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A historical journey from Los Angeles to Mammoth
By Erick Sugimura
Mammoth Times Staff Writer
 Recap of Part I
In 1924, the route from Los Angeles to Mammoth already had a significant story to tell. In the previous 50 years, Los Angeles' population had exploded and the city had to keep up. To develop fast enough to keep up with it's growth, it needed water.
Three men became famous (or infamous, perhaps) for acquiring a source of water plentiful enough for what would someday become one of the largest cities in the county. They were William Mulholland, Fred Eaton and J.B. Lippincott. Though their methods are considered by many to be lacking in ethics, they each showed incredible strength of their character in their drive to create one of the greatest engineering feats of all time; the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
The L.A. Aqueduct stretches over 200, cost millions of dollars and took eight years to build. When completed, it brought 400 cubic feet of water per second to the citizens of Los Angeles. What the aqueduct brought to the people of Los Angeles, however, it took away from the people of the Owens Valley...
Up the dry valley
In 1924, the journey from Los Angeles to Mammoth would typically take two and a half days.
The adventure would begin with a train ride from Los Angeles to Mojave and then continue on along the Jawbone Line (named for the fossils that were supposedly found along the route) to the Lone Pine station. The train would pass the empty Owens Lake.
By 1924, Owens Lake and roughly 50 miles of the Owens River were dry. The once green and abundant farms were replaced by the abandoned homes of the workforce that installed the aqueduct. Many of the residents had at this point given up their lands, allowing the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to own 95 percent of the farm and ranch land in the valley by 1934.
In Lone Pine, there would be no smiling faces to greet travelers arriving from Los Angeles. Officers from the Los Angeles Police Department and Sheriff's Department would be assigned to guard sections of the aqueduct, to protect it from the remaining locals who would periodically sabotage the waterway. Some of these officers were sympathetic to the residents and there are stories of locals and enforcement officers picnicking together near the open canals while explosives were casually tossed down the pipes.
On May 21, 1924, dynamite destroyed a structurally critical point in the aqueduct. In response, the city of Los Angeles sent out private investigators and offered a $10,000 reward for any information that would lead to the identification of the culprits. No one came forward. To the people of the Owens Valley, these were not acts of sabotage; they were acts of self-defense.
Over the next couple of months of what was dubbed “the Owens Valley War, William Mulholland received hundreds of threatening letters. He once commented that he “half-regretted the demise of so many of the valley's orchard trees, because now there were no longer enough trees to hang all the troublemakers who live there.”
Farther north, Wilfred and Mark Watterson had organized valley residents by forming the Owens Valley Irrigation District. The Wattersons were the financial leaders of Inyo County at the time; they owned the Inyo County Bank. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was buying land indiscriminately and valley residents made frustrated accusations of “checker boarding.” Farmers were feeling vulnerable and unsure of their neighbors. Who would sell out next? A growing sentiment was that Los Angeles should buy out the entire area altogether.
The City of Los Angeles rebuffed that idea, however, offering instead to leave 30,000 acres of the Bishop area free from city purchases and to create a state highway to the area to help generate a tourist economy. The Wattersons rejected this proposal and insisted on the outright purchases of farms and full compensation for all residents. Talks stalemated.
On Nov. 16, 1924, 70 armed men led by Mark Watterson took control of a critical aqueduct gate and completely shut off the water flow to Los Angeles. Word spread and by the next day the 70 grew into more than 700. The governor of California defied Los Angeles business leaders by refusing to send the state militia and the local sheriff declared himself to be a “friend and sympathizer” of the demonstrators. Los Angeles was forced to renew negotiations to end the conflict.
The road along the Owens Valley had other characters on it, as well.
Norman Clyde was a fairly well known mountaineer at the time. Born in Philadelphia in 1885, he spent his adolescence in Glengarry County, near Ottawa, where he learned to fish and hunt. His father schooled him at home, raising him to be a student of the classics and teaching him Latin and Greek as early as he was learning his native tongue. He eventually made his way to the University of California at Berkeley in 1911, where he spent his summers in the local mountains. In 1914, he met up with the Sierra Club in Yosemite and joined them on the way to Tuolumne before heading off south on his own.
In 1924, Clyde became the principal of the high school in Independence, in the Owens Valley, at the foot of Mount Williamson, arguably the most magnificent of all the 14,000-footers. Every weekend, he would lock up the school and head for the mountains. The following year, Clyde logged 48 climbs, half of which were first ascents. Of those 48, 42 were solo climbs. The year after that, the number of logged ascents became 60. Since these are only the climbs that he bothered to record, it is commonly believed that he explored the High Sierra at a rate of first ascents that far surpassed those of William Brewer, Clarence King or John Muir.
Hollywood had also taken note of the Owens Valley. In 1924, seven films are known to have been filmed in the Alabama Hills and Lone Pine area. Films such as The Back Trail, The Mine with the Iron Door, The Riding Kid from Powder River and The Sunset Trail featured actors like Jack Hoxie, Robert Frazer, Hoot Gibson and William Desmond.
On the long journey from Los Angeles to Mammoth, a traveller would have had a lot to write home about; pivotal events and key players in local history. But the road to Mammoth lay ahead now, up into the High Sierra.
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