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Figure 1. 1878 photograph of William Mulholland (standing) and his brother Hugh Patrick,
who was 11 months younger (Catherine Mulholland Collection, CSUN Oviatt Library).

On the Pacific side, Willie and Hugh found a Peruvian naval vessel sailing north, who
accommodated the pair in exchange for their shoveling bunker coal. They were left in the Acapulco,
where they managed to secure passage to San Francisco, by working in a similar fashion. From San
Francisco, the pair took made their way to Martinez, where they purchased a pair of horses and
made the 400-mile overland trek top Los Angeles. When they arrived in January 1877 the city’s
population was almost 9,000 people and it was battling a smallpox epidemic.
The Pueblo of Los Angeles had recently welcomed the arrival of the Southern Pacific
Railroad the previous September (1876), hastened by a local gold rush centered round Coso, in
southwestern Inyo County (north of the Mojave Desert). The area also found itself in the throes of
th
the worst drought of the 19 Century, which killed 400,000 head of cattle in southern California.
His Aunt Catherine had lost three of her six children to sickness on their voyage from Panama to
Santa Monica (Mulholland, 2000).
After a month of seeking work, Willie decided he had seen enough of this dusty, drought-
ridden land, and decided to return to the sea. While walking to San Pedro he ran into Manuel
Dominguez, one of the heirs to Rancho San Pedro, one of the largest Spanish Land Grants.
Dominguez hired Mulholland to hand excavate artesian water wells in the coastal plain of is now

Compton. At a depth of about 600 feet the workers encountered wood from a tree, as well as
numerous marine fossils. These discoveries caught Mulholland’s fancy, so he sought to learn more
about geology and hydrology (Kahrl et al., 1979). At the Los Angeles Library he secured a copy a
book on geology from the public library, which turned out to be Joseph Leconte’s Elements of
Geology, which had just been released (1877). Leconte was a Professor of Geology at the

World Environmental and Water Resources Congress 2017