writing discussion.pdf

writing discussion
history writing question and need a sample draft to help me learn.
The discussion post for today asked you identify the kind of history that Deverell is writing
in this chapter. It also asked you "how can you tell"?
As Rampolla notes in section 3d, page 39, a key way to evaluate a secondary source is to
note the most important evidence the authors presents to support his or her thesis.
With this in mind, go back to the chapter and identify the sources and evidence that
Deverell used by looking carefully at the footnotes for this chapter in the pdf labelled
footnotes. How does what you find influence your assessment of what kind(s) of history
Deverell is writing?
Requirements: 20-100 words
Three Remembering a RiverI went to the River Station for an hour,and crossed over into the
dirtand grime of Mexican Los Angeles.G. Bromley Oxnam,diary entry,Los Angeles,1913No
scientist will quarrel with [the] belief that the experiment inSouthern California will work
out to the benefit of the Saxon.Charles Fletcher Lummis,18961The Los Angeles River is best
known by historians of California andthe general public for its great floods.Los Angeles
River Pollution Committee Report,19492walkin’along by the l.a.riverstepping on broken
glass,kicking cansshe’s tellin’me i don’t even know heri guess there’s some things i won’t
understandi’d love to float away like old tom sawyeri’d love to run away and be huck
finnpoor riverempty riverE.,“l.a.river,”1993391Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 91
In 1906, a Los Angeles settlement house worker named Amanda MathewsChase published a
book of stories about Mexicans called The Hieroglyphics ofLove: Stories of Sonoratown and
Old Mexico. She dedicated the little volumeto her settlement house colleagues, offering that
it was made up of senti-mental tales of “the Mexican peonada... a dark and lowly people,
who areyet rich with the riches of the poor, and wise with the wisdom of the simple.”
Amanda Mathews Chase liked metaphors about Los Angeles Mexicans.She returned again
and again in the book’s stories to one in particular:water. The people in her stories lived
close to water, down at the edge of theLos Angeles River. Within sight of Los Angeles, “a
handsome, bustling,modern city,” their neighborhood existed in a world apart: “dirty,
peaceful,unprogressive.” In Chase’s eyes, the city’s Mexican residents not only livednear
water, they moved like water. Even one of her official reports as hometeacher working with
the Mexican families down near the river utilizedwatery images. She referred to a class of
Mexican women (prior to instruc-tion) as “a timid, sloppy, baby-submerged lot.” It was clear

from all thesemetaphors sailing by that Amanda Chase expected Mexicans to knowabout
water, especially about the Los Angeles River, its courses, its move-ments. The river’s
temperament had become their own. It is as if the book’sMexicans were water themselves:
elemental, each individual but a “driftfrom the tide of cheap Mexican labor... a tide which
seeps continuallythrough the ruinous adobe tenements of ‘Sonoratown.’”4Chase’s
naturalization of Mexicans as “river people” runs throughoutthe entire book. A woman in a
story spoke in a “sluggish but endless cur-rent of conversation” that her husband—of
course named Juan Garcia—“was not interested in damming,” because he was lazy and
drunk. Thewatery repetition flows on. “Señora Garcia would have liked to argue thematter
further, and had quite a notion insisting on Teodota’s giving up thepaper, but there was no
anchoring her conversational bark. She floated onto relating how the rats once ate the rent
receipt, and before one could learnwhether she had been obliged to pay the rent over again,
she was adrift onTeodota’s father’s aunt’s fear of the unpleasant rodents, and the paper
wasleft far behind.”5Rats and water. Was this Mexican Los Angeles? Adrift in liquid inertia,
the “old Mexican life” down at river’s edge threat-ened to be “overflowed by the tide of
American progress.” One man in anAmanda Chase story even seeks an escape in the river. In
doing so, JuanGallardo changes the Los Angeles River, and he becomes one with it:
“Juanturned in the direction of the river, thus giving time for escape. He wasmerely acting in
unwilling obedience to a habit grown too strong for him.whitewashed adobe92Deverell-
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The separate acts of unselfishness, the daily and hourly cherishing of hissulky little
mistress, had dammed the current of his selfish passion andturned it into a new channel of
loving.”6This chapter is an exploration not so much of metaphorical connectionsbetween
people and water, Mexicans and the Los Angeles River, but aboutother, similar sorts of
associations made by Anglo Los Angeles. “Remem-bering a River” is about “new channels,”
not so much of loving, but of theriver itself, about its startling transformation from
nineteenth-centurystream to twentieth-century flood control device. Amanda Mathews
Chasethought and wrote about Los Angeles Mexicans and a kind of curious eth-nic affinity
with the river. In doing so, she revealed ethnocentric patternsof belief that characterized
Mexicans as primitive, close to nature. This inturn led to a perception that Chase turned into
metaphor, of Mexicans hav-ing particular and proximate knowledge of the Los Angeles
River. It wouldseem as if she was not alone in her thinking.7But that is getting slightlyahead
of the Los Angeles River story. To understand dimensions of ethnicityand water, we have to
start well before 1906, before Amanda MathewsChase, before any “hieroglyphics of love.”
The River at the City’s HeartWere it not for the Los Angeles River, the city that shares its
name wouldnot be where it is today. Were it not for the Los Angeles River, Los
Angeleswould not beat all. The Los Angeles River has always been at the heart ofwhichever
human community is in the basin: Gabrielino village, Spanishoutpost, Mexican pueblo,
American city. The river has been asked to playmany roles. It has supplied the residents of
the city and basin with waterto drink and spread amidst their grapes, oranges, and other
crops. It hasbeen an instrument by which people could locate themselves on the land-scape.
It has been a critical dividing line, not only between east and west,north and south, but
between races, classes, neighborhoods. As this chap-ter will explore in some depth, the river

has also been a place where ideasand beliefs about the past, present, and future of Los
Angeles have beenraised and contested. Here where the river gently winds through the
girdle of hills, lies a soil sosaturated with the past that however far back the mind roams
one cannever detach it from its human background.... It is always there, quietand
unobtrusive, like a great artery running through the human body.893remembering a
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Pulled from the pages of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, this requiemdescribes the soil
around every river as much as it does that of the novel-ist’s beloved Seine. Believe it or not,
it also conjures up the Los AngelesRiver. Rivers are saturated with the past. They can
tellstories as much asthey can becharacters in stories if listened to and studied carefully
enough.What is especially significant is that rivers can reveal as much about
culturaltransitions and cultural conflicts as about economic, landscape, or politi-cal change.
The puny Los Angeles River, so unlike the noble Seine, is alsoa river in which human
memory mingles with water. It is a river all aboutmemory, a place where nature and culture
surely flow together. Ask Southern California residents today about the Los Angeles River,
andthe response may well be quizzical. “What Los Angeles River?” As a river,the Los
Angeles River is an inside joke, an urban legend. It is somethingthat supposedly once
wasbut rarely is, something that can be dismissedwith cynical humor (or, as in the case of a
recent ad for Nike outdoor climb-ing gear that made use of an image of the river as an
entirely dry industrialsite, attached to hip, wry commercialism).9There are good reasons
for jokes. The river really isn’t much of a riveranymore, and it hasn’t been so for a long time.
It still has water, it still hasflora and fauna, it can still drown the unfortunate or careless, the
drunk,the young, or the unwary.10But instead of a river, the Los Angeles River isnow a gray
channel, concrete-lined at both sides and bottom, a sad ghostthat, wrote Lawrence Clark
Powell, “no one would dignify with the nameriver.”11The Los Angeles River is today more
flood control instrument thanriver, victim of a century-long “fluvial lobotomy.”12The Los
Angeles Riveris a mechanized, cold river, held firmly in place by concrete and engineer-ing
logic. This channel river is of course a human invention. Socially constructedand physically
engineered, it is, however, no less historically significant forsupposedly no longer being a
river than it was as a river many years ago. Aonce-river can be important. As seeming proof
of its non-river status, localpoliticians, usually City Council members or county supervisors
anxious tomake the papers, rise up every once in a while with an argument that theriver,
precisely because it isn’t a river, really ought to be a freeway. Thatwould solve the Los
Angeles basin’s overcrowded roadway problem, theysay. After all, city bus drivers do
practice in it.13Fig. 17 about hereJust over two hundred years ago, there was the river
without Spanish orEnglish name. With headwaters twelve miles northwest of present-
daydowntown Los Angeles, the Los Angeles River is historically a lovely, ifwhitewashed
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95remembering a riversmall, river. Alternately above and below ground until just north
ofCahuenga Pass, where it pops up above ground, the river gathers strengthand direction as
it meanders southeast. Near where Glendale, once River-dale, is today, the river turns to the
south and runs east of present-dayDodger Stadium through Elysian Gap. Just below where
Elysian Park istoday, the river once made a graceful, lazy S-curve before straightening outin

its final stretch to the Pacific Ocean. The river’s entire course is about fiftymiles. Once,
almost before human memory records, it flowed far west ofits current concrete bed, which
now takes it through one of the city’s mostglaring deindustrialized shells out back of Union
Station. Fig. 18 about hereJuan Crespi, the diarist of the late eighteenth-century Portolá
expedition,made certain to note the river’s delights. In the late summer of 1769, walk-ing to
a point somewhere near where the Pasadena Freeway approachesdowntown today, Crespi
and party stumbled onto the little river. “We setout from the valley in the morning and
followed the same plain in a west-erly direction,” he wrote. “After traveling about a league
and a half througha pass between low hills, we encountered a very spacious valley, well
grownwith cottonwoods and alders, among which ran a beautiful river from theFigure 17.
The river that was: The Los Angeles River, late nineteenth century.Courtesy of the
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 95
whitewashed adobe96north-northwest, and then, doubling the point of a steep hill, it went
onafterwards to the south.... We halted not very far from river, which wenamed
Porciuncula.... This plain where the river runs is very extensive.It has good land for planting
all kinds of grain and seeds, and is the mostsuitable site of all that we have seen for a
mission, for it has all the requi-sites for a large settlement.”Such an idyll had attracted
others well before the colonists, people whodoubtless had a name for the beautiful little
river. As Crespi and partyreached the river’s banks, “about eight heathen from a good
village came tovisit us; they live in this delightful place among the trees on the
river.”14Theencounter proved peaceful. Gifts were exchanged, and the Indians blewsmoke
in the faces of the Spaniards, a gesture of friendliness. Crespi’s diaryindicates that the land
surrounding the river was rich and fertile, and he wascareful to note several times that
grains and other produce would grow inabundance with but a little concerted labor.A
decade later, acting on information like that supplied by Juan Crespi,the Spanish governor of
the Californias, Felipe de Neve, decided to builda pueblo on the Porciuncula. This was in
part to establish a beachheadFigure 18. The Los Angeles River flowing next to the Elysian
Hills, late nineteenthcentury. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino,
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southern settlement to support nearby San Gabriel Mission (Mission SanFernando would be
established not long after the 1781 founding of LosAngeles). The region promised
agricultural and, as important, livestockpotential, for as de Neve noted to his superiors, the
river had “much watereasy to take on either bank and beautiful lands in which it all could be
madeuse of.”15Made use of it was. The tiny pueblo, adopting a longer version of theriver’s
name and sacred commemoration, came into being. The river, ofcourse, was a crucial
component of the city’s growth and early prosperity.Though not navigable, it proved a
mostly reliable and convenient watersource. Untapped by many wells, the river ran far
fuller than it does today.Wandering Frenchman Auguste Bernard Duhaut-Cilly noted in the
late1820s that the tiny pueblo of Los Angeles, then comprised of eighty-twohouses, had
been built along the banks of a river “which does not run dryin summer.”16It flooded now
and again, or “boomed” as people remem-bered, but the landscape and the common sense
of the people helped mit-igate the inherent dangers of wintertime floods. Settlers generally
built, ifthey moved away from the central plaza at all, on slightly higher groundflanking the

river. Anglo arrivals would wonder, in later years, why theregion’s Indians and Mexicans
did not live on the rich land at the river’sedge. They would find out when floods came. The
area that would become Boyle Heights, just east of the river, becamea bit more crowded
with adobes after the floods of the 1820s. But topogra-phy and vegetation helped to blunt
flood impacts. The water had to fightits way through thick brush and trees in the marshy
flatlands or la cienaga.In those days, the river rarely made it all the way to the Pacific. It
peteredout somewhere west and south of the little pueblo in the countless tulemarshes and
ponds of the grizzly bear’s terrain.Where the river did run, near the plaza and to the north,
it occupied avital role in village life and folkways. Women took washing to water’s edgeand,
using large flat stones, beat and rubbed clothes clean. Families chosetraditional locations
against the riverbank reserved for their use, and it wasfrowned upon to encroach. Children
swam in the river as it flowed not farfrom the plaza. It was here, in the river or its irrigation
canal tributary, thezanja madre, that residents observed the annual “Bath of the Virgins”
(ElBano del las Virjines) ceremony to honor San Juan. Some Anglos, by folktradition at least,
thought little of the ceremony except as an opportunityto tease the adolescent girls who,
dressed in white, took part in ritualbathing.17The centrality of the river for emergent Anglo
culture and econ-97remembering a riverDeverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 97
omy was better represented in Abel Stearns’s mill, built in the 1840s to grindlocal grain by
river power.18Sometime shortly thereafter, a waterwheel wasbuilt in the dammed-up river
waters not far from Stearns’s mill; the wheelbuckets dumped water into the tributary
zanjaso that irrigation could takeplace at some distance from the river itself.19In those days
everyone noticed the river. It was a prominent feature of thelandscape and, unlike today, it
occupied a critical place in the region’s car-tography as a virtual compass helping to define
direction on the basinlandscape. Reading early Los Angeles descriptions, one is struck by
therepetitive presence of two critical directional landmarks, both long sincedeemphasized
in the modern city: the plaza—long ago the city center—andthe river. One went out from, or
into, the plaza, and one went across, up,or down the river.20Buildings, homes, plots of land
were on this side of the river or that.People lived on the east side or the west side. Travelers
went up the rivertoward the San Fernando Valley or down the river toward the ocean. For
latenineteenth-century residents in the village proper, the Poor House loomedjust across
the river, as did the City Orphanage. Here, too, on the banks ofthe river, occurred one of the
most important battles of the Mexican Warperiod, as Kit Carson and his ragtag body of
soldiers defeated Mexicantroops in the January 1847 “Battle of the Mesa.” The school for
Mexican kidswas upriver, and the children trudged to it by following or, depending onthe
season, walking in the riverbed. The Los Angeles River was the sole source of city water,
either the riveritself or one of its tributary zanjasdug out by Indian or Mexican
labor.Women made daily visits to the river to fill clay ollas. A man with a heavywater jug
resting in a wheeled cart or suspended from the handles sold riverwater on the streets and
doorsteps of the growing village. Everyone noticed the river. Coming overland in the Gold
Rush years,Vincent Hoover made careful diary entries in his tiny leather-bound
books.Entering Los Angeles along the same route taken by Portolá seventy yearsearlier,
Hoover wrote: “Los Angeles is Situated on the river of that nameand contains about 1500
inhabitants. The town is built of adobe houses andirregularly laid out. There are quite a

number of American residents nearlyall of which are married to Spanish women.”21James
Clarke also knew this river, and he made sure to orient himself inreference to it in letters to
family members. In an 1854 letter to his brother,Clarke explained his whereabouts by
drawing a word-picture of mountains,valleys, and waterway grids. “Our valley is from 30 to
40 miles long open-whitewashed adobe98Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 98
ing to the Pacific between two high bluffs or mountain spurs fifteen milesapart on the very
beach, and running back so as to make the valley from25 to 30 miles wide which is watered
by the two rivers of Los Angeles andSan Gabriel and by these rivers the valley is irrigated[,]
ditches or zanjasconducting the water all through the vineyards and fields.”22By mid-
century, the government of the United States had glanced uponthe Los Angeles River basin
with a gaze more covetous, and more power-ful, than that of any individual American
settler. Even in the earliest yearsof California statehood, federal agents and actors knew that
a river basinmeant more than water, more than agricultural promise. Valley floors—
leveland straight—could provide the setting for a more ambitious wish for theregion, the
railroad. Engineer and surveyor Albert Campbell noted the pos-sibilities of the region in a
report of 1853–1854, part of the much larger fed-eral survey of possible transcontinental
rail routes: “From El Monte, pass-ing a few hills, we enter the valley of Los Angeles. The
stream upon whichit is situated is about fifty yards wide and two feet deep. There were
numer-ous acequias irrigating vineyards, orange and olive groves, peach orchards,gardens,
and corn fields.”The little town of five thousand inhabitants “had the sombre cast of
aSpanish pueblo, relieved, as it were, by innovations of American com-forts,” Campbell
noted. But already, a portent of the future, there “was thebustle and activity of a business
place. Many new houses were in process ofconstruction. Everywhere was indicated a
thriving population and a landof intrinsic wealth.”23Making the river a critical part of the
landscape made sense in the earlydays of the little village’s history. Local knowledge, based
on lived experi-ence in the Los Angeles basin, incorporated the river into the rhythms
ofeveryday life. Indeed, the river was omnipresent. Los Angeles needed nomore water than
the river could provide, and it was an especially prominentlandscape feature along with
other local markers such as the Pacific Oceanor the San Gabriel Mountains.24As late as the
mid-1850s, even legal descriptions of property reveal a local-ized culture dependent on
time-honored tradition, tradition clearly, if wish-fully, expecting the river as a constant.
Property boundaries often utilized theriver as a fixed feature of the landscape, as in this
description from the pagesof the Los Angeles Starof a small lot not far from the plaza: “One
lot of landsituate in the eastern part of the city of Los Angeles, facing on a road thatruns in
front of the lands of Manuel Coronel, and on to the river of LosAngeles, bounded on the
north-east by the land of Francisco Ruiz....”2599remembering a riverDeverell-T.qxd
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The legal grid of the village itself included the following directionalsequence: “fifty yards up
the Los Angeles River from the city dam, then a linedrawn east 200 yards, thence south to
the lands known as Felis Gallardo’s,then southwest (following the garden of John Temple)
to the streets ofWilliam Wolfskill, south to the lands of Don Coronel, northwest to the roadof
San Pedro, which will exit at the garden of Antonio Lugo, thence fol-lowing that direction to
the corner at Eighth and Principal streets, on toblock 30, all said to include the hill of Ft.

Moore, both city cemeteries, thespring of the college, the foot of the mountain at the dam,
and the bank ofthe Los Angeles River.” The four square leagues thus entailed were to
remain,supposedly, the city’s definition in perpetuity. These boundaries were them-selves
dependent on the perpetuity and stability of the Los Angeles River.26While these were no
doubt legible methods of marking property andboundary, rivers are hardly reliable as fixed
entities. They move irregularly.Or they stop moving altogether. The Los Angeles River has
been no excep-tion. Henrique Abila, testifying in a land claim dispute in 1869, com-mented
on just this tendency. The disputed lands, marked offon an oldhand-drawn map, or diseño,
through reference to rock or tree landmarks,could still be discerned. But the river had fallen
down on the job: “thesprings have diminished in size, shortened in or disappeared
altogether,attributable to the change of course of the river Los Angeles.”27The “change of
course of the river Los Angeles” is of great importance inthe history of the region. For if
rivers can have moods, can be tempera-mental, then the Los Angeles River has proved the
moodiest of all rivers inSouthern California: one year overflowing in seeming fury, the next
becom-ing desperately dry. Periodic flooding of the major rivers of the Los Angelesbasin
(the Los Angeles, the San Gabriel, and the Santa Ana) once meant lit-tle in terms of damage
or danger. Topography, sparse settlements, andnative experience with local rivers all
combined to allay flooding problemsof dire seriousness.Those patterns began to change as
the basin changed. Floods and rainsand droughts have long been part of the climatological
features of this partof Southern California. Boosters used to boast that Anglo
agriculturalprowess would eliminate drought (as in “rain follows the plow” assur-ances),
and engineers used to argue that they could eliminate floods.Seldom are such claims heard
today. A table of Los Angeles River floodingthroughout the nineteenth century reads, if not
like clockwork, at least likeinevitability. One authority has argued that, square mile for
square mile, theLos Angeles basin is the most susceptible region of the nation as far as dan-
whitewashed adobe100Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 100
gerous floods are concerned.28As early Los Angeles basin resident SarahBixby, whose
pioneering uncle tried to coax the Los Angeles River into adefined bed, noted, the Los
Angeles River was really two rivers: one in sum-mer and fall, another in winter and
spring.29Tourists wanted to call theregion’s rivers “streams bottom side up,” but that
description would befound wanting every other February or so.A great flood will occur in
the Los Angeles area once every one hundredyears. Or so statistical probability suggests. A
large flood will occur six timesmore frequently. Moderate floods will strike once every ten
years or so. In1815 and again in 1822 and 1825, rains and floods proved so severe as to
alterfundamentally the location of the Los Angeles River on the landscape.Where it once
flowed out toward the marshy flatlands surrounding BallonaCreek, and thence indirectly to
the ocean, it now answered to a new geog-raphy. Picked up by ferocious floods, the river
moved from along AlamedaStreet in front of where Union Station now stands to an angled
course head-ing more directly south. Waters inundated the plaza, and Indian wickiupsfrom
the nearby village floated away.30Undaunted by the possibilities thatthe river might
someday return to its old channels, some village residentsblithely erected buildings and
roads in one of the former beds. The night-time 1825 flood came with such a terrifying roar
that people dashed fromtheir homes and ran into what hills they could find nearby. After

this greatflood, residents later remembered, the only thing that could be seen stand-ing
above the new downtown Los Angeles lake created by the floodwaterswas a lone, giant
sycamore tree. Don Jose del Carmen Lugo, scion of theranching Lugo family, remembered
years later that the river near his fam-ily’s house had become “a sea of water... running with
great violence,making enormous waves.” The 1825 flood scarred the landscape so muchthat
its paths could still be seen nearly fifty years later.31Map 2 about hereLater floods moved
the river less but did more damage to human habitsand habitats. Eulalia Perez, a Mexican
woman who would later be cele-brated by astonished Anglos as the oldest inhabitant of the
Los Angelesbasin—some claimed that she was well into her thirteenth decade by
the1880s—remembered the floods of the winter of 1833. Rising rivers in thebasin became
impassable, she recalled, and for weeks people on one side ofthe river were prevented from
crossing over to friends and family on theother.32Years later, the winters of 1859–1860 and
1861–1862 brought heavyflooding (the latter saw rain of nearly thirty days straight), so
much so thatstreet corners in the village overflowed and became impassable. First
camewater, then came the mud. One resident recalled looking out a window
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whitewashed adobe102downtown Los Angeles and thinking that the streets, caked in a
thick,greenish mud, were laid in glass. The 1861–1862 floods—“the Noachian del-uge,” a
later engineer called them—created a lake stretching from Ballonato the Laguna ranch
(now taken up by the city of Commerce) that coverednearly twelve miles. “It seems
incredible... to those who have seen yearMap 2. Los Angeles River, stream flow over time.
Courtesy of Blake Gumprecht.Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 102
103remembering a riverafter year the expanse of sand which we call a river,” a prominent
city res-ident remembered years later, “but on this Christmas day it was a torrent.”One
holiday affair on the west side of the river was in danger of failure untila “Sonorean” named
Jesus was impressed into duty, swimming across theswollen river to the east side to claim
party provisions. Even then, Angloopinion, it seemed, was that Mexicans knewthe river, and
they didn’t hes-itate to put them to the test, death-defying though it may have been.33In
1867–1868, the Los Angeles River again changed course, moving boldlyinto Louis
Willhardt’s grapes in the flatlands and wiping out the orchards ofneighbor Thomas Jefferson
White. Residents cut down some of White’s treesin a hurried attempt to turn the river away
from the Whites’ brick house. Itworked, but houses did float that year, ripped from flimsy
foundations bywaters cresting three and four feet on Alameda Street. The little city dam
laidagainst the river near the plaza washed away, and citizens were forced toreturn to the
old method of water delivery by cart and olla.Floods returned in the mid-1870s. By the
1880s, it had become com-monplace to hear warnings about building homes against the
river’s banksor, even, in the river itself, as a few people stubbornly persisted in doing.Yet
there were Angelenos who paid little heed.34Wrote Alfred Moore, in aburst of fateful hubris
and poor memory in 1882, “I have lived on the Alisotract, the most central part, for the past
eight years, and never saw a floodyet.” This same confident man congratulated one woman
for her “pluck”in building a home within a few feet of the river. He also gave a good wordto
a Mrs. Bigelow on buying, building, and improving her propertiesamidst the orange groves
on First Street, awfully near the river. “We neednot,” Moore concluded, “feel at all alarmed

about a flood.”35Fate enjoyed the temptation. The winters of 1884 and 1886 broughtfloods
as damaging as residents could remember. The river flooded with an“ungovernable fury.”
The Los Angeles Timesdevoted a special extra (“2:45O’Clock P.M.”) edition to the floods of
February 1884, with a sort of son-net running down the entire left side of the front page.The
Flood. Los Angeles River Leaps its Banks, Sending Down a MadCurrent of Water, Sweeping
Away Bridges and Houses, Deluging theLower Portion of the City, Destroying Human Life
and Property, AndRendering One Hundred Families Homeless.... 36Whole vineyards washed
away in the flatlands, where the river stretchedto nine hundred feet wide. Horses drowned
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whitewashed adobe104buggies across watery streets. “The river is utterly uncontrollable,”
warnedthe Los Angeles Express.37Milkman George Stoltz drowned in the river’stributary
stream, the Arroyo Seco, which ran from Pasadena toward down-town Los Angeles. J.J.
Phillips, who ran a laundry establishment at theriver’s banks, watched helplessly as first his
business and then his housedipped into the torrent and floated away. Dr. J.P. Widney’s
house onSansevain Street, recently built at a cost of $2,000, fell victim to the rush-ing water.
Most of the newly homeless were poor. Some of their houses hadbeen built in the riverbed
itself. Concepcíon Parra lost her house and allits furniture. Perdona Coma, one of those
whose house was unaccountablyin the riverbed itself, lost (miraculously enough) only her
bed. The extendedDiaz and Zernal families, tied together by marriage, were not so
fortunate.They watched their houses and everything inside of them wash away. Fig. 19
about hereMen labored to stem the tide of the river by hastily stacking sandbags atthe
junction of the river and First Street. Alfred Moore, who had with suchconfidence insisted
two years earlier that Angelenos need not fear anyfloods, lost his Aliso tract house and all
his possessions. So did his son andhis son-in-law. Mrs. Bigelow’s cottages facing First Street
had to be evacu-ated, and the trees in her orange grove swayed under the pressure of
thefloodwaters.A forty-year-old adobe, once a part of the Ramirez rancho but now onthe
estate of land baron Matthew Keller, melted and drizzled into theFigure 19. The Los
Angeles River in flood, 1880s. Courtesy of the HuntingtonLibrary, San Marino,
105remembering a riverfloodwaters. The East Los Angeles bridge, full of as many as two
hundredcurious onlookers, shuddered and then fell into the churning river below.No one
knew if all had jumped clear. Water covered the valley stretchingfrom Boyle Heights to the
plaza, where it stayed for weeks. The groundwas so wet, locals said, that it would “bog a
saddle blanket.” Recedingfloodwaters left all manner of debris and silt scattered across the
landscape,amidst the battered orchards and orange groves below Alameda Street.Fig. 20
about hereWhen the floodwaters finally receded, public debate over how to “con-duct the
Los Angeles River through our city when it gets on a bender” accel-erated. Plans to reinforce
the riverbank with a series of levees went forward.Downtown streets were graded and
scraped clean; workers and horses thenpushed and pulled the piles of dirt and debris up
against the riverbank.Some thought that the effort could be carried further, with the
construc-tion of willow brush-nets. “While there is but little water in the river it canbe
done,” wrote one citizen to the Los Angeles Timesin December 1885, “asno one knows but it
may be a dreadful river again before the ides of Marchcome around.”38The dreaded floods

did come. Within weeks of the dire warning, andwell before the Ides, the rising river
produced familiar scenes of havoc.Downtown Los Angeles slipped beneath the waters, as
did railroad and trol-ley tracks, hills, trees, and people. The river looked to one observer like
a“boiling yellow lake.” Lawman Martin Aguirre became a hero by wadingFigure 20. Flood
damage in the 1880s. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, SanMarino, California.Deverell-
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into the rushing waters to save two men trapped in a streetcar teetering ona broken bridge.
He then spent the whole day of January 19 going back intothe river over and over again to
rescue a grand total of nineteen peopletrapped one way or another in the raging
waters.39In 1889, floods carried stones of twenty-five pounds and more into thestreets of
downtown Los Angeles; boulders weighing as much as twenty tonsbegan answering
gravity’s call in the San Gabriel Mountains. Rainfall fromhigh up in the foothills raced in
minutes to the valley floor. Dogs in the citypound drowned in their cages. Bridges snapped
and floated downstream.Wood from high in the San Gabriels and Santa Monicas came down
withthe floodwaters, choking farmlands but providing easy-to-gather fuel formonths and
months. In the aftermath, various property loss cases went tocourt. In one important
decision, Judge Matthew Allen ruled that LosAngeles River floods resulted from the whims
of the Almighty, not thecapriciousness of any locals or their planning decisions.40Farmers
never knew what to expect from periodic flooding. On the plusside, any good-sized flood
promised a pay-offin driftwood and fertilizer.Receding floodwaters always left behind tons
and tons of alluvial silt, so richin nutrients that crop production and land values increased
overnight. Butfloods too strong could destroy a lifetime’s work. One local resident remem-
bered one season’s heavy floods because he had never seen so many unusualthings in the
river: whole stacks of hay, entire fields of pumpkins, chickenhouses, plows, horses, pigs, and
cattle, houses, and barns.41Yet despite these problems, new arrivals, encouraged by
booster rhetoric,happily figured the Los Angeles River—or a placid version of that river—
into visions of the future. Because of its reliability as a water source, the riverpromised to
help Americans embrace what was once a foreign land. Theycould use the river to claim the
region. For the river basin was, one self-congratulatory pamphlet gloated, “peculiarly
adapted for farming opera-tions by the Anglo-Saxon race.”42Boom period maps inevitably
character-ize the river as a large and peaceful, centralized feature of the landscape,always
beautiful, full, and graceful. A representative lithographic depictionof the river from the
volatile 1880s shows it as a lovely ribbon of white acrossand through the center of the city.
“The Los Angeles River has been morefully utilized than any other,” a booster pamphlet
declared in 1876, “and yetthere is still plenty for all.”43Map 3 about hereThe river proved
immensely useful, not merely as a source of water. Forone thing, the riverbed had a
seemingly endless supply of gravel, and gravelcould be hauled out for construction use or
for dumping into city streetswhitewashed adobe106Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM
Page 106
107remembering a riverto combat knee-deep wintertime mud. Then too, the river, like any
river,made a terrific conduit for carrying things away even during nonflood sea-sons. People
took advantage of this, and they saw the Los Angeles River asan ideal sewer. Early Los
Angeles sewers emptied straight into the river andadjacent dry beds amidst the abandoned

vineyards of earlier times nearWinston and Los Angeles Streets. If rains and the river
cooperated, therefuse was carried downstream beyond offense (the city would not build
anocean outfall until 1893–1894). As late as the late 1880s, citizens suggestedthat the best
sewer plans for the expanding city must consider utilizing theconvenient, almost intestinal,
Los Angeles River. “The river runs directlythrough the city from end to end, much as the
Thames runs throughLondon, or the Seine through Paris, the Spree through Berlin, the
Danubethrough Vienna, the Tiber through Rome, and as the Euphrates ranthrough
Babylon,” offered the writer “Cosmopolitan” in a letter to the LosAngeles Times. As such, the
river was “the natural and proper outlet for thesewage of Los Angeles city.” Downstream
residents ought to have little com-plaint with what the river brought their way, nor could
they expect the cityto build “a new river of brick” in order to control the river’s
outflow.44Map 3. Bird’s-eye view of Los Angeles. Note the peaceful ribbon of the
LosAngeles River in the background.Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 107
Locals used the river as a convenient trash dump (the city dump itself wasat river’s edge),
tossing in not only the daily refuse of the living, but thebodies of countless dead horses and
dogs, picked up offthe streets andthrown unceremoniously into the riverbed to await
decomposition andenough current to travel downstream. An 1887 stable fire, for
instance,killed eighty horses. All were dumped, “to putrify and breed typhoid fever,”in the
riverbed.45The local zanjashad protective laws that supposedly keptpeople from washing
or throwing refuse in them, or from slaughtering cat-tle and pigs in or near them. The river
offered the obvious and convenientalternative. “The carcasses of all dead animals,” reported
the U.S. Censusfor 1880, “are taken to the river-bed south of the city and there buried inthe
sand.” Garbage, ashes, street sweepings, manufacturing wastes: all werelikewise dumped
into the riverbed.46More prosaic activities continued aswell, events that observers
inevitably filtered through cultural lenses. An1890s visitor to the city, for instance,
appreciated the aesthetics that poverty,more than likely ethnic poverty, presented. As he
noted, “mid-stream, in theLos Angeles river, I saw women washing clothes by beating and
wringingthem; a picturesque scene.”47But such romanticizing required a distanced view.
The closer one got tothe river, the less picturesque its denizens and their actions became in
theeyes of observers. Before long, the river became known as a place of badsmells and bad
people, a place where, Anglos expected and insisted, crooks,Mexicans, Indians, and Chinese
congregated. Sonoratown, “Nigger Alley,”and the first Chinatown were all not far from
water’s edge. Long beforeMulholland Drive became known as a place to drop offmurder
victims, theLos Angeles River and its zanjas seem to have been favored locales.48Prostitutes
loitered down near the river; boys smoked cigarettes and gam-bled at water’s edge.
Worried citizens wondered what else could be goingon in the deep underbrush at the
river’s banks. During the infamous siegeof Chinatown in the 1870s, the first Chinese man to
be lynched by thecrowd had been plucked from the river’s bank, where he had tried to
hideunsuccessfully amongst the thick willows.49In the 1880s, a group of fifteento twenty
teenaged and younger boys and girls passed the time down at theriver and its bridges,
apparently “playing hoodlum” in those same willows,much to the consternation of
adults.50As Los Angeles grew, particularly in the boom years after transcontinentalrailroad
connection, the river began to occupy a more important, if increas-ingly troubling, role in

city planning. Uncomfortable with the ways in whichthe river attracted garbage and “the
dangerous classes,” city officials began towhitewashed adobe108Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04
10:01 AM Page 108
tie the river more and more to nascent city beautiful efforts, efforts thatwould find full
flower, at least in the imagination, in the new century. In thelate 1880s, with the increase in
regional rail service, the city and the railroadcompanies began to construct more bridges
and viaducts that spanned theriver from various downtown streets. The increase in river
vistas furtherencouraged the city to clean the river up. By 1890, the viaduct on First
Street,over which the local cable railway ran, became a favored Sunday promenadefor
strollers wandering into the city from Boyle Heights or vice versa. Yet the river continued to
be a problem every wet winter. It spilled overits flimsy bank, water rushed through the
streets of downtown, and stormsewers and drains backed up. “I thought we would be taken
offour feet bythe mad rush of water down the gutters and streets,” a nervous tourist
wrotenear century’s end of his experiences on a February morning.51Locked in a
tempestuous battle over where to put, or even build, a unionrailroad station, some planners
suggested that the riverbed might make apossible, though expensive (not to mention
dangerous!) location.52Moreimportant, the river had become a critical dividing line for a
new feature onthe urban landscape: industry. By the early years of the twentieth
century,the “river beautiful” competed with the “river industrial.” Once the orangegroves
and vineyards of earlier years began to fade away, the river lowlandsbegan to look better
and better for nascent Los Angeles industries and, as ithad for years, railroad corporations.
In the various industrial zoning ordi-nances adopted from 1908 forward (the first of their
kind in the nation), theLos Angeles River helped to delineate industrial sites from
nonindustrialsites. Where the river had once been key to describing the boundaries of
thecity itself, it now helped to break the city up into industrial parcels. Forinstance, city
ordinance 17135 declared that “Industrial District No. 1” wouldinclude the following
perimeter sequences: “northwesterly along the centerline of Buena Vista street to its
intersection with the center line of theofficial bed of the Los Angeles River; thence southerly
along the center lineof the official bed of the Los Angeles River as defined by Ordinance
No.6035....”53In short, the river had a newer cartographic role to play once thetwentieth
century arrived, one which helped further divide Los Angelesinto specific ethnic and class
spaces.54“I went to the River Station for anhour,” social reformer G. Bromley Oxnam wrote
in his diary in 1913, “andcrossed over into the dirt and grime of Mexican Los
Angeles.”55With the arrival of the new century, various city officials and
reformersthroughout the Los Angeles basin grew increasingly concerned about thelarge
numbers of Mexican laborers who had begun to live in coloniason109remembering a
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riverbed lands. Pushed to these cheap lands by patterns of land use, segre-gation, and
poverty, Mexicans eked out lives “hidden,” as one official putit in 1918, “out of sight in the
brush.”56Zoning ordinances reveal one way in which the city elites thought of andutilized
the river. But the grandest plans for the river emerged less out ofengineering or zoning
imperatives than from aesthetic and reform posi-tions. In his classic book The Better City,
reformer Dana Bartlett wrote ofthe river’s ability to define the new—the better—city:

“Think of what valueto the city this river might yet become if placed under a special
commis-sion empowered to carry out a definite plan for its reclamation from baseuses.”
Bartlett, who had founded the city’s first settlement house, was noth-ing if not progressively
wishful. The river could be adorned by manybridges (“each a work of art”), parallel to steam
and electric rail lines, andfurther reclaimed to make a parklike esplanade for autos and
pedestrians.Adjacent factories and warehouses would be “hidden behind a wealth
ofclimbing vines and roses.” The riverbed, once cleaned of its rubbish andproperly graded,
could even become “an extensive playground for the chil-dren of the congested districts.” Or
for at least “nine months of the year,”lest those happy children get swept away by winter
floods. At right anglesto the riverbed (rigid adherence to geometry equaled order, as well as
thecontrol of nature) extensive piers would support three “civic centers” withlyceum halls,
club rooms, athletic facilities, all with “steps leading down tothe riverbed
playground.”57The addition of nearly a dozen bridges for railroads and pedestriansand,
eventually, automobiles, did not do much in terms of making the riverbeautiful. Taming and
beautifying the Los Angeles River would requiremore concerted effort than building
bridges. The future beckoned, and LosAngeles might get there by paying close attention to
the river.The Ugly Shall Be Made Beautiful, the Crooked StraightThe river along its entire
length can be made into a line of beauty.Rev. Dana Bartlett,The Better City,1907Time was, a
concrete river was a beautiful thing. Lining a river with milesand miles of cool grayness was
heralded as the ultimate in city beautifulrationalization, the apex of twentieth-century
urban design’s triumph overnature’s messy whim. Consider Joseph Mesmer, a turn-of-the-
century shoe,whitewashed adobe110Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 110
111remembering a riverreal estate, and brick magnate, owner of the palatial Linda Vista
estate andorchard overlooking the Los Angeles River, president of two powerful
citydevelopment organizations, and chairman of the municipal committeeempowered to fill
the river with cement. A contemporary periodical left lit-tle doubt as to the civic dividends
such a project would return: This work... will be the crowning achievement of [Mesmer’s]
life. Noother work could be projected that will have such beneficial results andmean so
much to the city of Los Angeles. The transforming of the mostunsightly sight of the city into
a beautiful parking [sic], lakes and espla-nades. See the impression the visitor will get upon
his arrival in the citywhen he beholds this picture of artistic picturesqueness and beauty,
alsobeing a park six miles long in the center of the city. Consider the pleasurethat will be
afforded to thousands of our own people where they canenjoy their outing and recreation in
walking over beautiful laid serpentinewalks amidst shady trees, beautiful shrubs and
flowers, while others enjoythe pleasures of boating, sailing and swimming in the six lakes of
3000feet long averaging in depth from two to fifteen feet.Concrete was key to this plan, a
plan designed far more with beautifi-cation and aesthetics in mind than flood control. Lest
anyone doubt the all-inclusive nature of the plan, this booster publication spelled out the
con-struction details: “The river bed and sides are to be lined solidly withconcrete. The
parapet sidewalks above the surface level are to be 3½ feethigh and of artistic design, on
the top of which there will be placed at every30 feet apart a beautiful electrically lighted
gondolier, lighting the park atnight as light as in the day time.”58This ambitious scheme, ca.
1910, planted an important seed. And ithelps us better understand the irony of Los Angeles’

appeal to natural liv-ing epitomized so aptly by the popular Chamber of Commerce
slogan(also ca. 1910): “Los Angeles—Nature’s Workshop.”59But before Mesmer’svision
could be made real, certain things had to happen within the realmsof nature, memory, and
culture. The first was easy: winter rains. In February1913, heavy rainfall inundated
downtown; one local confided to his diarythat “many funny incidents happened on the wet
streets, [or,] I should say,rivers.”60A year later, more rain fell. In late January and again in
mid-February1914, the Los Angeles basin got pounded by winter rains. The Januaryrains
soaked the ground, which lost all absorptive capability. In Februarycame the deluge. On the
night of the 18th alone, an inch and a half of rainDeverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page
111
Figure 22. Salt Lake Railroad at Macy Street and the Los Angeles River, February20, 1914.
Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.Figure 21. Los Angeles River,
north from the Seventh Street Bridge, February 19,1914. Courtesy of the Huntington
Library, San Marino, California.Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 112
113remembering a riverfell on the city. In just three days, nearly twenty inches of rain fell
in the SanGabriel Mountains. The mountains could only absorb so much of the del-uge; the
rest ran downhill as floodwater. Damage was severe; later estimatesput the cost to the basin
at well over $10 million.61Figs. 21 and 22 about hereJust as it had done in the past, the
water came down, first from the skiesand then from the mountains. But the basin had
changed. Roofs and roadshad replaced open land. Water collected only long enough to
gather morestrength and more vertical slope. In downtown Los Angeles, the Los
AngelesRiver flooded at a discharge rate normally used to describe the ColoradoRiver. The
river dumped four million cubic yards of silt into the harbors atLong Beach and San Pedro.
Los Angeles went without outside communi-cation for a week. Rail traffic got knocked out,
and telegraph messages to SanBernardino were sent via Chicago. Damage estimates
reached into the tensof millions of dollars. Many people died. Property washed away. And
whenthe rains returned two years later, they left in their wake flood control bondsFigure
23. Postal worker and intrepid regional photographer Charles Puckadriftfollowing 1916
floods. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino,California.Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04
10:01 AM Page 113
whitewashed adobe114and a wishful piece of legislation, the Los Angeles County Flood
ControlAct, voted in by a worried, frustrated, water-logged citizenry.Fig. 23 about hereAnd
what of memory? The people of Los Angeles, then as now, deal lessday to day with geologic
or climactic time than with human time. Andhuman time has many a memory blind spot.
Like the ever-confident AlfredMoore, who in the 1880s declared floods a thing of the past,
people simplychose not to remember that the Los Angeles River posed a significant haz-ard.
Instead, it was far too easy to continue to market Los Angeles as theworld’s capital of
sunshine and perfect weather. And all that “menaced” landthat lay at the river’s edge, all
those bowl-shaped spreading grounds atopaquifers next to the mountains, proved too easy
a target for real estate saleand development. As the past century has shown, a flood will
take advan-tage of developed land to wreak havoc all the more. The Los Angelesgrowth
machine of the early 1900s had virtually begged nature to providea terrible flood. By 1910,
there were nearly a half a million people in the citywho had never seen the damage a flood

could do to the basin. There wereprobably an equal number who did not (or chose not to)
remember.62But it is within the realm of memory, and the larger realm of culture, thatwe
find an interesting and revealing variable in the flood control and con-crete equation.
Obsessed with the Los Angeles future, elites paused to takethe past seriously, if only for
brief moments stolen from a morning orafternoon here and there. Joseph Mesmer’s plans
for his river committee,borrowing heavily from city beautiful prophet Charles Mulford
Robinson’sideas, focused almost exclusively upon Los Angeles as theAmerican city ofthe
future. But that new river in that new city could not become realitywithout some attention
paid to the ancient river, the real river. Planning tobeautify a river through concrete is one
thing. Actually doing so, particu-larly with a river as volatile as the Los Angeles River,
required a differentmindset, one that ironically contemplated, say, 1820 and 1850 as much
asit did 1920 or 1950. Because to do Mesmer’s “work of a lifetime” justice (orto do it at all),
the river had first to be known. It had to be rememberedbefore it could be corralled. The
Floods of Memory“It was commonly understood and talked of in the early days by
oldMexican people that the Los Angeles river flowed out through thesouthwest part of the
city by Ballona and into the Santa MonicaBayuntil the flood of 1825.”Deverell-T.qxd
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“Mr.Cate has heard the Mexicans talk of the Los Angeles riverhaving flowed into Ballona in
early days,and he thinks it is entirelypossible,even today,for the water to go over that
way.”Flood Control Interviews,William Workman and D.M.Cate.In his majestic 1985 book
Rivers of Empire, environmental historian DonaldWorster argued that historians could
learn a great deal about the modernWest by strolling along the gray, artificial banks of any
number of irrigationcanals which criss-cross America’s arid regions. Such locales—
whichprompted Worster’s insightful “reflections in a ditch”—offered both studyand
illustration of “ecological and social regimentation.” Living thingsshunned concrete canals
because, as Worster points out, a riparian ecosys-tem has been replaced by the sterility of
efficient civil engineering. What ismore, the “hydraulic society” responsible for making
straight channels outof temperamental streams induces and supports a regimented social
order,which is itself “increasingly a coercive, monolithic, and hierarchical system,ruled by a
power elite based on the ownership of capital and expertise.”63The modern canal becomes
in this reading, then, both symbol and engine,both cause and effect, of a rigid social
structure predicated upon gain,growth, and mastery of nature. Such, then, are modern
rivers of empire. Yet social coercion and ecological manipulation are but two of anyempire’s
programs. Imperial designs rarely suffer from any lack of ways orreasons to gain, swipe, or
shore up power, and the American Southwest isno exception. In other words, concrete
canals may tell other stories inaddition to bald environmental destruction and coercive
imposition ofeconomic order. Concrete might also tell us about ethnic clashes in theWest,
about how Anglo visions of the future might have necessitated themanipulation of Latino
understandings of the past. Concrete might con-vince us that infrastructural designs and
schemes are inherently cultural (anotion Worster would clearly support), and that the
much-maligned,laughable Los Angeles River is itself, ironically enough, if not a great riverof
empire, then at least a river of great empire. From his office in downtown Los Angeles, civil
engineer J.W. Reaganchaired a committee (“Committee of Menaced and Flooded Areas”)

andoversaw an extraordinary history project. Agents were sent into the field(the field being
the entire Los Angeles basin) to interview people, particu-larly those who made up the
“dwindling remnant of the early pioneers ofthis County,” about rivers.64Blandly titled
“Research Los Angeles CountyFlood Control 1914–1915,” the dozens and dozens of
interviews weave115remembering a riverDeverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 115
together an amazingly rich fabric of Southern California social history. Welearn a great deal
about the growth of the Southland, the decline of regionalfarming, folkways, and, of course,
an immense amount about rivers: whereand when they flowed, what damage they did, what
should, could, andwould be done about them. But we also learn something more. Because it
turns out that those inter-viewed were not necessarily ordinary people chosen entirely at
random bythe field workers. There is clearly a presumption on the part of the com-mittee
that age and ethnicity matter. Alongside the community leaders, thepowerful capitalists and
planners (Joseph Mesmer, for instance, is inter-viewed at length65), the Anglo pioneers, and
the powerful farmers, are eld-erly Mexicans. This cannot be an accident. It is as if
instructions to inter-viewers included the charge to “find the oldest Mexicans you can.”66It
is clear that the surveys were designed (if only accidentally) to validatethe past in an
explicitly utilitarian, and yet oddly thrilling, sort of way. Thevolume, the engineers proudly
stated, had been “written in the language ofthe pioneers themselves.”67In other words,
these engineers at work inReagan and the U.S. Engineer’s office on Figueroa Street began to
map thecourses of the basin’s rivers by deliberately establishing a cartography ofmemory.
Knowing everything there is to know about rivers requiresdifferent sets of knowledge and
information. The engineers, J.W. Reaganmost prominent among them, knew hydraulics;
they knew all about theacre footage of river flow; they knew groundwater equations and
aquiferstorage capacities. But what they did not know was history, particularly the“pre-
history” of Mexican Los Angeles (to say nothing of the NativeAmerican history and memory
of and in the region). And there were pre-cious few places to turn in 1914 to fill any gaps.
Aside from the boostersextolling the sweetness of the mission period or the slow pace of
“whatwas,” Los Angeles had few repositories of local historical knowledge. Eventhe region’s
Historical Society had urged Angelenos not to spend too muchtime pondering the Mexican
or Spanish period of the basin. As the orga-nization’s president had put the matter, with
poignant finality, “a score ortwo of names, a few crumbling adobes, and all is
told.”68Newspapers wereunreliable; mission records were unattainable. The United States
WeatherBureau, the repository of scientific knowledge about Los Angeles floods,had a data
bank that went back only thirty-seven years into the region’s past.Knowing about the floods
of 1878–1879 might have been useful, but amemory bank that thin could not much help
engineers understand rain-fall and hydrologic patterns on or in the landscape.69What they
needed towhitewashed adobe116Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 116
know could be stated, certainly much more simply than the engineersthemselves put it: “If
the year of maximum floods can be identified, it ispossible from the information which
exists as to other floods, to arrive bysynthetic process at a rational approximate of
maximum discharge quanti-ties.”70In other words, how big were the floods of memory?
Where couldengineer Reagan’s interviewers turn?71The answer must have been obvious.
They turned, in part, to the riveritself. William McEuen, who had just finished his M.A. thesis

at theUniversity of Southern California with Emory Bogardus, had declared thatmost of the
Mexicans in Los Angeles could be found “within a mile of theLos Angeles River.” So the river
was itself a vector of ethnicity, in that theinterviewers probably used it as a guide to finding
Mexicans. But ethnicitywas but one guide; it had to be supplemented by age. The
interviewers’work provided a meeting ground between past and future, between whatLos
Angeles was and what Los Angeles would be. Their questions clearlyreflected a respect for
memory and for age and for a period of local historythat, already by 1914, must have
seemed ancient. But in order to catch therivers where they would most likely be, in order to
cement them in onceand for all, engineers had to know their histories. The engineers had
toknow what river flowed where, when, and with how much force. They hadto know how
to, if only in a rudimentary fashion, create a hierarchy offloods, particularly since it was
suggested that 1914 was notas big as floodscould, or did, get in the basin.72Was the great
1889 flood the proverbialhundred-year flood? Should it provide the critical benchmark for
hydro-logic planning? Or was it 1825? 1815? “To state that knowledge of the great-est
volumes of water carried by the various streams is fundamental to floodand conservation
studies is to state an axiom,” is how one prominent engi-neer put it. Even as the Los Angeles
Timesdeclared “Science to ReshapeCounty’s Waterways,” engineers recognized the
necessity of other tools. Or,put in another way, geology could reveal a great deal, but so
could aneighty-year-old Mexican woman.73The interviewers asked their subjects about
rivers. They were, in effect,looking to find private Mexican memory to go with the very
public mem-ories that events like La Fiesta had already shaped in Los Angeles. Now
theireffort was truly aimed at shaping the basin’s physical environment itself, andthey
needed historical help. They worked from a series of questions. Didtheir subjects know
about the basin’s rivers? Did they remember them?What did floods do and, more important,
where did floods go? And whatthey got in return was a wealth of information, often
contradictory, always117remembering a riverDeverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 117
interesting. They learned about regional topography, that before massivesettlement the
expanse of land stretching west from Los Angeles to thePacific had been grizzly bear
country overgrown with willows, elders, cot-tonwoods. They learned about vast vineyards
all along the banks of the LosAngeles River. People told them about overland travel, about
the arrival ofthe railroad in Los Angeles, about the soldiers stationed over by the
oceanduring the Civil War.Judge Ygnacio Sepulveda granted an interview in his downtown
officeand was interrogated “as to the floods of his time.” He agreed that his lin-eage ran
deep in local history, but that the truly knowledgeable membersof his family, those who
could map a century of floods, were dead. Thejudge did point out something that other
Mexicans said again and again:the Los Angeles River had not always flowed where it did in
the twentiethcentury. It moved in the early 1800s, not once but twice, and had oncefound
the Pacific by going out through what was now Exposition Park.74Jose Ruiz, sixty-eight,
recalled a time when there were but four or fiveranchers between Los Angeles and San
Pedro. “In the early days,” Ruizremembered, “the old people used to say that the Los
Angeles river flowedout through the southwest of Los Angeles and into the Ballona.” His
fathertold him that he once saw the valley from Boyle Heights to the plaza onesolid sheet of
water. In those days, though, given the lack of development,“no one thought much of the

floods... they would only cover the groundand not wash to amount to anything.”75After
admitting that old maps were terribly difficult to locate, SurveyorS.B. Reeve insisted that
“memory maps” were the only way to proceed. “Itwould not be too much trouble,” he said,
“to get a few of the old timerstogether and make up a map of the old flooded district, and
make planswhereby the river could be readily controlled.”76Joe Bernal, who remembered
swimming in the river when it ran downAlameda Street, talked of an old aunt who told him
about the river’s his-tory. “Yes,” he recalled she said, “the Los Angeles river at one time had
itschannel near the plaza, passed at what is now 2nd and Alameda Sts., thento near 6th and
Los Angeles Sts. then in a southwesterly direction towardsthe Ballona for a long distance,
then swung southeasterly and skirted theedge of the hills at Dominguez.”77Mr. Bernal also
remembered visiting thehome of the Lugo family and asking Mr. Lugo about the Los
AngelesRiver; he was told much the same story, that the river once flowed elsewhereand
that one could know the route simply by looking closely at basin soils:where there was sand
there had once been a river.whitewashed adobe118Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM
Page 118
“Years ago,” William Crain remembered, “when I was a young man, Iused to talk to the old
people, both Americans and Mexicans. They inter-ested me more than the young people.
The Mexicans have told me manytimes, and it is a sort of legend among them, that in the
early days the LosAngeles river ran out through the southwestern part of the city, and emp-
tied into the Ballona Bay. It is entirely feasible physically, and what has beenmay come
again.” F.Z. Vejar, eighty-four and a Los Angeles native, ratifiedthis oft-told story and told
many others as well, apparently. But these oth-ers were dismissed: “Mr. Vejar has many
stories of the early days, during theMexican rule and later that of the U.S., but they in no way
bear upon thesubject.”78Mr. J. Frank Burns spoke of being employed by the Santa Fe
Railroad tofind out about floods in regards to certain legal cases. He said that he
hadinterviewed Pio Pico at ninety-three and another man who was 137 yearsold. Both had
insisted that the river changed course radically in 1825.79Mrs. Lopez had been born in Los
Angeles in 1831. She had moved to theSan Fernando Valley at twenty, on her wedding trip,
and had stayed eversince. Speaking in Spanish translated by her daughter, Mrs. Lopez
recalledthe big floods of 1858–1859. She remembered the date very well, she said,because
she had to travel to Los Angeles to attend a christening, and she wasable to look the
information up in her family Bible. She had been trappedfor two weeks in Los Angeles at
that time and, upon returning to the val-ley, noticed that many adobe homes had simply
melted away in the rainsand floods.80Jesse Hunter remembered the big floods of the 1860s.
He also recalledasking his father, long ago sometime around mid-century, why
“theMexicans always built their houses on the ridges and hills and carried waterup to them
instead of building down by the water, and his father said hedidn’t know, but after 1861–62
he knew why they built on the highground.”81Mr. J.R. Ramirez, interviewed at home on
North Broadway, told ofgrowing up in Los Angeles in the 1840s. His grandfather’s
grandfather hadcome to the area in 1786 and made the first wine and brandy in the
basin.His grandfather, an Avila, had made adobe bricks in a kiln down near theriver and had
grown grapes where the Southern Pacific railyards stood. Hehad little faith in the utility of
flood control efforts. “When Mr. Ramirezwas told that we were looking for data to enable

the engineers to perfecttheir plans to control the river, he emphatically said it could not be
done.Then he showed where the water had been in 1825, and said that there
was119remembering a riverDeverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 119
not money enough to control such floods. Those floods will come again,he said, and no one
can keep them from it.”82What Reagan’s engineers were after was evidence of the river’s
wander-ings and its excesses, a way to map reminiscence. They did just this: underJ.W.
Reagan’s supervision, a map of Los Angeles basin rivers was drawnwhich suggested cyclical
patterns of flooding of greater and lesser extentsince the nineteenth century. This is not to
suggest that the engineersplaced inordinate faith in comprehensive Mexican, or any,
memory. On thecontrary, Reagan made sure to point out that it was “quite possible
thatthere may have been other floods which were not recalled. It would be anexceptional
memory which could recall every serious flood.”83But exceptional memory was not the
critical point. Simple, individualmemories of flooding and destructiveness were all that
mattered. Theycould be aggregated. In the report drawn up following the oral history-tak-
ing, the Los Angeles County Supervisors introduced the important findingsby suggesting
that both physical and mental (i.e., “memorable”) evidencedictated “that equally great and
even greater and more disastrous inunda-tions will occur in the future.”84The engineers
also wanted proof that the river could be corralled andheld. For it is in the wake of all this
interviewing that plans were developedthat eventually led to the concretization of the Los
Angeles River. Whatplanners and engineers in part wanted to do was protect the new
LosAngeles Harbor at San Pedro from the deleterious effects of river-borne silt.If they could
move the river and send it into Alamitos Bay near LongBeach, the new harbor—pride and
joy of both engineering and commerce—would be the beneficiary of modern flood control.
One way to interpret the interviewers’ search for information is as mereintelligence
gathering from the past. But another way of looking at thingsreaches for a broader
interpretation than what might have gone on in anygiven sitting room between an
interviewer and an interviewee some ninetyyears ago. Awareness, even validation, of the
past was predicated upon ask-ing about it. Interviewers quizzed their informants. When
were you born?Can you talk about growing up here? Do you remember the Los
AngelesRiver? Where did it flow? When did it flood? How big were those floods?Do you
have any maps? This sensitivity to the past had a purpose, one aimed directly at thefuture
and, more explicitly, the city of the future. These engineers didappreciate the regional
Mexican past. They did ask about it, and they didwrite it down. But viewed through a fairly
skeptical lens regarding ethnicwhitewashed adobe120Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM
Page 120
perceptions and the rise of Los Angeles, such validation can be seen as tak-ing up but a
cultural instant, worth only the time it took for Mexican mem-ory to be put to work as
science in the quest for the Anglo city of the future.These unusual interview documents, as
saturated with the past asPorciuncula itself, nonetheless had within them ultimate designs
on thefuture. While these reminiscences are indeed oral histories, it is importantto keep in
mind that the oral historians approached their work as engineersfirst: the history they
gathered was meant to be put to work, to make abridge between memory and the future.
That future—in the city of thefuture—required that the river go away or at least go where it

was supposedto go. Similar behavior was required of the basin’s Mexicans as well. In
theend, the river of memory and Mexican memories of the river linked eth-nicity and water
far more intimately than any novelist’s metaphor couldpossibly accomplish. And unlike
most metaphorical wordplay, these asso-ciations came complete with hard-edged realities,
such as further ethnic seg-regation, isolation, and destitution down at river’s edge. All of this
was part and parcel of those processes of cultural and ethnictransference explored years
ago by Carey McWilliams in Southern Cali-fornia Country. As McWilliams notes, study of
“the local annals” reveals “atleast the outlines of the process by which, through a kind of
occupationalerosion, the Hispanos steadily declined in influence and power.”
ForMcWilliams, the transitions are explicitly work-related: Mexican vaquerosbecome
sheepshearers following the demise of the cattle business; sheep-shearers in turn become
farm laborers; those farm laborers in turn becomestreet vendors and peddlers. Pushing
Mexicans aside allowed them tobecome that “picturesque element” for a short period of
time until, by theend of the century, “visitors had ceased to note the presence of
Mexicans.”85It is that erasure—or at least retreat from, or at least whitewashing—of
theregion’s culture, politics, and political economy, which provides us with adifferent lens
through which to examine the life and death of the LosAngeles River. Because what is so
striking about the flood control interviewsof 1914 is the mere presence of Mexican voices
and Mexican people, broughtback and made real by the infrastructural demands of “the
better city” ofthe future. Anglo Americans had interviewed elderly Mexicans before
inCalifornia history—Hubert Howe Bancroft’s early oral histories stand outin this regard.
But this was different. Antiquarianism had been replaced byutilitarianism. In the former
case, the words and stories themselves were theobject. In the latter case of the young
hydrologists talking to octogenarians,the personal histories were but means to an
engineered end.121remembering a riverDeverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 121
Carey McWilliams notes that the swamping of Mexican life and culturetook place with a
“truly awful swiftness.” But in the case of the concretiza-tion of the river into an Anglo icon,
things would move slowly. The surveysdoubtless helped create a certain body of historical
knowledge, but massiveflood control measures did not begin immediately. The receding
waters of1914 and 1916 floods left behind the bond acts that were to provide thefinancial
and engineering wherewithal to channel and move rivers, builddams, and protect
harbors.86The work proved far less manageable than hadonce been thought; more concrete
would be needed.87Despite (or becauseof) help from the Army Corps of Engineers, things
moved slowly. Yes, theLos Angeles River would be cemented in place. But it would take
muchmore time and much more money than anyone in early twentieth-centuryLos Angeles
could have imagined. The introduction of tens of thousands of automobiles (Los Angeles
had,by the late 1920s, the highest per capita car ownership of any American city)helped
further to cement the river’s future. As early as 1924, the city andcounty Traffic Commission
had designed a “Major Traffic Street Plan,”adopted by the voters, which called for a “river
truck freeway” to connectthe San Fernando Valley with the harbor district. Such a visionary
planwould also go a long way toward rationalizing the river; by the twenties, theLos
Angeles River had been virtually personified as a mischievous trouble-maker. “Was there
ever anywhere a river more subject to ‘ups and downs’?”the Los Angeles Timeswondered.

“It [will] never stay put. At one time itflowed along Los Angeles street and then it
deliberately moved to Alamedastreet.”88The time was fast approaching for more concerted
action againstsuch willfulness.By the mid-1930s, Joseph Mesmer’s dream of a concrete
river—the utilitar-ian river if not the river beautiful—had new allies in the form of federal
floodcontrol funds and a more aggressive Army Corps of Engineers. By this time,too, flood
control as a civic problem had become an unquestioned given onthe part of city engineers
and politicians: Los Angeles had floods, Los Angeleshad temperamental rivers, therefore Los
Angeles must undertake drastic floodcontrol measures.89Just as the rains of 1914 had
brought about concertedaction and regional “re-memories” of flood dangers, so too with the
devastat-ing floods of the Depression years. What is more, the federal governmentproved
more than willing to step in with both money and labor. Figs. 24, 25, and 26 about hereNew
Year’s Day, 1934, was among the worst, when the Los Angeles Rivercommunities of
Burbank, Montrose, and Glendale got hit by a massive anddeadly flood. Poor migrants from
the southern plains had set up tent andwhitewashed adobe122Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04
10:01 AM Page 122
temporary communities in the bed of the river and nearby tributarystreams. It was “the
natural thing,” according to Woody Guthrie, thatOkies would congregate in river and creek
bottoms. But on “that fatalNew Year’s Night,” Woody sang in his mournful dirge about the
flood, “acloudburst hit the mountains, it swept away our homes. A hundred soulswas taken,
a million hearts was grievin.” “This world will long remember,”Guthrie sang, those folks
“that crossed the golden river in that fatal NewYear’s flood.”90The world has not long
remembered those victims, nor the “wild LosAngeles River” that flooded. But “immediate
memory” did prompt theflood control engineers of Los Angeles to step up their actions
following thedevastation. By 1937, the Army Corps had $70 million to spend in LosAngeles
on flood control work. Momentum and money increased in theaftermath of the deadly 1938
flood, which killed close to a hundred peopleacross Los Angeles County.91Planners were
quick, as they often were, to combine flood control planswith beautification projects if they
could get away with it under the watch-ful eyes of the Corps. As one report of the era put it,
with specific referenceto the Los Angeles River, “large areas of proposed park lands in the
riversand drainage channels will have double value to the public because they willserve
both park and drainage purposes.” In other words, the objectives weremutually reinforcing:
channel the rivers and develop them into narrowurban greenbelts. The major recreational
planning document of the period,brought out just as the Depression hammered Southern
California, rec-ommended the construction of nearly one hundred regional
“parkways,”many of which were multiple designs bringing together flood control
plans,freeway developments, and urban green space. The document pointed outthat much
of the residential areas lying up against the river were “of low val-uations and poor
developments.”92Despite some real concern on the part of certain city and county
officialsabout the wisdom of turning the Army Corps of Engineers loose willy-nillyin the
rivers of the Los Angeles basin, the city did nonetheless plunge intothe paving project.93At
one point, the channel projects were to include “theworld’s highest dam” nestled cozily
above Azusa in the San Gabriels, but thatparticular endeavor was shelved when it ran into
bad public relations, poten-tially unstable geology, and an embarrassing kickback scandal

which sent acounty supervisor to state prison after $80,000 mysteriously showed up inhis
pocket.94The Corps had some early problems with the Los AngelesRiver: their first attempt
at concretization washed away in March rains. But123remembering a riverDeverell-T.qxd
1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 123
the die had long ago been cast, and the Los Angeles River, and its cousinsthe San Gabriel and
Rio Hondo, were paved over in about twenty yearsof labor (though the work is ongoing),
with the help of a virtual ocean ofthick concrete. Los Angeles basin flood control today
represents the mostambitious, expensive, and concrete-intensive such project west of
theMississippi. The Los Angeles River, Army Corps engineers say, is “the riverwe built.”95Is
a built river dead, by definition? Of course not, despite indicationswithin technical and legal
literature that others believe it is.96And few whobelieve so are shy about suggesting foul
play. The following is from a sharp-eyed WPA observer in the mid-1930s. Notice how it
reads like the obitu-ary of a loyal civil servant:[The] Los Angeles River has been pictured in
recent years by local witsasa stream whose bed must be sprinkled regularly to keep down
the dust.Despite all merry quips coined at its expense, the fact remains that, savefor a few
scattering wells, the Los Angeles River, for a period of 133 years,served as sole water source
for this community. From the day the pueblowhitewashed adobe124Figures 24–26. 1930s
channelization of the Los Angeles River. Courtesy of theHuntington Library, San Marino,
Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 125
was founded in 1781, the river continued faithfully to serve the town untilthe increasing
needs of a growing city exceeded its limited supply.97Throughout the past century, city
officials and planners have celebratedthe control of nature as exemplified by their
rationalization of the river.Sometimes they have been right, sometimes the river has
surprised them.If anything, the Los Angeles River is a stubborn stream. In the winter
of1907, assistant Los Angeles city engineer E.A. Tuttle wrote to his boss andboasted that
recent flood control measures had, for the first time in history,made it possible for the city
to weather the rains of winter without fear ofthe Los Angeles River. He was wrong, to be
sure, but the mere fact thatTuttle believed it illustrates how the city was firmly engaged in
remakingthe river and turning it to other than traditional uses.98Engineer Tuttle has been
echoed ever since, most particularly by thetruck river freeway enthusiasts of the twenties
and again during the SecondWorld War. In early 1941, city planning documents argued that
the riverwould be a good defense industry ally in that trucks could be used totransport war
materiel in the riverbed (planners apparently got the idea bywatching construction trucks
in the riverbed, busy supplying concrete forthe channels). Of course, planners noted, the
river did have water twomonths out of the year, but this was being taken care of by the
“great con-crete channel.”99By 1943, the regional planning commission, in the pagesof its
“Summary Report on Feasibility of Los Angeles River Freeway,” haddetermined that truck
traffic in the riverbed itself was not practical. “Thisconclusion was based on the fact that the
channel was designed for onepurpose only[:] to carry the maximum runoffthat occurs
during periodicfloods.”100But they still thought they could construct wings on either sideof
the riverbed to carry traffic. In that way, though the river itself might benow unreliable, the
channel would still flow. A new river had been, if notcreated, at least envisioned, one no

longer filled with water but with carsand trucks. Planners could hardly rein in their
enthusiasm.101The newly industrialized river—what writer D.J. Waldie has called “theriver
the Anglo city misplaced”—helped create more rigid pockets ofMexican housing and
neighborhoods.102For in addition to acting as amarker for industrial development, as in
zoning legislation, the Los AngelesRiver simultaneously “zones” ethnicity and class. It has of
course been thatway for years, even long ago when the river’s moods made its banks
riskyand thus cheaper land. But the process accelerated once the river wasassigned
industrial chores. In the late 1930s, for instance, right in the heartwhitewashed
adobe126Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 126
of the public works assault on the river, University of Southern Californiastudent Charles
Withers went looking for Mexicans in Los Angeles, as hispeers had been doing for decades.
Like a watery magnet, the river drew himto his subjects. He went first east of the plaza,
“following the general lineof the river and of the railroad tracks. This was perhaps the
poorest district,and the most frequently studied in the past twenty years by those
interestedin the Mexican and his problems. It had a distinctly Mexican flavor, withshops,
theaters, recreational facilities, and so forth, of a typically Mexicanturn. In this district were
those localities known as the ‘Plaza,’ ‘Dogtown,’and the ‘Flats’ of the packing house district.
This last spread across to theother side of the river in some places.... The houses were
ancient, ram-shackle, and crowded.”103It was as if a sharp quarantine began in the low-
land flats running along Macy Street, falling down toward the river itself,a critical dividing
line that exists even today. Maybe it is easy to pick on the Los Angeles River because it has
always beenpuny and never all that reliable. It looks like a creek next to other rivers ofthe
American West. But it clearly once was something that it is not any-more, and the transition
from what once was to what is now cannot bedivorced from political, cultural, or social
currents. At least two certaintiesare apparent. The first is that the river’s most critical
transition (from riverto flood control channel) is tied to a regional disassociation with a
distinctethnic past. The river displayed a disturbing propensity to flood, and suchfloods
were all too obvious reminders of an unruly nature in a place thatdemanded—and
claimed—control over nature in the name of the urbanfuture. A different future beckoned to
the planners and builders of LosAngeles, if and only if the river could be corralled,
contained, and con-trolled. That process, precisely because it was predicated on
knowingregional history as a tool by which to embrace the regional future,
revealedattitudes and behaviors about ethnicity and race. The second sure thing is that the
concrete did not come down from themountains all by itself. A concrete river used to be a
beautiful thing, a placewhere exuberant Angelenos would be able to stroll placidly amidst
thevisionary city that they had created, the city of the future, the city that hadbeautified
itself by perfecting Nature. But concrete rivers are not beautifultoday. The enduring irony of
the Los Angeles River is that those exuberantfuture-obsessed Anglos do not inhabit the
river’s spaces. It is the immigrant127remembering a riverDeverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01
AM Page 127
and homeless, mostly Latino, people living in a depressing deindustrializedcorridor who
drink the water, swim and wash in it, and even farm itsbanks and belly.104But of course
ethnic boundaries could be and most assuredly are drawnwith other markers in addition to

environmental features like topographyand a river. In this, Los Angeles is no diﬀerent than
any other Americancity. One of these markers was, and is, certainly labor, as we will
investigatein chapter 4’s discussion of the making of modern Los Angeles on thebacks of
several generations of Mexican laborers working at the biggestbrickyard in the
world.whitewashed adobe128Deverell-T.qxd 1/20/04 10:01 AM Page 128

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