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California's First gold
The first gold was not discover in the northen California It was discovered in Southern California. From this website.
http://www.scvhistory.com/scvhistory/signal/worden/lw082896.htmsite
Enjoy
PLL
Wednesday, August 14, 1996
Part 1 of 3.
T
he first California gold was discovered in Placerita Canyon in 1842. The first commercially productive oil well west of Pennsylvania erupted in Pico Canyon in 1876. The second-worst disaster in California history began in a canyon above Saugus, where the St. Francis Dam collapsed in 1928.
By and large, the Santa Clarita Valley's best-documented historical sites are also those which are the most visited — those which are located in public parks or other areas that are easily accessible to the public. In contrast, relatively little is known about several historical venues west of Interstate 5, and for good reason. They sit on private land that has been off-limits to the general public for generations.
You might be aware, for instance, that a Spanish mission outpost once sat near present-day Castaic Junction. But chances are, you can't pinpoint its exact location. Nor, in all likelihood, can you give many details about prehistoric life on the western edge of our valley.
That is about to change.
Earlier this month, the Newhall Ranch Company, a subsidiary of The Newhall Land and Farming Company, released the biggest Environmental Impact Report for the single biggest development project ever planned for our valley. While the politicians and the public spend the next few months poring over the 4,700-page document to determine if the company is planning enough roads, schools, water, job sites and other amenities for the 70,000 people who will eventually live there, they will also decide if the company plans to do enough to protect the historical assets that lie within the project area.
In preparing the "cultural-paleontological" section of the report, the company recruited a team of noted archaeologists to study the area. Finding that all available archival records showed the site "had never been systematically surveyed" before, the archaeologists examined and excavated the region over a three-year period from 1993 to 1995.
The resulting environmental report is therefore not just an important political tool; the archaeological findings contained therein are a valuable resource that sheds new light on some of our valley's lesser-known points of historical interest.
They also call some well-established facts into question.
Here's a passage that should have local historians buzzing for some time to come.
The first documented discovery of gold in California occurred in 1842 when Francisco Lopez, then a resident at Rancho San Francisco [later known as Newhall Ranch], found the placer deposits in Placerita Canyon. ... A variety of lines of historical evidence suggest, however, that gold may have been mined in the Santa Clara Valley region one to three decades before the Placerita Canyon discovery.
According to a local tale [published by St. Francis Dam chronicler Charles Outland in 1986], a group of about twenty men, led by one Santiago Feliciano, left Mission San Fernando in 1820 to explore the Castaic region. After reaching the Castaic Junction area, they traveled up Hasley Canyon for about 10 miles. There they discovered gold, and the mining camp "San Feliciano" was born. The region from San Feliciano to Soledad Canyon was subsequently prospected and mined, mostly for placer deposits, for a number of years.
Although there is no clear verification of this tale, there is, nonetheless, fairly strong evidence that the Placerita discovery in 1842 was by no means the first in this region. In 1832, for example, Ewing Young discovered an old ore smelting oven in San Emigdio Canyon, suggesting that gold mining in the area had occurred for one or two decades prior to the 1842 event. A number of other sources [referenced in this report] indicate that the presence of gold in the area was known at least a few years prior to the famous Francisco Lopez discovery.
Troublesome as this account may be to the keepers of our valley's history, you must admit it's plausible. If you had been the first discoverer of gold and wanted to reap the rewards, would you want everyone to know about it?
We do know a few things "for sure." One: we know we are always uncovering new information that challenges everything we think we know. Two: we know from familiar sources that Francisco Lopez himself was culling gold from the Hasley-San Feliciano area by 1843. Three: we know that after the United States took possession of California in 1848, many of the Santa Clarita Valley's early prospectors returned to Mexico.
Maybe they took the real secrets of California's first gold with them.
Archaeologists David S. Whitley and Joseph M. Simon explored the terrain of the planned Newhall Ranch development from 1993 to 1995 and conducted the most comprehensive archaeological survey to date of the 19-square-mile region from Interstate 5 to the Ventura County border. Here are some of their newly-released findings.
L
ong ago, oak woodlands probably covered Potrero Canyon and other lowland mesas of the western Santa Clarita Valley. Climatic changes caused the woodlands to recede to higher southern elevations about 9,000 years ago. The region became unusually dry, even by inland Southern California standards, which is why aboriginal settlements were sparse and the first known map, drawn by Spanish settlers in 1843, identifies the area south of the Santa Clara River and west of Castaic Junction as "sterile hills" (lomas esterilas).
The survey team headed by Whitley and Simon discovered eight prehistoric sites within the project area. They include seasonal encampments, a cache cave, a lithic (stone tool) worksite and scattered artifacts. All but one of the sites are new discoveries.
Three sites contain "subsurface archaeological deposits and intact prehistoric artifacts that can contribute to the scientific reconstruction of prehistoric lifeways." One dates from 2250 BC to AD 940, another from 160 BC to AD 1160, and another from AD 236 to AD 808. Most fall into the Intermediate Period (3500-1500 years ago) and the beginning of the Late Prehistoric Period (1500-200 years ago).
The dawn of the Late Prehistoric Period marked a shift from the mano and metate — used to grind hard seeds — to the mortar and pestle — used to pound acorns — and placed greater emphasis on hunting, as seen in the shift in artifact types from spear points to arrowheads.
While it is not known who preceded them, the Tataviam Indians arrived during the Late Prehistoric Period and occupied an area bounded by Piru on the west, Newhall on the south, the Liebre Mountains on the north, and Soledad Pass on the east. They spoke a Takic dialect of the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family similar to that of their Gabrieleño and Kitanemuk neighbors. At Camulos, near Piru, they mixed with the Chumash.
Hunter-gatherers who probably organized into a series of autonomous tribelets, the Tataviam ate acorns, yucca, juniper berries, sage seeds and islay, and they hunted small game. They likely practiced a shamanist religion that put them in touch with the supernatural world through trances and hallucinations brought on by the ingestion of jimsonweed, native tobacco and other psychoto-mimetic plants found along rivers and streams. Such habitats also provided plant material for baskets, cordage and netting.
Some believe a major Tataviam settlement called chaguayabit once existed near Castaic Junction. Whitley and Simon found no physical evidence of it there and instead suggest that it lies about one-half mile east of Rye Canyon Road and Interstate 5.
Indians stored tools and food in caves throughout the Upper Santa Clara Valley. The most famous bounty of Tataviam artifacts comes from Bowers Cave near Val Verde, outside the Newhall Ranch study area. Bowers Cave was found and looted by two local teenagers in 1884, its rare religious artifacts ending up in Harvard University's Peabody Museum of American Ethnology. Whitley and Simon discovered a cave that once stored Tataviam baskets and tools, and while it yielded a variety of deposits, it too had been looted.
Only about 1,000 Tataviam occupied the entire valley when the first Euro-Americans arrived in AD 1769, and none seem to have lived within the study area after AD 1200. The archaeologists hypothesize that a wide-scale inland population expansion began about 4,000 years ago, when one dry period ended, and that the population tapered about 800 years ago, when another dry period started.
Archaeological work was monitored by the California Indian Council Foundation. Relics will eventually be displayed locally. Whitley and Simon recommend that the three significant prehistoric sites be preserved or salvaged. In the unlikely event that new discoveries are made during the development of Newhall Ranch, the archaeologists will take another look
y Father Juan CrespĂ's own account, the peaceful Tataviam Indians of the Upper Santa Clara River Valley offered seeds and sweet preserves to Don Gaspar de Portolá's soldiers when they rode their peculiar four-legged beasts into Castaic Junction on Tuesday, August 8, 1769.
Apparently that hospitality was forgotten 35 years later, when the Franciscan padres of Mission San Fernando decided to annex our valley and bring the local heathens into the Catholic fold.
Portolá had considered the confluence of Castaic Creek and the Santa Clara River a "very suitable site" for Father JunĂpero Serra to establish a mission, but it was not to be. Mission San Buenaventura went up in 1782, followed by Mission San Fernando in 1797, and El Camino Real (the Spanish "Royal Road") eventually punched its way through the Conejo Corridor, bypassing the inland Santa Clara Valley.
But as their herds grew, the missions needed more land. Within a few years after the founding of Mission San Fernando, the verdant Santa Clara River Valley was deemed an ideal spot for a mission rancho, or estancia.
Spanish troops removed the Tataviam from their land and relocated them, Japanese internment camp-style, to San Fernando, where they were put to work in mission vineyards and fields. All Tataviam were baptized by 1810. Their introduction to Old World diseases and their intermarriage with other relocated tribes effectively ended their 1400-year history. The last full-blooded Tataviam died in 1916.
The Estancia de San Francisco Xavier was a ranching out-station, and probably a religious outpost, of Mission San Fernando. Built with Tataviam labor in 1804 on the site proposed by Portolá and CrespĂ, its headquarters consisted of two long, rectangular adobe buildings connected by a low wall and included a kiln, granary and tiled sacristy. Another adobe structure known as the "Old Milk House" was built around the time the estancia was upgraded to an asistencia, or sub-mission.
Spanish rule was not to last. Revolution soon raged in Mexico. Skirmishes broke out in Alta California. In 1833, the Mexican government confiscated all mission holdings. The next year, Mexican Lt. Antonio del Valle was assigned to inventory the property of Mission San Fernando. The land was supposed to revert to the indians, but Don Antonio appealed to his friend Juan B. Alvarado, governor of California, for the deed to the former asistencia. Alvarado granted the 48,000-acre rancho to Antonio, then 46, in January, 1839.
Don Antonio didn't have long to enjoy it. In two years he was dead. In 1845 the rancho passed to his son, Ignacio, who was mayor of Los Angeles until the war with the United States, and who would serve in the state Legislature after the peace of 1848. When the Death Valley '49ers escaped the Mojave Desert, they emerged at the old asistencia, now headquarters of the Del Valles' Rancho San Francisco.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo honored Mexican land grants. The Del Valles held the rancho until the 1860s, when falling cattle prices and too many bank loans put them out of business. They retired to their hacienda at Camulos, at the western fringe of the rancho, and sold the rest. It went to a succession of oil speculators and, finally, to a San Francisco entrepreneur whose heirs renamed it "Newhall Ranch."
Today, little more than memories remain of the Asistencia de San Francisco Xavier. The last vestiges of its headquarters were razed in 1937, after vandals broke up the tiled floors and adobe walls in search of fabled mission treasure.
To the land owners of the 1930s, bulldozing seemed the surest way to discourage trespassing and looting. To the archaeologists who explored the terrain of the planned Newhall Ranch development from 1993 to 1995, the rubble of the old asistencia was a treasure trove of historical artifacts. Their surface survey yielded roof and floor tiles, hand-blown glass, hand-crafted nails and pottery dating from 1750 to 1840.
The remnants of the asistencia lie in an area where no future development will occur. The Newhall Ranch Company plans to deed the site to a nationally-renowned non-profit organization that will preserve and manage it on an ongoing basis.
The first gold was not discover in the northen California It was discovered in Southern California. From this website.
http://www.scvhistory.com/scvhistory/signal/worden/lw082896.htmsite
Enjoy
PLL
Wednesday, August 14, 1996
Part 1 of 3.
T
he first California gold was discovered in Placerita Canyon in 1842. The first commercially productive oil well west of Pennsylvania erupted in Pico Canyon in 1876. The second-worst disaster in California history began in a canyon above Saugus, where the St. Francis Dam collapsed in 1928.
By and large, the Santa Clarita Valley's best-documented historical sites are also those which are the most visited — those which are located in public parks or other areas that are easily accessible to the public. In contrast, relatively little is known about several historical venues west of Interstate 5, and for good reason. They sit on private land that has been off-limits to the general public for generations.
You might be aware, for instance, that a Spanish mission outpost once sat near present-day Castaic Junction. But chances are, you can't pinpoint its exact location. Nor, in all likelihood, can you give many details about prehistoric life on the western edge of our valley.
That is about to change.
Earlier this month, the Newhall Ranch Company, a subsidiary of The Newhall Land and Farming Company, released the biggest Environmental Impact Report for the single biggest development project ever planned for our valley. While the politicians and the public spend the next few months poring over the 4,700-page document to determine if the company is planning enough roads, schools, water, job sites and other amenities for the 70,000 people who will eventually live there, they will also decide if the company plans to do enough to protect the historical assets that lie within the project area.
In preparing the "cultural-paleontological" section of the report, the company recruited a team of noted archaeologists to study the area. Finding that all available archival records showed the site "had never been systematically surveyed" before, the archaeologists examined and excavated the region over a three-year period from 1993 to 1995.
The resulting environmental report is therefore not just an important political tool; the archaeological findings contained therein are a valuable resource that sheds new light on some of our valley's lesser-known points of historical interest.
They also call some well-established facts into question.
Here's a passage that should have local historians buzzing for some time to come.
The first documented discovery of gold in California occurred in 1842 when Francisco Lopez, then a resident at Rancho San Francisco [later known as Newhall Ranch], found the placer deposits in Placerita Canyon. ... A variety of lines of historical evidence suggest, however, that gold may have been mined in the Santa Clara Valley region one to three decades before the Placerita Canyon discovery.
According to a local tale [published by St. Francis Dam chronicler Charles Outland in 1986], a group of about twenty men, led by one Santiago Feliciano, left Mission San Fernando in 1820 to explore the Castaic region. After reaching the Castaic Junction area, they traveled up Hasley Canyon for about 10 miles. There they discovered gold, and the mining camp "San Feliciano" was born. The region from San Feliciano to Soledad Canyon was subsequently prospected and mined, mostly for placer deposits, for a number of years.
Although there is no clear verification of this tale, there is, nonetheless, fairly strong evidence that the Placerita discovery in 1842 was by no means the first in this region. In 1832, for example, Ewing Young discovered an old ore smelting oven in San Emigdio Canyon, suggesting that gold mining in the area had occurred for one or two decades prior to the 1842 event. A number of other sources [referenced in this report] indicate that the presence of gold in the area was known at least a few years prior to the famous Francisco Lopez discovery.
Troublesome as this account may be to the keepers of our valley's history, you must admit it's plausible. If you had been the first discoverer of gold and wanted to reap the rewards, would you want everyone to know about it?
We do know a few things "for sure." One: we know we are always uncovering new information that challenges everything we think we know. Two: we know from familiar sources that Francisco Lopez himself was culling gold from the Hasley-San Feliciano area by 1843. Three: we know that after the United States took possession of California in 1848, many of the Santa Clarita Valley's early prospectors returned to Mexico.
Maybe they took the real secrets of California's first gold with them.
Archaeologists David S. Whitley and Joseph M. Simon explored the terrain of the planned Newhall Ranch development from 1993 to 1995 and conducted the most comprehensive archaeological survey to date of the 19-square-mile region from Interstate 5 to the Ventura County border. Here are some of their newly-released findings.
L
ong ago, oak woodlands probably covered Potrero Canyon and other lowland mesas of the western Santa Clarita Valley. Climatic changes caused the woodlands to recede to higher southern elevations about 9,000 years ago. The region became unusually dry, even by inland Southern California standards, which is why aboriginal settlements were sparse and the first known map, drawn by Spanish settlers in 1843, identifies the area south of the Santa Clara River and west of Castaic Junction as "sterile hills" (lomas esterilas).
The survey team headed by Whitley and Simon discovered eight prehistoric sites within the project area. They include seasonal encampments, a cache cave, a lithic (stone tool) worksite and scattered artifacts. All but one of the sites are new discoveries.
Three sites contain "subsurface archaeological deposits and intact prehistoric artifacts that can contribute to the scientific reconstruction of prehistoric lifeways." One dates from 2250 BC to AD 940, another from 160 BC to AD 1160, and another from AD 236 to AD 808. Most fall into the Intermediate Period (3500-1500 years ago) and the beginning of the Late Prehistoric Period (1500-200 years ago).
The dawn of the Late Prehistoric Period marked a shift from the mano and metate — used to grind hard seeds — to the mortar and pestle — used to pound acorns — and placed greater emphasis on hunting, as seen in the shift in artifact types from spear points to arrowheads.
While it is not known who preceded them, the Tataviam Indians arrived during the Late Prehistoric Period and occupied an area bounded by Piru on the west, Newhall on the south, the Liebre Mountains on the north, and Soledad Pass on the east. They spoke a Takic dialect of the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family similar to that of their Gabrieleño and Kitanemuk neighbors. At Camulos, near Piru, they mixed with the Chumash.
Hunter-gatherers who probably organized into a series of autonomous tribelets, the Tataviam ate acorns, yucca, juniper berries, sage seeds and islay, and they hunted small game. They likely practiced a shamanist religion that put them in touch with the supernatural world through trances and hallucinations brought on by the ingestion of jimsonweed, native tobacco and other psychoto-mimetic plants found along rivers and streams. Such habitats also provided plant material for baskets, cordage and netting.
Some believe a major Tataviam settlement called chaguayabit once existed near Castaic Junction. Whitley and Simon found no physical evidence of it there and instead suggest that it lies about one-half mile east of Rye Canyon Road and Interstate 5.
Indians stored tools and food in caves throughout the Upper Santa Clara Valley. The most famous bounty of Tataviam artifacts comes from Bowers Cave near Val Verde, outside the Newhall Ranch study area. Bowers Cave was found and looted by two local teenagers in 1884, its rare religious artifacts ending up in Harvard University's Peabody Museum of American Ethnology. Whitley and Simon discovered a cave that once stored Tataviam baskets and tools, and while it yielded a variety of deposits, it too had been looted.
Only about 1,000 Tataviam occupied the entire valley when the first Euro-Americans arrived in AD 1769, and none seem to have lived within the study area after AD 1200. The archaeologists hypothesize that a wide-scale inland population expansion began about 4,000 years ago, when one dry period ended, and that the population tapered about 800 years ago, when another dry period started.
Archaeological work was monitored by the California Indian Council Foundation. Relics will eventually be displayed locally. Whitley and Simon recommend that the three significant prehistoric sites be preserved or salvaged. In the unlikely event that new discoveries are made during the development of Newhall Ranch, the archaeologists will take another look
y Father Juan CrespĂ's own account, the peaceful Tataviam Indians of the Upper Santa Clara River Valley offered seeds and sweet preserves to Don Gaspar de Portolá's soldiers when they rode their peculiar four-legged beasts into Castaic Junction on Tuesday, August 8, 1769.
Apparently that hospitality was forgotten 35 years later, when the Franciscan padres of Mission San Fernando decided to annex our valley and bring the local heathens into the Catholic fold.
Portolá had considered the confluence of Castaic Creek and the Santa Clara River a "very suitable site" for Father JunĂpero Serra to establish a mission, but it was not to be. Mission San Buenaventura went up in 1782, followed by Mission San Fernando in 1797, and El Camino Real (the Spanish "Royal Road") eventually punched its way through the Conejo Corridor, bypassing the inland Santa Clara Valley.
But as their herds grew, the missions needed more land. Within a few years after the founding of Mission San Fernando, the verdant Santa Clara River Valley was deemed an ideal spot for a mission rancho, or estancia.
Spanish troops removed the Tataviam from their land and relocated them, Japanese internment camp-style, to San Fernando, where they were put to work in mission vineyards and fields. All Tataviam were baptized by 1810. Their introduction to Old World diseases and their intermarriage with other relocated tribes effectively ended their 1400-year history. The last full-blooded Tataviam died in 1916.
The Estancia de San Francisco Xavier was a ranching out-station, and probably a religious outpost, of Mission San Fernando. Built with Tataviam labor in 1804 on the site proposed by Portolá and CrespĂ, its headquarters consisted of two long, rectangular adobe buildings connected by a low wall and included a kiln, granary and tiled sacristy. Another adobe structure known as the "Old Milk House" was built around the time the estancia was upgraded to an asistencia, or sub-mission.
Spanish rule was not to last. Revolution soon raged in Mexico. Skirmishes broke out in Alta California. In 1833, the Mexican government confiscated all mission holdings. The next year, Mexican Lt. Antonio del Valle was assigned to inventory the property of Mission San Fernando. The land was supposed to revert to the indians, but Don Antonio appealed to his friend Juan B. Alvarado, governor of California, for the deed to the former asistencia. Alvarado granted the 48,000-acre rancho to Antonio, then 46, in January, 1839.
Don Antonio didn't have long to enjoy it. In two years he was dead. In 1845 the rancho passed to his son, Ignacio, who was mayor of Los Angeles until the war with the United States, and who would serve in the state Legislature after the peace of 1848. When the Death Valley '49ers escaped the Mojave Desert, they emerged at the old asistencia, now headquarters of the Del Valles' Rancho San Francisco.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo honored Mexican land grants. The Del Valles held the rancho until the 1860s, when falling cattle prices and too many bank loans put them out of business. They retired to their hacienda at Camulos, at the western fringe of the rancho, and sold the rest. It went to a succession of oil speculators and, finally, to a San Francisco entrepreneur whose heirs renamed it "Newhall Ranch."
Today, little more than memories remain of the Asistencia de San Francisco Xavier. The last vestiges of its headquarters were razed in 1937, after vandals broke up the tiled floors and adobe walls in search of fabled mission treasure.
To the land owners of the 1930s, bulldozing seemed the surest way to discourage trespassing and looting. To the archaeologists who explored the terrain of the planned Newhall Ranch development from 1993 to 1995, the rubble of the old asistencia was a treasure trove of historical artifacts. Their surface survey yielded roof and floor tiles, hand-blown glass, hand-crafted nails and pottery dating from 1750 to 1840.
The remnants of the asistencia lie in an area where no future development will occur. The Newhall Ranch Company plans to deed the site to a nationally-renowned non-profit organization that will preserve and manage it on an ongoing basis.
