Growing up in Los Angeles and skiing in Mammoth, I knew Mulholland as the name of a road, and the Owens Valley as desolate stretch of wilderness along the 395. But that's at the remove of 80 years. Mulholland was once a power, the unquestioned king of water in Los Angeles, and the Ownes Valley home to hardscrabble but successful ranchers and farmers.

To grow, Los Angeles needed water. Mulholland and former Los Angeles major Fred Eaton hatched a plan to buy up water rights in the Owen's Valley, and transport water to Los Angeles with an ambitious 235 mile gravity fed aqueduct. Mulholland was the chief engineer, Eaton the financier, but the partnership broke down as Eaton demanded an extortionate $1 million for a valley well-suited to be a reservoir. Mulholland's crew braved desert temperature extremes, cave-ins, and guerrilla war from the locals to build and maintain the aqueduct. Meanwhile, a cabal of Los Angeles based speculators used their insider knowledge to profit immensely from new development in the San Fernando valley. Mulholland himself didn't profit from speculation, but those around him did.

Mulholland's reputation was destroyed by the 1928 failure of the Saint Francis dam. The reservoir broke suddenly in the middle of the night, killing hundreds, an the ambitious prosecutor Asa Keyes aimed to show that Mulholland's incompetence was the root fault. And certainly, as chief engineer, he bore ultimate responsibility, but Davis argues the dam collapse was due to an ancient landslide unexplained by contemporary geological theories. Mulholland would have need to be prescient, more than prudent, to prevent the collapse.

Rivers in the Desert is a fast moving history, and illuminates some of the character of the age. But I'm a fan of engineering biographies, and this book falls short of the sublime of McCullough's The Path Between the Seas, and is oddly silent on the California Water Wars. I'd probably read Cadillac Desert on that subject. But within these limits, Davis does a great job.