Name/Title
Print, PhotographicEntry/Object ID
2024.0.478Description
Photo of a massive 52-mule team hauling sections of pipe for the Jawbone Sipon on the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the railroad siding at Cinco. Cinco was the largest aqueduct supply base for the entire system.
Stamped in black ink on reverse with the Dept. of Water & Power stamp and photograph/negative number 545.
Written in red ink on reverse: Sec. I - No. 6 - Page 67.
A different copy of this photo has a purple stamp on reverse that says "Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Public Relations Division Photographic Section" and "H68-1018."
"Headquarters for the Jawbone Division was Cinco, a railroad supply station fairly roaring with activity. In and out of spur tracks freight cars were shunted day and night. It was a canvas town of innumerable tents--barracks, mess halls, stores, blacksmith shops. From this bustling center long lines of mule teams hauled machinery and supplies to outlying construction camps along the conduit." -Water Seekers, pg. 38
"In January 1912 the work was started in the canyon bottom, where the extra thickness of the steel made it necessary for most of the riveting to be done at the Eastern mill. Several pipes thirty-six feet long, weighing twenty-six tons apiece, were pulled the last four miles to the siphon by two specially rigged mule teams. Each outfit had a pair of great flat-decked wagons supported by steel wheels with tires two feet wide. They were drawn by no less than fifty-two mules, using three parallel jerk lines of sixteen mules each, with a lead pair at the head and two wheelers on the tongue. Such a job of mule skinning required highly skilled work from the most experienced drivers on the desert." -Water Seekers, pg 45.
"For several months the gray bearded mule skinner (Whistling Dick) perched on the back of his near wheeler, was a familiar sight from Cinco to the Jawbone siphon. While his mules tugged through the heavy sands of the canyon bottom, the mountainsides echoed to Dick's commanding whistles and the crack of his blacksnake." -Water Seekers, pg. 46.