MONO BASIN MARKED BY TIME

With all the recent discussion surrounding the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power‘s (LADWP) presence in the Eastern Sierra (see cover story), it’s easy to lose track of how the agency came to control so much land and water here in the first place.

Tuesday night, June Lake resident and historian Robert Marks offered a crash course in that history while discussing his book, “Deep Time in the Mono Lake Basin,” at the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory.

The book traces both the human and environmental history of Mono Lake across 10,000 years.

Mono Basin is defined largely by the creeks feeding Mono Lake, a terminal lake with no outlet where minerals accumulate rather than flow away, making the lake saline. Those tributaries include Mill Creek to the north, Lee Vining Creek and Parker and Walker Creeks in the center of the basin, and Rush Creek near present-day June Lake.

For at least 1,500 years, the Numu Kootzaduka’a people have lived throughout the basin.

However, in the mid-19th century, miners flooded into the Eastern Sierra. Ranchers and farmers soon followed, hoping to profit from supplying booming mining towns with food and livestock.

Starting in the 1850s, federal land policies encouraged settlers to move into places like Mono Basin.

Signed by Abraham Lincoln, the Homestead Act of 1862 encouraged westward expansion by granting settlers free or inexpensive public land.

Then the Desert Land Act allowed individuals to buy up to 640 acres of arid public land for as little as $1.25 per acre if they promised to irrigate and improve it.

“What’s missing from this map?” Marks asked the audience while displaying an 1861 survey map dividing land around Mono Lake into tidy square parcels. “Well, it looks like it’s empty, doesn’t it?”

The problem, Marks explained, was that it wasn’t empty at all.

As settlers fenced property for ranching and agriculture, many Kootzaduka’a people were pushed off ancestral lands and forced to labor on ranches and farms.

“To this day, the land has never been ceded,” Marks said.

By the early 20th century, land itself was less valuable than the water on it.

Mono Basin’s creeks quickly became targets for irrigation and hydroelectric development. Under California’s early water laws, claims could be established by posting notices and constructing diversion ditches, creating a system that rewarded first use and infrastructure over ecological impact.

One of the most ambitious schemes was led by developer W.D. McPherson, who formed the Rush Creek Mutual Ditch Company. Investors bought shares tied to the promise that irrigation water would eventually be delivered to desert land claims filed under federal land laws.

But McPherson ran into J.S. Cain, a Bodie mine owner and hydroelectric developer who had acquired extensive land along key streams in the basin. Those holdings gave him strong riparian claims under California law, which generally favored landowners whose property bordered waterways.

Cain’s strategy prioritized control of streamside land and water rights that could support hydroelectric generation. Courts later upheld his claims, culminating in the 1916 Hancock Decree, which awarded most Rush Creek water rights to Cain’s interests and effectively killed McPherson’s large-scale irrigation vision.

McPherson spent years contesting that outcome, arguing that Cain’s claims masked hydroelectric development under the guise of irrigation. State and federal officials acknowledged some ambiguity in how water was being used but continued to defer to the court’s decree.

In 1918, McPherson sold the struggling operation to J.B. Clover, who fraudulently continued selling shares in the Rush Creek Mutual Ditch Company for decades.

Meanwhile, Cain’s hydroelectric empire flourished. 

The Agnew, Gem, and Grant Lake dams Cain built on Rush Creek are now part of systems that are still in use bySouthern California Edison. 

“With those dams, the hydrology of the Mono Lake Basin is controlled for humans, by humans, and for profit,” he said.

Cain also expanded development into Bishop Creek and helped drive early long-distance high-voltage transmission projects in the region.

Because LADWP had claims over water and power use within Los Angeles, Cain’s company sent power into agricultural and industrial regions east of Los Angeles, where electrification mainly supported ice production. 

To protect their hydroeelctric power interests, the Southern Sierra Power Company started buying as much land with water rights as it could. By 1923, the company had amassed 9,000 acres of land, for which the water rights were granted.

That year, the company attempted to sell its Mono Basin holdings to LADWP for $7 million, but the city initially declined. Los Angeles was still reeling from the collapse of the St. Francis Dam disaster, while water chief William Mulholland remained deeply embroiled in conflicts with Owens Valley farmers over water exports.

The deal finally came together years later. By the late 1920s, Los Angeles had amassed millions in bond funding earmarked for Mono Basin land and water acquisitions. The purchase was finalized in 1933.

“That’s how and why one entity came to control all the land and water rights in the Mono Lake basin,” Marks said.

LADWP began exporting Mono Basin water south in 1941. As lake levels steadily dropped, environmental concerns intensified.

By the 1970s, Marks said, “it was clear the lake was in serious, serious crisis.”

That decline sparked the rise of the Mono Lake Committee, which launched legal challenges against LADWP.

In 1994, after years of hearings before the California State Water Resources Control Board, regulators issued Decision 1631, requiring Los Angeles to reduce diversions and restore Mono Lake’s ecosystem toward pre-1941 conditions.

Los Angeles ultimately chose not to appeal the ruling.