Water and Los Angeles: A Tale of Three Rivers, 1900–1941

Front matter

WILLIAM DEVERELL | TOM SITTON

WATER AND LOS ANGELES

A TALE OF THREE RIVERS, 1900-1941

Preface

Introduction 1. Rivers of Growth 2. Harnessing the Rivers 3. Rivers in Nature

Epilogue: What’s Next? What’s the Future?

Notes

Study Questions for Consideration Chronology

Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments

Index vii

145 147 149 151 153 155

PREFACE

The two of us have been thinking and writing about Greater Los Angeles for a long time. Some of this work pertains to projects we have pursued separately: scholarly articles and books on this or that theme or topic pertaining to the history of Southern California. But much of what weve done has been collaborative as friends and colleagues. We edited a collection of essays about Progressive Era California; we brought out a volume devoted to the 1920s in Los Angeles and all its attendant growth and cultural busyness. We worked together on a biography (which Tom authored) on Los Angeles harbor and transit pioneer Phineas Banning.

Through many joint projects such as these, as well as what amounts to an extended conversation stretching across many years, we have studied and thought about various facets of the institutional and infrastructural growth of the metropolis from the beginning of the American period forward. We approach the subject and themes of Los Angeles history differently, but those differences have been, in every instance, mutually reinforcing and, we think, enriching to our readers and students.

Like they all seem to be, this project has been several years in the making. We knew that the primary source material on Los Angeles growth and metropolitan ambitions was rich and evocative and needed wider circulation among students. We also knew that the environmental history of Greater Los Angeles stood as a remarkably complex, hugely important feature of the history of the region, of California, of the nation, and of the world.

Hence this project. In the pages that follow, we examine the growth of Los Angeles by way of the three rivers that play critical and fundamental roles in supplying freshwater to the landscape and its many millions of people. Our focus is on a vii viii PREFACE riparian triptych: the Los Angeles River, the Owens River, and the Colorado River. They are, each in its own way and together as an interconnected system, of paramount importance to the history and the future of the region we call home. In this volume, we limit our investigation of each river to a discrete and relatively short time period, from the start of the twentieth century to the coming of the Second World War. The era from World War II to the present is unquestionably important to the riparian history of metropolitan Los Angeles. We cast our analytical net earlier, however, because we believe that this four-decade period is especially critical to how Greater Los Angeles brought each river, in both different and related ways, to bear on the global future of Southern California. Perhaps a subsequent volume will pick the story up from the 1940s and carry it forward to the recent past. To be sure, the rivers and the ways in which they roll through Los Angeles and through Los Angeles history deserve far more than a single scholarly examination.

We do not think that histories of these three rivers—so alike in some ways and so profoundly different at the same time—have ever been put together in the ways we try to do in this book. That seems odd to us: a missed, critical opportunity and obligation to deepen understanding about the region and the environmental and other challenges it faced in the past and which are growing more difficult with each passing year. Without the Colorado, the Owens, and the Los Angeles, there is no modern Los Angeles. Such a simple truism and statement of fact is but the first— important—insight about the region and its rivers. More complicated, and hardly less important, is to try to understand how and why the region developed such a complex technological, fiscal, political, and environmental relationship with three entirely different and diffuse riparian systems. The stories of Los Angeles and its namesake river, the stories of Los Angeles and the Owens River, and the stories of Los Angeles and the Colorado River are historical narratives that illuminate and illustrate broad sweeps of western and American history.

That’s the purpose of this book—to know a region’s rivers and the ways in which those rivers explain historical change of gargantuan proportion and to know about broad themes in American history that these water stories illustrate and highlight. The prisms we bring to the river history of Southern California—political, environmental, technological—help us figure out the regional past and, at the same time, help us place the region into wider frames of western, national, and even international history.

Putting this book together has been a pleasure, and we hope and expect that the documents (for the most part in their original grammar and syntax) and images that follow will help you think about, ask about, and better understand the Southern California past. We hope, too, that in so doing you will find ways to think creatively about the Southern California present and future.

William Deverell and Tom Sitton San Marino, California