Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

On top of all this, the Owens was a generous desert river, with a flow sufficient for two million people. It was laughable to think of Los Angeles growing that big, so even under the worst of circumstances there would be water enough for all. The reasoning was very sensible, the logic very sound, and it was fatefully wrong. There was one person who knew that it was. She was Mary Austin, the valley’s literary light, who had published a remarkable collection of impressionistic essays entitled Land of Little Rain that won her recognition around the world. In the course of her writing she had spent long hours with the last of the Paiutes, the Indians who had lived in the valley for centuries until they were instantly displaced by the whites. The Paiutes showed her what no one else saw—that order and stability are the most transient of states, that there is rarely such a thing as a partial defeat. In a subsequent book, a novella about the Owens Valley water struggle called The Ford, she wrote about what happens when “that incurable desire of men to be played upon, to be handled,” runs up against “that Cult of Locality, by which so much is forgiven as long as it is done in the name of the Good of the Town.” Mary Austin was convinced that the valley had died when it sold its first water right to Los Angeles—that the city would never stop until it owned the whole river and all of the land. One day, in Los Angeles for an interview with Mulholland, she told him so. After she had lef...