tall buildings, but also shirked from them) and from there, moved on to Michigan, where the young seaman had heard tales of a thriving logging industry that needed young men with strong backs. Mulholland toiled on fishing boats in the Great Lakes in the summer, then moved onto the lumber camps in winter, working as a "sawyer" under frequently punishing conditions — subzero temperatures that numbed Mulholland's hands as he sawed tree limbs into logs.
A logging accident put Mulholland in the hospital during his tenure in Michigan. Fearing amputation from an erysipelas infection in his leg, Mulholland slipped the nurses and made his way to Cincinnati. Mercifully, his infection eventually healed. As his leg got better, so the pace of Mulholland's life quickened, as he moved from city to city for other lumber jobs and new adventures.
Mulholland had to keep moving forward — it was either that or the aimless nomadic life that had befallen those roughnecks he met on the Dublin docks. Mulholland picked up work where he could. He even hooked up with some gypsies for a spell and traveled around the Midwest fixing people's clocks and lathing scissors and knives. He was inching West, but in a wayward fashion.
Arriving in Philadelphia, Mulholland found his uncle, Richard Deakers, who owned a dry goods store in Pittsburgh. Mulholland was welcomed into a well-ordered Christian household run with brisk efficiency by Deaker's wife Catherine. It was the placid domestic hearth that had eluded him at home, and he reveled in it.
Deaker's dry goods job was the most remunerative work yet, if somewhat dull. Mulholland found, however, that he was quite good at it, and earned "somewhat of a business reputation in the county." William's younger brother Hugh Jr. eventually joined him, and the two went into business together. But Mulholland had no desire to be a small-business owner. Men of action didn't run dry goods stores.
Tuberculosis was creeping into the Deaker residence. Richard's two young children were wheezing and coughing up sputum striated with blood. Catherine's brothers were ranchers in San Diego, and the best thing for TB was temperate weather. It was a wrenching decision to leave Pittsburgh for California, but Richard Deaker's options were few and time was running out. The family shipped West.
William and Hugh Mulholland Jr. decided to cast their lot with the Deakers; they had little else holding them down in Pennsylvania. Lacking the money for proper passage, they would travel in steerage as stowaways.
Sneaking onto the Crescent City schooner in New York harbor on December 9, 1876, William and Hugh Jr. made it to Colón, Panama, before they were caught and left to fend for themselves. Lacking the twenty-five-dollar fee for train fare to Balboa, Panama, William and Hugh Jr. walked there, instead — for forty-seven miles. It was to be a kind of crucible for Mulholland — if he didn't make it through, then he would be flung back toward Dublin, back into a life with no open doors.
The dangers inherent in traversing the Panama Isthmus were manifold in the late eighteen hundreds. The elevation of the terrain was both monotonously flat and dangerously steep; Mulholland had to hike up mountains wearing flat-soled shoes. The jungle was not only thick with vegetation but suffused with a kind of brackish sludge; Mulholland had to wade through muck up to his thighs in some places. And the heat was overwhelming, relieved only by great squalls that materialized at a moment's notice, which meant Mulholland, when he wasn't on the verge of heat prostration, was getting drenched to the bone. It felt like negotiating quicksand. Disease-bearing insects were omnipresent. Even if Mulholland made it through the jungle unscathed, there was also the ever-present danger of dysentery, cholera, and Chagres fever, a sandfly-borne disease characterized by vomiting, muscle pain, weakness, and crashing headaches.
By the time Mulholland and his brother made it to the port at Colon, William was so depleted that he couldn't summon the strength to take a drink. But then Hugh and William cast their eyes upon the Pacific Ocean, and knew that the arduous trek had been worth it. Mulholland noted years later that "I would walk that far today to make twenty-five dollars."
Eventually, the Mulhollands made their way to Balboa, the port city for ships heading West. From Balboa, Mulholland found work on a ship headed to Acapulco, but first it would make a stop in San Francisco. This arrangement worked well for the young Mulholland; from San Francisco, he could work his way south to Los Angeles and reconnect with the Deakers for steady employment. He would have to part ways with his brother Hugh, who decided to stay in Panama for the time being. The two brothers wouldn't see each other for many years.
Mulholland's ship sailed through the San Francisco Bay in February 1877. He was duly impressed with San Francisco and even found the time to make a brief visit to the University of California at Berkeley, which was under construction. It was the closest Mulholland would ever get to an institute of higher learning in the States, though Berkeley would confer an honorary degree to Mulholland years later.
Mulholland was taken by San Francisco, but he was determined to make it down to Southern California. In order to do so, he would have to travel through the San Joaquin Valley, in the state's midsection. After eight days, Mulholland found himself in Bakersfield, a city in the Central Valley roughly two hundred miles from Los Angeles. From Bakersfield, Mulholland moved south via buckboard, then arrived in Los Angeles, exhausted but renewed by this alien, yet agreeable, new city.
It was as if Mulholland had passed over from L. Frank Baum's dreary Kansas into the land of Oz. There was abundant vegetation, regal mountain ranges, a pristine shoreline: an empyrean, a wonderland. Some part of Los Angeles' efflorescence connected Mulholland to his ancestral roots in Dublin, but it was bright and sunny here, not rainy and shrouded by clouds. He fell in love with it instantly. "It was the most attractive town I had ever seen," he recalled years later. For the first time in his life, Mulholland would sit still, acclimate himself to his surroundings. He would make Los Angeles his home for the rest of his life.
William Mulholland had arrived in a city that had been jostled by overlapping waves of invasion, settlement, and retreat. Los Angeles was a vast region in terms of landmass, but the total population in 1881 was only eleven thousand. In many respects, Los Angeles was an outlier of the West, lawless and unruly. But William didn't know any of this, at least not yet.
In some respects, Mulholland's initial impressions were the observations of a rube. By any objective measure, Los Angeles was primitive — at least the developed, urbanized part of the city that had grown up around the Los Angeles River. In fact, Los Angeles was two cities: the rural countryside that Mulholland admired, and the grimy commercial core which was bisected by the river.
But to call Los Angeles a city at all in the 1870s was a misnomer. It was still in its troubled infancy, jostling its way into modernity. It was barely a city at all, having been formally incorporated into the United States in 1847, less than thirty years prior to Mulholland's arrival.
Los Angeles was unmanageable for a start, lacking basic services and the resources to function properly. The sidewalks were just packed dirt, the curbs made of wooden boards. The dust that built up on the ungraded roads in town was so thick it climbed up to a man's ankles. Wind was a constant terror. When it rained, the streets turned to slurry and were impossible to navigate. On the city's busy commercial streets, pedestrians had to negotiate a riot of merchant stands, bootblacks, fruit hawkers, and patent-remedy hucksters. There was refuse, animals, and, putrescence everywhere. Packs of mongrel dogs roamed the town like mangy sentries. If they became too much trouble or nipped at too many heels, they were either shot at or poisoned with strychnine.
And yet, Mulholland would always profess that his romance with Los Angeles began right on that first day, when he pulled into town from Bakersfield.
"It was the most attractive town I had ever seen," he recalled years later. "The people were hospitable. There was plenty to do and a fair compensation offered for whatever you did. In fact, the country had the same attraction for me that it had for the Indians who originally chose this spot as their place to live."
Navigating his way through the streets of the main business district, Mulholland would have seen signs of industry. There were low-slung storefronts similar to the dry goods store he left behind in Pennsylvania, as well as warehouses full of hay and grain; wheat was the predominant crop being grown by farmers at the time. At the end of the road was the International Savings and Exchange Bank — banks and hotels being the tallest structures in the city. But elsewhere, radiating outward from the town center, he would have observed the other Los Angeles — groves of oranges, acorns, currants, blackberries, and fields of gillyflower, jessamine, and tuberose. The groves might have looked forlorn to him, as well as the walnut vineyards, which had just been pruned two months earlier. But it was more color than he had ever witnessed in Dublin.
The most conspicuous landmarks in the city were the various "blocks," brick buildings where multiple businesses might set up shop, and around which other, smaller establishments clustered. Temple block was the most prominent of these zones. There was also Downey block, where a courthouse stood. On Main and Third, a brewery was housed in a two-story brick building, while another brick structure with a grocery store, assembly hall, and dancing hall could be found on the east side of the street. Main street from the Plaza to Temple block was the place where most business transactions took place; beyond that it was adobe houses for the most part, inhabited by Mexican families who worked for penurious wages.
Moving north on Main street toward Los Angeles Plaza, Mulholland would have seen the Pico House, a three-story hotel built in the Italianate style under the supervision of former Mexican Governor of Alta Los Angeles, Pio Pico (it was known as the National Hotel at the time.) Crossing the road onto Los Angeles street, there were a couple of dry goods stores, which furnished supplies for freighters. There was also John Goller's blacksmith, wagon, and gun shop, one of the busier establishments in town.
There was one of virtually every type of business to be found. A dentist named J. C. Crawford had an office on Temple Street. There was a wine and brandy merchant called Vache Bros. which had a busy "sample room" in the back. Nordlinger's jewelry store, Harper hardware, Workman brothers saddlery: Mulholland marveled at the variety of goods for sale in such a small business district.
Vestiges of the city's Spanish and Mexican past were subtle yet present if Mulholland knew where to look. On the west side of the central plaza was a church that was built during Mexican rule bearing the name "Nuestra Señora, Reina de Los Angeles," the full title of the city when it was christened by the Spanish. The church served as the gateway to Sonoratown, a Mexican enclave where families lived in whitewashed adobe houses with dirt floors. This was perhaps a none-too-subtle reminder that, despite its incipient polyglot flavor, Los Angeles was very much segregated along ethnic lines.
If Mulholland had made his way to the cross-street below the Plaza church to a tiny hundred-foot-long block extending from Main to New High street, he would have found a two-story building tucked away, with imposing windows running the length of the ground floor. These were the offices of Prudent Beaudry, a man who had made his fortune developing the hilly land northwest of the city center, a forbidding region that had no one else had dared to try and develop. In a few short years, Mulholland would be working for Beaudry. But at the moment, he was just a tourist looking for sustenance work.
Los Angeles was still in many ways a provincial town — "Queen of the Cow Counties," as one wag put it. The city's settlement came in fits and starts, with each new wave of conquering migrants imposing its own rituals and rules of law. Spain established dominion from the Native American population in 1769 when a Franciscan missionary named Juan Crespi landed on its shores and immediately envisioned the region's potential as a large Catholic settlement. The first mission was built in 1771 by a Franciscan friar named Junipero Serra. Gabrielino Indians who had settled the land hundreds of years earlier were now being forced to convert to Catholicism and work for Spain's new pueblo.
At first, the Spanish settlers built adobe houses, but over time, as Easterners, Southerners, and Europeans descended upon the land in search of new trade markets, other, somewhat less sturdy industrial structures were hastily erected. That architectural juxtaposition would remain the default mode of the city for the next one hundred years.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Thirsty by Marc Weingarten. Copyright © 2016 Marc Weingarten. Excerpted by permission of Rare Bird Books.
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What People are Saying About This
"With the skill of a master storyteller, Marc Weingarten narrates one of the great and quintessential California origin stories. This is saga of civic ambition and can-do determination. It is also one of greed, environmental shortsightedness, class and cultural appropriation. So it turns out that it's not just a California story at all but the story of America.
—Marisa Silver, New York Times Bestselling author of Mary Coin and Little Nothing
"Thirsty gives us the story behind the story of the birth of what we now understand to be the modern American West. That makes it sound like a doorstop, but the truth is, Marc Weingarten has delivered a slick, eminently readable, and even fun tale, at once tragic and grand and ready to gulp down."
—Charles Bock, author of Alice & Oliver and Beautiful Children
"Los Angeles is a city that should not exist. In Thirsty, Marc Weingarten gives us the story behind William Mulholland’s grand vision to bring water, and life, to this desert community. The dizzying rise and fall of this self-invented engineer’s career keep the reader riveted, and Weingarten’s depiction of the tragic consequences of his hubris sears itself on the brain. A bravura performance."
—Sherill Tippins, author of Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel
"Offering a fresh perspective on the foundational story of modern Los Angeles, Weingarten finds the facts among the legends, the drama within the history, and larger than life characters all around. An essential addition to the canon of California lit."
—Bob Mehr, author of Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements