engineer William Mulholland had travelled to the Inyo Valley, where Eaton showed Mulholland how water from the Owens River could be acquired and transported to Los Angeles. In 1904, the Board of Water Commissioners was notified of the purchases of water rights in the Owens Valley for the proposed aqueduct to Los Angeles. But in September, 1903, before the aqueduct plan was conceived, a syndicate led by L.C. Brand had purchased an option on the 16,500-acre George K. Porter Ranch in the northeastern San Fernando Valley. The syndicate included Porter himself, railroad builders Henry E. Huntington and E. H. Harriman, newspaper publishers Harrison Gray Otis, Harry Chandler, and Edwin T. Earl, banker Joseph Francis Sartori, and others. Brand, along with Huntington, purchased the ranch in order to run an electric line to it and then to subdivide it, as he had done in Glendale. Shortly after Eaton’s report regarding the possible aqueduct was given to the water commissioners, the syndicate took up the option on Porter Ranch. William Randolph Hearst’s paper, the Examiner, alleged that Sherman, after hearing the news of the aqueduct through his position on the water board, informed his business friends, who then completed their purchase of the ranch. Several historians note that, while this is possible, there was never any concrete evidence that this was the case. A second syndicate was formed in September, 1909, two years after construction of the aqueduct had begun in 1907. This group of men purchased the 47,500-acre (192 km2) parcel from the Los Angeles Farming and Milling Company, owned by Isaac Newton Van Nuys and son-in-law Issac Lankershim for $2,500,000, or just under $53 an acre. The 30-person syndicate was led by a five-member Board of Control which included Sherman and partners Hobart Johnstone Whitley, General Harrison Gray Otis, Otto F. Brant, and Harry Chandler, manager of the Los Angeles Times, The land, also known as Tract 1000, comprised nearly the entire south half of the San Fernando Valley south of present-day Roscoe Blvd. Sherman’s Los Angeles Pacific Railroad, now under Southern Pacific control, began surveying a route over the Cahuenga Pass to the Valley in 1909. By 1912, after the syndicate paid a $150,000 bonus to help with construction, the Pacific Electric Railway completed the new San Fernando Valley Line, a 20-mile-long (32 km) extension of the PE, which ran from Hollywood to the developments of the Los Angeles