It is the early 1880s, somewhere close to the somewhat desolate small town of Los Angeles, and a young man comes upon a team digging a well, looking for water.
They offer him a job and he accepts, a turning point in his working life that for more than the next four decades will be dominated by water.
William Mulholland would within a few years be appointed, aged just 31, Los Angeles’ superintendent of water as the city exploded in size, fuelled by the discovery of oil before also becoming the centre of industry for the silver screen.
Mulholland, born in Belfast and who lived his early days in a small house next to St Patrick’s Church on Donegall Street, managed the building of the then 233-mile viaduct bringing water to LA, the life blood of the city to the present day. It was also a deeply controversial project.
He is also remembered as the man who managed the construction of a dam that broke, sending an 80-foot wall of water and debris pouring down a Californian valley, sweeping over villages and ranches.
Before that night in 1928 was over, at least 450 people were dead, their bodies either buried in small mountains of debris and mud, or washed into the vast Pacific Ocean.
Granddaughter Catherine, in an interview with this reporter before she passed away in 2011, said: “The failure of the St Francis Dam destroyed my grandfather.”
Years later, many after Mulholland died, it was conclusively proved the ground beneath the dam was geologically unsound for the building of such a structure, something he and his engineers could not have known about at the time.
Life magazine would later name him among the 100 most influential people in 20th century US history.
William Mulholland was born in 1855 to father Hugh and mother Ellen. After those early years in Belfast, Hugh, a mail guard, was transferred back to his native Dublin.
Tragedy hit within a couple of years as William’s mother died aged just 28, leaving the 33-year-old widower to raise four boys. He later remarried and had three more children.
The then seven-year-old William and brother Hugh ran wild, recounted Catherine, a noted historian and author of William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles.
“They were out and about, running the streets, a real pair of Dublin jackeens,” she added.
It was not long before he began running further. At 16, he was off for good, joining the British Merchant Navy.
Catherine said: “His first landfall in the new world was up in Montreal in Canada. After four years, by his own account, he saw that he wasn’t getting ahead, and started to believe that not much lay ahead for him on the sea, much as he loved it. So he bailed out in New York.”
There was a year of wandering, working on boats on the Great Lakes and at a logging camp in Michigan. He injured his leg in a logging accident, then overhead the doctors discussing amputation. He climbed out of bed and fled.
Now in his early 20s, William’s lowest point came in Cincinnati, where he was alone, down to his last few dollars and suicidal. Then, it is said, he heard the voices of a boys’ choir singing Gloria In Excelsis.
“He entered the church and spent an hour in prayer and meditation as the suicidal mood passed and his zest for life returned,” said Catherine.
Later, he met up with his brother Hugh – also a Merchant Navy man before jumping ship – in New York. They travelled to Pittsburgh to the home of a wealthy uncle, the brother of their dead mother.
Tuberculosis struck the family, with two of the children dying of the infection. The rest of the extended family decided to decamp for the better suited climate of southern California. It was some journey for the two young brothers.
“William and Hugh stowed away in a lifeboat and their uncle would come in the evening and bring them food, lifting the tarp to feed them,” said Catherine.
“Well, of course, they got caught.”
On landing at the Panama Isthmus, while paying passengers were escorted across the narrow but treacherous strip of land, the pair hiked on their own, somehow, eventually making their way north to Acupulco.
They were hired on ships and sailed to San Francisco before travelling by horseback and re-joining the family in southern California. A cousin remarked that it was a place “where nothing looked like anything”.
The brothers headed for the Arizona territory in search of gold, but, the story goes, landed right in the middle of the long running Apache uprising, later led by Geronimo.
But water became Mulholland’s gold. As superintendent, he was responsible for constructing the aqueduct from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles.
“There it is. Take it,” Mulholland declared before a crowd of 40,000 as the first of the water flowed in 1913, five years after work first began.
But it was more than controversial as it diverted water away from the farmers working the valley. Within 15 years, an entire 100-square mile lake had been drained, once described as the greatest water theft in US history.
Mulholland and others were also accused of using underhand tactics to purchase land in the valley in order to take control of the water, and make a lot of money. Angry farmers blew up the aqueduct more than once.
This controversy even featured very loosely in a modern cinema classic movie, the Roman Polanski-directed Chinatown, which Catherine recognised “as a darn good film noir….but nothing to do with reality as we know it”.
Ann Holzcloth, in a contemporary newspaper account, described how a viciously strong eddy washed away her home, threw her baby to his death but left her on dry land. An older child was also lost .
“The whirl of the eddy wrenched him from me and threw me in the other direction. I landed on dry land. Why did I have to live?” Mrs Holzcloth told reporters.
It was March 1928, and she had just been tragically caught up in the collapse of the St Francis Dam, the worst civil engineering disaster in 20th century U.S history.
Mulholland said: “The only people I envy in this thing are the dead.”
Catherine, aged five when the disaster happened, remembered her grandfather: “He would come out to, let’s say a family dinner, and would just sit in the living room like a stone. He was like a spectre at the banquet…at the end.”
William Mulholland never returned home and is quoted as saying at his most influential height that he never wanted to see that “damned island again”.
But Catherine remembered: “I think when he was young, he was a man in flight. I just think he did not look back, and I think that was true of many of the men who came west and created new lives out here.
“But he sent money back home to help his family, you know, in a quiet sort of a way. He never lost touch with his roots.”
