Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

In the West, drought tends to come in cycles of about twenty years, and the next drought arrived on schedule. The years 1919 and 1920 were a premonition; rainfall was slightly below average. It rose back to average—a measly fourteen inches—in 1921 and went slightly over that in 1922. Then it crashed. Ten inches in 1923; six inches in 1924; seven inches in 1925. In Florida, a seven-inch rainstorm may occur two or three times a year, but Los Angeles was trying to look like Florida, and grow even faster, on a fifth of its precipitation, and when the drought struck it kept going on a tenth. Mulholland had expected 350,000 people by 1925, but had 1.2 million on his hands instead. The city was growing fifteen times faster than Denver, eleven times faster than New York. And though the city at its core had become a metropolis, Los Angeles County led the nation in the value of its agricultural output. All of this agriculture depended on irrigation, which, together with the phenomenal urban growth, depended on a river draining Mount Whitney two hundred miles away.