Track 11: Thaddeus Taylor, 40 Acres Resident

The tiny 40 Acres community is a hamlet of privately owned homes located in scenic Round Valley about twelve miles northwest of Bishop, California. The land was originally homesteaded by Jack Wright, a Paiute Indian who filed the original claim during the 1890s on eighty acres of land with Pine Creek running near it. Wright operated a sheep ranching operation here and made the necessary improvements, including the construction of an irrigation ditch off Pine Creek, to obtain his homestead patent. Eventually, the title of the property was passed to his brother Jim Wright, also a sheep rancher.

In 1926, the City of Los Angeles purchased the lower southern forty-acre portion with Jim Wright retaining the northern section. This northern area defines the location of today’s 40 Acres community, now subdivided into forty-nine private properties. The community is bordered by LADWP land on three sides with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to the west. The original ditch connecting Pine Creek continues to serve the 40 Acres community for “domestic supply, agricultural supply, fire protection, groundwater recharge, freshwater replenishment, recreation, and cold freshwater habitat.”[1] The community has collectively regulated and conducted all necessary maintenance on the ditch since the 1920s.

Up until 2001, LADWP had never interfered with the community’s use of the Pine Creek diversion. An ongoing dispute began when the department destroyed a historic wood control gate replacing it with a steel and concrete gate that directs the majority of the streamflow back into LADWP’s Pine Creek system. The LADWP additionally secured the gate with a lock to avoid tampering, which up until 2001 had never been required. Immediately, LADWP reduced stream flows to 40 Acres by as much as 50 percent.[2] When confronted by the community, LADWP stated that 40 Acres was not legally entitled to the water, however, the LADWP could not provide any legal claim to the water either. After organizing the 40 Acres Homeowners Water Association to combat the incursion, the group soon determined that LADWP had in fact built their new control gate on BLM land that the city did not actually own.

Because of this a group of 40 Acres residents regularly cut the LADWP’s lock on the new control gate to divert Pine Creek flows back into their community ditch, replacing the lock with one of their own. LADWP responds, by cutting it off and replacing it with a new lock—a cycle that has been going on for over twenty years now.

The 40 Acres Homeowners Water Association eventually sought legal help in the matter “to recognize our pre-1914 appropriative water right and to restore the historic flows through the community.”[3] Their demands include that LADWP provides them with the historic four CFS average daily flow rate recorded by LADWP over a thirty-year period.[4] LADWP and the 40 Acres Homeowners Water Association have yet to settle the dispute as of 2013.

Thaddeus Taylor III, 40 Acres resident and activist, died peaceably on May 19, 2020. Click here to read Sierra Wave’s obituary for Mr. Taylor.

Track Credits
Archival soundtrack excerpt from Frontier Horizon (The Three Mesquiteers series, Republic Pictures, 1939) starring John Wayne, Ray Corrigan, and Raymond Hatton. Music: Black Twig Pickers and Steve Gunn, “Sally in the Garden Sifting Sand” (Creative Commons license).

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