Good point, George. The outcome for Owens Valley is pretty good for the recreational visitor. If LADWP didn't take it, then corporate farms would've taken over anyway. With the enormous value of that water, the small farmers fighting amongst themselves never stood a chance. It would be very much like the Central valley on the west side of Sierras (without the rolling foothills). There would be a lot more development and it would lose its sense of remoteness.
The people of Owens Valley who were tricked into signing away water rights shouldn't feel so bad. The people of LA were manipulated similarly:
"In the first bond issue election in 1905 in which the relatively trivial amount of $1.5 million would be up for approval to pay for the land and rights to the Owens Valley
water the city would be appropriating, a certain level of tact was necessary on the part of city officials. The fact that Los Angeles residents would be paying so much just to buy the rights to water for which there was no demonstrated demand forced the new Bureau of Water Works and Supply to come up with a forceful and convincing pitch. Outside of enlisting the support of the city's biggest newspapers (whose owners had a considerable financial stake in the deal going through), William Mulholland, the chief engineer of the project, did two simple things that all but guaranteed that the issue would pass. First, he fabricated a water famine in a particularly wet year by announcing that the Los Angeles River could not support more than 220,000 people (a prediction that turned out to be grossly underestimated), and that at the current levels of consumption and immigration, the supply could run short within a few weeks, given an excessive dry spell. He predicted a huge exodus should this ever happen, forcing city residents to consider their economic well-being in a circumstance where that connection might not necessarily be made. Secondly, he distributed throughout the city idyllic photographs of the lush, well-watered Owens Valley. Since this Edenic image was the same that had been used to market Los Angeles to the nation, Los Angeles residents were already susceptible to its powers, and were easily convinced that they did not want to let go of the garden paradise they were in the business of developing. The strategy proved massively effective: the issue passed by a ten to one margin." (Forrest, 2002) link to Atlas in previous post
