1913 - Environment

Environment

Canada establishes Quetico Provincial Park on 1,832 square miles of wilderness west of Lake Superior in southwestern Ontario adjoining the U.S. border. Once the site of a major east-west route used by Native Americans, explorers, and traders, the park contains more than 1,000 lakes and waterways that teem with bass, lake trout, northern pike, pickerel, and sturgeon; the only access and travel is by canoe, and wildlife includes black bear, moose, white-tailed deer, and wolf.

The Weeks-McLean Act signed into law by President Taft March 4 empowers the Department of Agriculture to protect migratory game and insectivorous birds with regulations to control hunting with seasons and zones.

Ohio's Great Miami River floods its banks at Columbus March 25 after a 5-day rainfall that has dropped 10 inches of water. The flood kills 351, injures hundreds more, and creates property damage amounting to $100 million.

Forest Lawn Cemetery at Tropico (Glendale), California, is taken over by Missouri-born metallurgist-promoter Hubert Eaton, 30, who embraces the new concept of selling burial plots "before need" and will expand the tiny cemetery into a vast enterprise with branches in Hollywood Hills, Cypress, and Covina Hills. Eaton will make Forest Lawn a showplace of more than 1,200 acres of towering trees, sweeping lawns marked with bronze memorial tablets rather than with tombstones, splashing fountains, flowers, birds, bronze and marble statues, and small churches modeled on famous ones in Europe. He will forbid artificial flowers.

The Los Angeles Owens River Aqueduct opens November 5, bringing in at least 260 million gallons of water per day from 3,000 feet high in the Sierra via 234 miles of gravity-powered pipeline and ditch. Irish-born city manager William Mulholland, 58, has planned the $25 million cement-and-steel pipeline that permits irrigation of the San Fernando Valley. The city has secretly bought the water rights to the river, and a bond issue has financed the project, which Mulholland has promoted by saying, "If you don't get that water now, you'll never need it—the dead never get thirsty." Construction crews have labored for 8 years, sometimes in 105° F. heat, to complete the project, siphoning water up mountains more than 1,000 feet high and digging a five-mile tunnel under Lake Elizabeth, 50 miles north of the city. Some 30,000 Angelinos turn out to celebrate the grand opening; they hear Mulholland shout, "There it is! Take it!" Sale of hydroelectric power will pay the cost of the aqueduct within just a few years, and the water brought across the Mojave Desert makes L.A. a boom town (see farmers, 1924; Parker Dam, 1939).

The U.S. Senate votes December 16 to fund construction of California's Hetch Hetchy Dam despite public opposition (see 1907). John Muir, now 75, says it will destroy his beloved "Tuolumne Yosemite." Located about 40 miles from the Yosemite Valley, the dam will create a reservoir that will supply San Francisco with water and hydroelectric power but will bury part of the valley under 300 feet of water.