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HISTORY OF LOS ANGELES COUNTY

for many and many a year while Los Angeles remained a mere village,
sleepy and contented.
It was only when the "gringo" came and insisted on making a city where
it seemed that neither God nor man ever intended a city should be, that the
problem of water became momentous.
It is true, however, that by one means and another, the ingenuity of the
engineers was able to cope with the situation. But the engineers were
always at their wits' ends. Every year more and more people came to make
Los Angeles a bigger town, but Nature did nothing to bring more water to it.
We can realize what the situation came to be if we will go back to the
year 1905 when the population of Los Angeles was in the neighborhood
of 200,000 souls.
In the month of July of that year the city found itself using every day
4,000,000 gallons of water more than was flowing into its reservoirs. The
water commission found itself figuratively tossing on its bed and spending
sleepless nights. It sent out its engineers on a quest for more water, as
though by some magic or miracle the rocks might be smitten and heretofore
unknown springs might be discovered.
And the engineers came back only to say that no possible source of water
supply that could by any stretch of the imagination be considered adequate
existed anywhere south of the Tehachapi or west of the range of mountains
whose backbone lies back of San Bernardino.
It was of the future that these worried water commissioners and the
engineers had to think. Los Angeles absolutely declined to cease growing.
The experts estimated that by 1925 Los Angeles would have reached a
population of 400,000 people. And it would be a city then tragically short
of water. We can see now that as a matter of fact the estimate of the
experts was entirely too conservative. For, as we are writing this book in
the year of our Lord 1923, the population of Los Angeles is quite 600,000,
and that in all likelihood it will reach 750,000 in 1925, the time fixed by the
experts for it to reach 400,000.
It was in this critical year of 1905 that there came down from the snows
of the high Sierras in the character of a Moses, an old-time lover and long-
time resident of Los Angeles who had abandoned his old home town to
devote his life to ranching far away to the north among the great mountain
peaks of Inyo County.
This man was Fred Eaton, sometime city engineer and sometime mayor
of Los Angeles.
The day that Fred Eaton came down from the mountains of Inyo to
lay before the officials of Los Angeles his plan for a water supply is a day
that should be set down in history. And Fred Eaton himself must be set
down in history. His idea was to secure possession of the Owens River
with its inexhaustibfe supply of snow waters from the high Sierras and
divert its course through conduits over mountain and desert, a distance of
250 miles, for the relief of the city that was well beloved by him and that
had heaped upon him its favors and its highest honors.
With the eye of the engineer, Fred Eaton saw that in former ages the
Owens River had probably flowed along the eastern base of the Sierra
Nevada, and had emptied itself into the Mojave Sink. A rock uplift,
maybe a million years ago, had interrupted this flow and confined it to the