Damna absque injuria: Reparations in the Owens Valley Water Wars

acquisition by the City of Los Angeles of the water supply of the eastern Sierra's Owens Valley remains a powerful part of the city's loreIn popular imagination and in most secondary accounts, the people of the Owens Valley usually come off best in the morality play of David versus Goliath that the Owens Valley water controversy has becomeUnlike their biblical counterpart, the rural Davids of the Owens Valley lost, frustrated even in their use of violence to alter the city's water policies* Finally the valley organized in an attempt to seek economic compensation, or reparations, from Los AngelesTheir reparations organizations remain too little discussed and too seldom understood in the secondary accounts of Los Angeles and the Owens ValleyThe reparations struggles of the valley's largest town, Bishop, and its leaders, the Watterson brothers, have received notice even if limited in secondary accounts examining the matterThe people of another valley town, Big Pine, at the northern end of the valley, also created reparations organizations in the mid1920sTheir efforts merit investigation for the fresh evidence that they provide into the demands, frustrations, and struggles for justice on the part of Big Pine residents and, by extension, the valley, represented by the reparations movement-