William Mulholland and the Water of Life

Mulholland’s genius and mercenary political savvy brought life-giving water in the early dec-ades of the twentieth century to a town stunted in its growth by the constant threat of drought. Like some great conquering Alexander, Mulholland rallied an army of more than 5,000 work-men and herds of mules to dig, dynamite and tunnel across hundreds of miles of the scorched Mojave Desert, a river bed of concrete and steel that would channel a bountiful new water supply to Los Angeles in the first decade of the twentieth century. Without the water that Mulholland battled and schemed for years to deliver to Los Angeles, the city’s population could not have grown much beyond a half a million and certainly Hollywood as we know it today would simply not exist, City officials concede. ‘No other individual has had so much to do with the creation of the modern metropolis of Los Angeles… as William Mulholland,’ writes William L. Kahrl in his book about the city’s war for water, Water and Power.

For many of the Irish who came after Mulholland, Hollywood would come to represent a limbo of unreality to which they had been lured by outrageous payments for their con-siderable talents. The late Dublin-born actor Keith McConnell confessed to the authors over dinner one evening at his house in the Hollywood Hills, “I feel like Rip Van Winkle. I arrived in Hollywood with the intention of lingering a month or two. This morning I awoke to find that I have been here for the past twenty years. Or perhaps it’s thirty. I really don’t care to find out.” A roll call of Irish names that are legend in the early years of Hollywood and the American film industry laid the foundation blocks upon which the movie capital of the world is built. These included D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Sidney Olcott, Mack Sennett, Rex Ingram, Pat Powers, Herbert Brenon and a multitude of others. But the one who prepared that foundation was Mulholland, a man prepared to risk a veritable civil war in Southern California to build his dream.

“The world was my oyster and I was just opening it… Los Angeles was a place after my own heart,” Mulholland would recount. “It was the most attractive town I had ever seen. The people were hospitable. There was plenty to do and a fair compensation offered for whatever you did. The country had the same attraction for me that it had for the Indians who originally chose this spot as a place to live. The Los Angeles River was the greatest attraction. It was a beautiful, limpid little stream with willows on its bank. It was so attractive to me that it at once became something about which my whole scheme of life was woven. I loved it so much.”

Mulholland’s fateful arrival in Los Angeles was the final stop on an odyssey that had begun when he was just fifteen years old, shipping out aboard the merchant vessel Clennifer from Dublin. Mulholland was born in Belfast in 1855, the son of a postal clerk, but the family moved to Dublin when he was still a baby. He was a bright boy and excelled at the Christian Brothers O’Connell School, though he left before completing his full term there to join the British Merchant Navy.

He served for four years at sea on the Clennifer before disembarking in New York City in 1874. His first job in America was on a ship that traded the Great Lakes. The young man also tried his hand at lumberjacking. He later teamed up with his brother Hugh, who had also been at sea before setting foot in America. They spent some time with relatives in Pittsburgh before deciding to head west to California. Mulholland had become captivated by the thrilling accounts of California told by Charles Nordhoff. It was land for the undaunted, he thought.

Mulholland’s granddaughter Catherine Mulholland still recalls her grandfather’s stiff-backed figure and chiseled features. She was twelve when he died. She melded her personal memories and recorded accounts of the era to tell the history of Los Angeles and her grandfather’s role in the story in her book William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles. She recalls in her book and in conversation with the authors how the brothers stowed away on a ship bound for California by way of the Panama Canal. But the pair were caught ‘and dumped on the Isthmus of Panama’. They hiked nearly fifty miles across the isthmus and signed on with a ship headed for Acapulco, Mexico. They crewed another ship north to San Francisco. From there they rode on horseback to Los Angeles. Broke and out of work, Mulholland took stock of his life, thinking and pondering along the quiet places of the Los Angeles River which he came to cherish. So strong was the spell cast by the willowed waters on the dreamer that he went to work as a ditch tender for the Los Angeles Water Company.

‘And when he was not pulling weeds or working with hoe and shovel that summer, he spent the long hours of dusk striding the river’s banks, learning its peculiarities, and dreaming of the ways he could fashion its uncertain flows to build a great city,’ Kahrl tells. But these were much more than idle dreams. After his day’s work was finished, he would sit up through the night, straining his eyes by lantern light to teach himself engi-neering. ‘His library at the time of his start in the Water Works was Fanning’s Treatise on Hydraulics, Trautwine’s Engineer’s Pocket Book, Kent’s Mechanical Engineer’s Pocket Book, a geometry, a trigonometry, and Shakespeare’s works,’ a friend of Mulholland’s remem-bered. Mulholland’s great enthusiasm and energy attracted the attention of the Water Company’s bosses and he was moved rapidly up the corporate ladder. But Mulholland would never boast or brag of this incredible tenacity – not even under oath! Once in a court of law, older and now head of the city’s Water Authority, Mulholland faced down a lawyer who demanded to know what qualifications the old man held as an engineer. ‘Well, I went to school in Ireland when I was a boy, learned the three Rs and the Ten Commandments – or most of them – made a pilgrimage to the Blarney Stone, received my father’s blessing, and here I am,’ informed a stone-faced Mulholland.

It was a response that typified the dichotomy that was ‘Willie’ Mulholland, at once a light-hearted dreamer who relished his day at the baseball park, humorous and feisty, and then a visionary who would brook no fool or halt at any hindrance, a man who would proclaim, ‘Damn a man who doesn’t read. The test of a man is his knowledge of humanity, of the politics of human life, his comprehension of the things that move men.’