CV’s First Inhabitants – The Village of Wiqanga

Last week I introduced the Tongva, focusing mainly on how scattered and elusive the historical records are. Falling right into that pattern of elusiveness is the location of their village sites. We have many village names recorded in Mission records, but no locations. The locations we have today came mostly from recorded interviews with natives who were transmitting memories of conversations with elders; pure guesswork for modern researchers.

Clues to the guesswork would have to be in the form of some basic assumptions. The villages would have probably been located on trade routes, the modern equivalent being that today you would want to live near a freeway on-ramp or train station. They tended to want to be near intersections of two or more environmental zones (oak forests and mountains for example) to provide a variety of food sources, similar to how today you would want to be close to several different stores – Trader Joe’s, Ralph’s and Target. And lastly, they would want to be near a water source. In a few cases archaeology has yielded village sites, but not in CV.

Let’s make some assumptions about where a local village would have been.

Wiqanga (Wi-Kong-Na) would have been CV’s local village. According to a Tongva man, related long after the village was gone, the village Wiqanga was located in “Canada de las Tunas,” today’s La Tuna Canyon. La Tuna refers to the Spanish word for prickly pear cactus, and Wiqanga is from the Tongva word wiqar that means thorn, so it all fits together. Artifacts from Wiqanga have never been found, so where in La Tuna Canyon the village was located is anyone’s guess.

The perfect spot (in my unqualified opinion) would have been where the Verdugo Hills Golf Course is. There was (and is) a spring on the property. The site is adjacent to the Verdugo Creek, which was then a year-round water source, yet raised up enough to be free of floods. It would have been close to the vast oak forests at the lower end of the valley (of which CV Park is a small remnant). Acorns, the staple food of the Tongva, could be gathered there. It was easy walking distance to the canyons of the San Gabriel Mountains for hunting and for a cool retreat in the heat of the summer. The path between the villages that were scattered along the base of the San Gabriels ran right by that site, basically where Honolulu Avenue runs and turns into Tujunga Canyon Boulevard. That would have meant easy access to trading and socializing between villages. It would have been a good village site.

In the early history of the valley, we read that in 1880, when pioneer Phil Begue first moved onto his new property on the west end, a band of displaced Native Americans were camped on the land that is now the golf course. Perhaps they knew that that’s where Wiqanga used to be. But that golf course land was heavily graded for the course and the lower part disappeared under the freeway. I guess we’ll never know for sure where Wiqanga was.

On another subject, La Crescenta has one of the most beautiful libraries in the Los Angeles area, filled with art and history. The Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley will be touring this local gem, learning about its architecture and about the artwork inside – its stained glass, bronze sculpture, and murals – all done by local artists. As a matter of fact, the woman who designed the bronze floor plaque is Tongva.

As a bonus, we’ll also learn how to view and search the computer files of our historic local newspaper, the Ledger. The CV Ledger, the local paper for the formative years of the valley, the ’20s through the ’70s, was digitized recently and is available on the La Crescenta Library’s computers. It should be a good tour, even if you’ve been to the library before. Meet in the lobby of the La Crescenta Library, located at Foothill and La Crescenta [2809 Foothill Blvd.], this Saturday, Aug. 25 at 2 p.m. I hope I’ll see you there!

  mike lawler