CV’s First Inhabitants – Life After the Mission

The plan the Spanish missionaries had first laid out for California was to establish the missions, Christianize the natives and, after 10 years, hand the missions and their lands over to the natives. That would free the missionaries to move further north and east and establish more missions. But that didn’t happen.

Instead, the mission fathers stayed put and never made the preparations necessary to hand over the missions to the natives. They lost their chance to do so when Mexico won its freedom from Spain and the new Mexican government began a path towards secularizing the missions. This culminated in the early 1830s when the mission lands were broken up and sold to private owners. The Tongva people, who had established close economic ties to the missions for food and shelter, were in most cases cast out to fend for themselves. Many of them, now homeless, drifted north, while others found work with the many ranchos or in the growing towns.

A few apparently joined some of the mission runaways who had been hiding in the canyons of the San Gabriel Mountains and the Verdugo Mountains, or bands roaming further north as evidenced by this scrap of history: Although the Verdugo family owned the Crescenta Valley, they never used it or even went there. As a result, in 1843 Ignacio Coronel claimed the valley away from the Verdugos. He built a ranch in Verdugo Canyon near today’s Verdugo Park, but he was chased out almost immediately by bands of lawless natives.

He wrote, “In the year 1844 we were obliged to leave the rancho on account of the attacks of the Indians, at which time one man was killed on the rancho (meaning CV and the Verdugo Canyon) and 20 head of horses were stolen … The rancho is the principal place where all the wild Indians come down into this valley for the purpose of committing depredations and robberies.”

During that pre-American period, we might assume that a few displaced natives ran free in the Crescenta Valley and perhaps even intermittently reoccupied the old village site of Wiqangna. But again, the majority of the remaining natives either took employment on the ranchos or drifted north.

As the Americans took hold of California in the late 1840s, the exploitation of the remaining natives became more entrenched in the new fast-growing economy. The Americans found a ready source of cheap labor in the post-mission natives. Here’s one egregious example of the sad exploitation of the natives in Los Angeles: Natives arrested for drunkenness were auctioned to private parties, quite often vineyard owners, for a sentence of one week of hard labor. At the end of their one-week sentence, they would be given a small payment in the form of alcohol, ensuring that they would get drunk and arrested once again to be auctioned off the next week. Even those who were simply paid workers were often cheated out of their wages. These cycles accelerated during the American period, and the already slim number of surviving natives was further reduced by disease, starvation and alcoholism.

A few small bands of natives either returned to or, in a few cases, never left the areas near their ancestral village sites. In the later part of the 1800s, settlements of mixed native and Mexican people were recorded near former village sites in the Eagle Rock/Highland Park area. The plateau on the eastern side of the Arroyo Seco above today’s Rose Bowl, the area we know as Linda Vista, was known as “Indian Flats” for the native settlements there. East Pasadena had natives and Mexicans living at the traditional village of Akuuraonga into the 1870s, working as laborers at the Sunny Slope Vineyards. And on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, two villages survived. A village site known as Fisherman’s Camp was occupied by natives into the 1890s, and the village of Kiinkenga had Tongva people living in it past the turn of the century. But in years since, movement and intermarriage have pretty much erased any true population centers of Tongva people.

Next week – So what happened to Wiqangna?

  mike lawler