1. California
Part 3
“Panama & Los Angeles:
The Waterworks That Made the American West”
BY:
CHANTEL HENDERSON
HISTORY 141
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2. The Panama Canal:
The First Attempt by the French
 Ferdinand de Lesseps was a French entrepreneur who
developed the Suez Canal and began the construction for the
Panama Canal.
 He wanted to make a short cut for sea travel. This would save
8,000 miles from New York to San Francisco, instead of
going around the horn of South America.
 Without previous knowledge of Panama and despite warnings
from others of how much turmoil would come from it, de
Lesseps went over to Panama with thousands of French
laborers to build the canal.
 They encountered obstacles immediately but still persevered.
 The biggest obstacle were the diseases, mainly malaria and
yellow fever, that wiped out the workers in vast numbers.
Although of the dangers, people still kept coming over to
replace the deceased workers.
 A total of over 20,000 men died from diseases and in the end
the French had failed and had to cease the project due to lack
of funds.

3. The Panama Canal:
Theodore Roosevelt and the Panama Revolution of 1903
 After Theodore Roosevelt became President, he
wanted to rule both seas (the Pacific and Atlantic)
with an American canal in between. He wanted to
finish the Panama Canal from where the French had
stopped.
 After the senate approved the project, Roosevelt was
ecstatic, but Colombia did not like the terms and
dragged out the negotiations indefinitely. This made
things difficult since Panama was a part of
Colombia.
 This brought on the Panama Revolution of 1903.
 The Panama Revolution of 1903 was bloodless and
ended very shortly when a gun ship, the USS
Nashville, pulled up on the shores of Panama before
the Colombians could even send their troops.
 Panama had gained their independence from
Colombia and the Americans were able to start
construction.

4. The Panama Canal:
Chief Engineer John Stevens and Dr. William Gorgas
 The Americans were unorganized when they first started building the
canal, and yellow fever was threatening them.
 After John Stevens, the best railroad engineer at the time, became
Chief Engineer, he told the men to stop excavating and make their
environment hospitable first.
 Dr. William Gorgas, who was the medical physician there, knew that
the tropical diseases came from mosquitoes and told them to put
screens on their houses.
 With the help from John Stevens and Dr. William Gorgas, the
Americans were able to clean up the area and make it a habitable
environment for themselves, and by December 1905, Dr. Gorgas was
able to announce that there was no more Yellow Fever on the
isthmus.
 John Stevens proposed the idea to President Roosevelt of building a
dam to create an enormous lake and a series of locks to raise the ships
up and down across the canal. Roosevelt preferred the idea of a sea-
level canal but approved the idea fortunately.
 Stevens built a series of railroads to haul the dirt out of the canal and
used massive power shovels to dig out the dirt. This proved to be a
very efficient way of moving the dirt.

5. The Panama Canal:
Colonel George Washington Goethals
 After Chief Engineer John Stevens resigned from the
position, Roosevelt wanted to appoint someone the
position who could not walk away from it, so he
appointed a military man, Colonel George Washington
Goethals.
 With the prior experience he had with building locks
and dams while in the military, he proved to be a good
leader.
 Problems had occurred including pre-mature
explosions from dynamite and massive amounts of rain
that would cause substantial mudslides. Even when the
biggest mudslide occurred, the Colonel said to dig it out
again.
 The locks were made out of concrete, and the most
amount of concrete any structure had been made out of,
and were meant to become machines themselves.
 They were extremely massive with an overall length of
1000 feet and a width of 110 feet.
 The Panama Canal officially opened on August 14th,
1914.

6. The Los Angeles Aqueduct:
Why It Was Necessary
 Los Angeles’s only source of water, the tiny
Los Angeles River, was sucked dry by 1903.
 The superintendent of Los Angeles’s water
system, William Mulholland, tried to fix the
problem, but the city’s growth kept it from
being solve. He knew that the city would
need to stop growing or that they would need
to find another source of water for it.
 A friend of Mulholland’s told him about the
Owens Valley about 200 miles north of L.A.
where there were lakes and rivers full of fresh
water.

7. The Los Angeles Aqueduct:
The Building of the Aqueduct
 Mulholland wanted to build an aqueduct that would
bring that water from the Owens Valley to Los
Angeles and campaigned to the people of the city to
fund his new project.
 The people voted 10 to 1 for his new project.
 In 1905, Mulholland set out to build his new
aqueduct.
 With no formal civil engineering training,
Mulholland had men and mules go out to the dry,
arid desert of the Mojave to build a very long pipe
that was imported in segments from Germany.
 On November 5, 1913, the Los Angeles Aqueduct was
released and dedicated.
 It poured out 4 times the amount of water that Los
Angeles would need.

8. The Los Angeles Aqueduct:
Problems Arise
 Since the aqueduct was releasing 4 times as much water than
what was necessary, the ranchers’ soil in the Owens Valley was
becoming unfertile because the water was being sucked out of it.
 Mulholland had even more ground water sucked out of the
Owens Valley and the Owens Lake even became dry because of
it.
 This resulted in business and schools closing down because the
crops were failing.
 The ranchers were mad and people revolted.
 In 1924, the local bank president and 100 citizens seized the
aqueduct.
 They opened the flood gates and allowed the water flow in a
ditch where it would go back into the valley floor where it
originated.
 Over 700 people gathered at the aqueduct to keep control of it.
 The city made a deal with the bank and the ranchers to pay
them to regain the rights of the water supply and said that they
would share it with them too.
 Everybody was happy until they learned that the deal fell
through.
 People kept blowing up the aqueduct, but no one was ever
convicted for it.