The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which settled the U.S.-Mexican war, was clear. It guaranteed the legitimacy of all existing property rights. The U.S.-Angeleno lobbyists in Sacramento relentlessly defended their antique Spanish land grant, until finally, in
1874, the State Legislature formally revised the city's charter to recognize the "four square leagues" boundary, plus an addition of "twenty chains" to the south. These boundaries were repeated in the new charter of 1889 (Utter 1946: 19-20).[1]
From the earliest years, the City of Los Angeles possessed and exercised the authority to extinguish any well, even outside of its own charter boundaries, that pumped water from the Los Angeles River courses (including the Arroyo Seco leading to Pasadena). In one of these early cases, the California Supreme Court even prevented owners of land in the San Fernando Valley from pumping water from their own land, 1,000 feet away from the riverbed (which is dry most of the year), stating:
Repeated rulings, reaffirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal to hear appeals, left "riparian owners and other cities and towns upstream with no rights whatsoever." But these early rulings did impose one critical limit: Los Angeles could not sell its water outside of its city limits. This in combination with its absolute monopoly on the water supply, gave surrounding settlements very little choice but to pursue annexation to the original Pueblo if they were to grow at all, and gave the City of Los Angeles a great incentive to annex surrounding territory when it was flush—so to speak—with water.[3]
A monopoly on the very essence of life is of incalculable value as a reservoir of power. The power of the state was first etched into the surface of the Los Angeles Basin by the Pueblo of Mexican Los Angeles, and then by the City and County of United States Los Angeles after 1850.
