Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
four million barrels of 'black gold' annually. Downtown LA sprang up around Doheny's
well, becoming a hub of industry with over 100,000 inhabitants by 1900.
While pastoral Southern California was urbanizing, Northern Californians who had wit-
nessed the environmental devastation of mining and logging firsthand were jump-starting
the nation's first conservation movement. Sierra Nevada naturalist, lyrical writer and San
Francisco Bay Area farmer John Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892. Dams and
pipelines to support communities in California's deserts and coastal cities were built over
Muir's strenuous objections - including Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite, which sup-
plies Bay Area water today. In drought-prone California, tensions still regularly come to a
boil between land developers and conservationists.
The classic flick
Chinatown
(1974) is a fictionalized yet surprisingly accurate account of
the brutal water wars that were waged to build Los Angeles.
Reforming the Wild West
When the great earthquake and fire hit San Francisco in 1906, it signaled change for Cali-
fornia. With public funds for citywide water mains and fire hydrants siphoned off by cor-
rupt political bosses, there was only one functioning water source in all of San Francisco.
When the smoke lifted, one thing was clear: it was time for the Wild West to change its
ways.
While San Francisco was rebuilt at a rate of 15 buildings a day, political reformers set to
work on city, state and national policies, one plank at a time. Californians concerned about
public health and trafficking in women pushed for the passage of the 1914 Red Light
Abatement Act, which shut down brothels statewide. Mexico's revolution from 1910 to
1921 brought a new wave of migrants and revolutionary ideas, including ethnic pride and
worker solidarity. As California's ports grew, longshoremen's unions coordinated a histor-
ic 83-day strike in 1934 along the entire West Coast that forced concessions for safer
working conditions and fair pay.
At the height of the Depression in 1935, some 200,000 farming families fleeing the
drought-struck Dust Bowl on the Great Plains arrived in California, where they found
scant pay and deplorable working conditions. California's artists alerted middle America
to the migrants' plight, and the nation rallied around Dorothea Lange's haunting docu-
mentary photos of famine-struck families and John Steinbeck's harrowing fictionalized ac-
