Three men dammed this mountain for the valley below it, and what decided how each of them ended was not engineering and not money. It was which way the water was already running.
The San Bernardino Mountains shed in two directions. What falls on the south slope goes down the Santa Ana River toward San Bernardino and Redlands, where the orange groves were. What falls on the north slope goes to Deep Creek and the Mojave River and disappears into the desert. The divide between them is a line nobody driving over it would notice, and in the law of this state it decided everything.
The one that worked
Frank Brown grew citrus in Redlands and needed water for it. In 1884 he threw a single granite arch across Bear Valley, seventy-five thousand dollars of masonry that engineers told him would not stand. It stood. Behind it rose what was briefly the largest artificial lake anywhere, and the water ran some thirty miles down the mountain by flume and pipe to the groves.
Bear Valley drains south. Brown was moving water down its own watershed to the ground it already fed, and nobody had standing to stop him. In 1892, building a second dam, he bought a Pelton wheel to drive the winches, which was the first use of electricity in these mountains. By 1912 the groves had outgrown his arch, and the Bear Valley Mutual Water Company hired John Eastwood to put a multiple-arch dam across three hundred feet downstream, more than doubling the lake.
The one that did not
In 1891 a syndicate of Ohio money — James Mooney of Cincinnati and the soap maker James Gamble among it — formed the Arrowhead Reservoir Company and began buying the timberland around Little Bear Valley, Grass Valley and Houston Flat. They ran a cable tramway up Waterman Canyon to haul supplies in. It failed, and everything came up the switchback road instead. Dam work began in 1893. In 1905 they reorganized as the Arrowhead Reservoir and Power Company, having worked out that they could sell electricity as well.
Little Bear Creek runs the wrong way. It feeds Deep Creek, which feeds the Mojave River, which goes north into the desert. Delivering it to San Bernardino meant lifting water out of one watershed and setting it down in another, and in 1913 a California court ruled that this could not be done for irrigation. Twenty-two years of land purchases, tunnels and concrete, and the answer was no.
The same year
On November 5, 1913, Los Angeles opened an aqueduct that carried Owens Valley water two hundred and thirty-three miles across watershed after watershed and let it out on a hillside in the San Fernando Valley, a story told elsewhere in this guide. That same year a court in San Bernardino told a private company it could not take water over a single ridge. The difference was not the distance.
What a failed reservoir is worth
The lake was still there. Only the reason for it was gone. Anglers had been coming to the half-filled water for years, two thousand of them turning out on one opening day, and when Mooney died his entire holding went on the market. A group of Los Angeles investors bought it, called themselves the Arrowhead Lake Company, finished the dam thirty-one feet higher than it had been drawn, and opened a Norman-style village on the shore on June 24, 1922, with a dance pavilion, an outdoor cinema and three hotels behind it. The waterworks had become a resort, which is what nearly everyone now assumes it always was.
The third man
Arthur Gregory also grew oranges in Redlands, and he kept a sawmill at Houston Flat cutting his own crate stock. Houston Creek drains north to the Mojave, the same as Little Bear. Gregory did not try to move it. He dammed it where it lay, with a Works Progress Administration grant in 1937 and his own money when the federal share ran out, and because the water never left its watershed nobody sued anyone. Engineers estimated three years to fill the lake. The rains of March 1938 filled it in three days.
Who owns it now
All three are still arguing, quietly. Big Bear remains an irrigation reservoir in law: the town voted itself a water district in 1964 and spent thirteen years in court to buy the lake bottom, the dam and the right to manage the surface, while the water flowing in stayed with the growers below. Lake Arrowhead is private, bought by the property owners around it in 1975. Lake Gregory passed to San Bernardino County in 1977, after residents revolted against a water-district tax.
Three lakes on one mountain and not one of them made by nature. Drive the crest and what you are looking at is a century-long argument about where water is allowed to go.