Would you believe this idyllic image is from Los Angeles? What it used to look like before cars and smog and business lunches and photographers. This is a painting of the Tongva tribe who lived for thousands of years on the sea shore and mountains of San Gabriel. They hunted and fished and collected acorns and told stories and got married and worshiped a complex deity of six gods. And then some neighbors moved in.
The San Gabriel Mission we know today was erected in 1771 under fathers Cambon & Somera. It was originally slated for another location, flooded out and found its way to its present address after some false starts. It is the beginning of what is now called Los Angeles. Of course an undertaking so massive required massive labor and crops and food and workers. Plus more workers to replace all the ones that contracted diseases and died in a steady unending wave. Fortunately there was a good supply of those near by.
They called them ‘Gabrieleño’.
Which is kind of like America describing its slaves by saying they hailed from a tribe called “We-like-to-work-for-white-people” – (which we certainly might have if we thought of it). There are horrific stories about the Gabrieleno people starving and dying and killing their own infants rather than have them sentenced to a life of slavery, but this is a beaver web site so we will push past those gory details. We won’t mention the mysterious unearthing a few years back when they were installing an Arco station and found 50 violently killed bodies including women and children from 200 years ago that no one could explain.
Lets talk instead about the Blackskill Mountains where the Tongva would retreat from the heat and gather acorns to use for grinding bread. It also happens to be the sight of one of the most violent battles between the natives and the fur trappers who came to steal their you-know-whats. This battle (substitute ‘massacre’) took place in 1831 and was described to the narrator by someone who was there. We have to wonder if the ‘horse-eating-allegation’ might actually be a transparent justification, because the odds of it being true seem pretty slim. As in why court trouble when your life makes sure trouble finds you anyway?
“The story of the battle, the bloodiest in the history of the Santa Ana Mountains, was told seventy years ago by William Wolfskill to J. E. Pleasants, and was repeated to us by Mr. Pleasants. The Indians were very fond of horseflesh. Ranchos were lacking in means of defense in the days when the missions were breaking up and Indians from the mountains and desert used to have no trouble in stealing herds of horses from the Spaniards. A party of trappers came across from New Mexico in 1831. Their long rifles and evident daring offered to the troubled dons a solution to their horse-stealing difficulties. Americans were not any too welcome in the Mexican pueblo of Los Angeles, and it was with a desire to please the Spaniards [Mexicans] in this foreign land a long way from the United States that the American trappers agreed to run down the Indian horsethieves.
The trail of the stolen band of horses was followed across the Santa Ana River, eastward through what is now Villa Park and up the Santiago Canyon to the mouth of Canyon de los Indios… Here, the trail turned into mountain fastnesses, into the unknown mountains, covered heavily with brush. With every turn a favorable spot for ambush, the frontiersmen made their way carefully. The trail took the men up a steep mountainside, and, after two or three hours of climbing there was laid out before them a little valley with grassy slopes and hillsides [today called Hidden Ranch], upon which horses were quietly grazing. Smoke was coming from fires in the age-old campground of the Indians at the lower end of the valley. The Indians were feasting on juicy horseflesh. Perhaps it was the crack of a long rifle, the staggering of a mortally wounded Indian that gave the natives their first warning of the presence of an enemy. Among the oaks and boulders an unequal battle was fought. There were no better marksmen on earth than these trappers. They had killed buffalo. They had fought the Comanche and Apache. They were a hardy, fearless lot, else they would not have made their way across the hundreds of miles of unknown mountain and desert that laid between New Mexico and California. The Indians were armed with a few old Spanish blunderbuss muskets and with bows and arrows.
The battle was soon over. Leaving their dead behind them, the Indians who escaped the bullets of the trappers scrambled down the side of the gorge and disappeared in the oaks and brush. Of those who had begun the fight, a few got away. The stolen horses were quickly rounded up. Some of them were animals stolen months before. The herd was driven down the trail to the Santiago and a day or two later, the horses were delivered to their owners. In the battle, not one of the frontiersmen was wounded.^
[1930, Shadows of Old Saddleback, T. E. Stephenson, 105-06]
Hmm, okay let’s review our who’s who. Wolfskill who funded the expedition from Taos to Los Angelos ended up buying a lot of land and experimenting with agriculture. He’s the one that introduced the Valencia orange and came up with the bright idea of selling citrus to gold miners and whose fortune became the eventual name of Orange County. Are you with me? Orange money comes from beaver money. On his team was the famed Jebediah Smith, Kit Carson and George Yount. If Yount sounds vaguelly familiar it should bring to mind YOUNTVILLE in the wine country because Yount is considered one of the first vintners of the Napa valley. As in wine money also comes from beaver money.
Everything starts with beavers.
Heck, even the gold rush starts with beavers. John Marshall (who worked for Sutter) is credited with finding the first gold in Coloma and Sutter made his money from the trade of beaver through Sutter’s fort in what is now Sacramento before that. There are accounts saying that Jebediah Smith found gold while trapping beavers in the Molumne before that but he was really only interested in fur. Everyone was looking for the beaver bounty, and they were looking in Los Angeles, and Monterey and Point Reyes, and Mendocino and Eureka – all the coast rivers where Tappe and Grinnell said they couldn’t be.
So I thought, lets look up the poor harassed Tongva and see if they had any dealing with beavers, or made clothes out of beavers, or maybe had a word for beavers. William McCawley is credited for the seminal account of their existence in “The Gabrielino Indians of Los Angeles” first published in 1952. I was able to buy a used copy and venture through. Look at that, an appendix at the back lists the scattered remnants of their lost vocabulary:
Ta daa! We can assume if they had a word for beaver it means they had a reason to talk about beaver, and that means there were beaver in Los Angeles. Period. In fact, there was even an actual beaver skull found in Sespe Creek that Tappe described as an ‘anomaly’ but that’s a subject for another day. Beaver were everywhere in California before we killed them. Just like they were everywhere in New Mexico and Colorado and Oklahoma and New York. They were shaping American soil and American waterways that we depend on to this day. Here endeth the lesson.
And because you have been very good historians, we will finish with a beautiful photo of our new kit Cheryl took last night. Enjoy!
