Fish Springs and Black Rock, two long-forgotten settlements in Owens Valley, California, were thriving communities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1864 to 1922, more than nine hundred people lived there, earning precarious livings as farmers, ranchers, miners, millwrights, merchants, and lumbermen. This is their story, and it is also the story of how the City of Los Angeles, by purchasing water rights throughout Owens Valley, gradually turned Fish Springs and Black Rock into ghost towns.