William Mulholland Revealed!

After deeply researching the famous water engineer of Los Angeles, William Mulholland, my opinion of his character and morals has largely changed. Initially, my view of Mulholland was skewed due to the viewing of the movie "Cadillac Desert". The movie contained heavy commentary from Mulholland's granddaughter. At one instance of the movie she talked about Mulholland being only concerned about the people of Los Angeles when the St. Francis Dam broke. Her kind, warming words about her grandfather throughout the film planted an image of a compassionate, noble man inside my head. This image would begin to germinate in my psyche and before you know it my draft of my "LA's Past and Prologue" essay is geared toward Mulholland being the kind savior of Los Angeles. However, my research has led me to conclude that Mulholland was not concerned with the people of LA or the people in which he took the water from.

Mulholland was a water engineer, and with an engineer's mindset, he saw the task of getting a water source for LA with tunnel vision. This means that Mulholland created a solution that did not keep in mind the side effects that it would create. The solution was an extensive aqueduct that carried water from Mono Lake and Owens River Valley to LA, but this masterpiece did not take into account the damage of the ecosystem of the two water sources. In addition, the people of Mono Lake and Owens River Valley lost the majority of their source of water for their own needs. The caring image of Mulholland in "Cadillac Desert" was created by his granddaughter, a close relative who was likely to supply this view of Mulholland. Real history shows that this water engineer was not concerned with anything but getting water into the growing city of Los Angeles.

With this being said, the citizens of Los Angeles are also to blame for the deprivation of water from the Mono Lake and Owens Valley Lake community. The people of LA as a whole were only concerned with getting water into the city as well, and did not care about the methods that transported the resource into it. This is evident because no protests or disapprovals were made about Mulholland until after the St. Francis Dam broke. Los Angeles at that time period was only concerned with growth and expansion, and not the well-being of other cities and regions.