What is the first name of the person who sought water rights to the Tuolumne River?
San Francisco Mayor James D. Phelan hired USGS engineer Joseph P. Lippincott in 1900 to perform a discreet survey of Hetch Hetchy Valley, located north of Yosemite Valley in the national park. His report stated that a dam of the Tuolumne River in the Hetch Hetchy Valley was the best choice to create a drinking water reservoir for the city. Lippincott sought water rights to the Tuolumne River and rights to build reservoirs at Hetch Hetchy and Lake Eleanor on behalf of Phelan in 1901. These requests were rejected in 1903 by Secretary of the Interior Ethan Allen Hitchcock, who felt the application was "not in keeping with the public interest."
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake tipped the balance in favor of granting the city the right to build the dam. Rights to Hetch Hetchy were granted to the City of San Francisco in 1908 by Secretary of the Interior James Rudolph Garfield, who wrote: "Domestic use is the highest use to which water and available storage basins ... can be put."A nationally publicized fight over the dam project ensued; preservationists like Muir wanted to leave wild areas wild, and conservationists like Gifford Pinchot wanted to manage wild areas for the betterment of mankind. Robert Underwood Johnson and the Sierra Club joined the fight to save the valley from flooding. Muir wrote, "Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for watertanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man." Pinchot, who was director of the U.S. Forest Service, wrote to his close friend Roosevelt that "the highest possible use which could be made of it would be to supply pure water to a great center of population."Roosevelt's successor, Woodrow Wilson, signed the Raker Act into law on December 13, 1913, which authorized construction of the dam. Hetch Hetchy Reservoir grew as the valley was flooded behind the O'Shaughnessy Dam in 1923. The Raker Act also gave the city the right to store water in Lake Eleanor and Cherry Lake, both located northwest of Hetch Hetchy in the park.Shortly before Muir died he expressed the hope that "some compensating good must follow" from the Raker Act. The fight over the dam strengthened the conservation movement by popularizing it nationally.
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