“Native Americans of Topanga Beach”
by Pablo Capra
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| Woman holding flowers, early 1900s. Photo courtesy Santa Monica Public Library |
For years it has been known that a number of Indian bones were buried all along the bluffs by the sea. Occasionally after a high tide, relics… are to be seen, the high water having removed the covering of earth and exposed them to crumble in the air.
—“Skeletons and Skulls of Warriors Are Excavated,” Los Angeles Times, 1910-07-19
On June 27, 1910, a class of Stanford University students from the Mining Department and their Geology professor John Roy “Billie” Pemberton (1884-1968) pitched tents at Topanga Beach, camping, or glamping, with Japanese cooks and “everything required for [their] convenience.”
Professor Pemberton, just 25 years old, had recently been a Stanford student himself. Attractive and athletic, he was a football player, rower, and sailor. He was also greatly interested in birds, having spent his youth studying them in what’s now known as MacArthur Park, and would go on to publish many articles on Ornithology. He moved to San Francisco in his teens, and experienced the deadliest earthquake in US history there in 1906. Before deciding on a career in Geology, he seriously considered becoming a professional boxer.
He and his students, “clad in khaki suits, wearing sombreros, and with several weeks’ growth of beard,” were supposed to be studying oil formations in the rocks, but by mid-July they were digging up Native American graves at Topanga Beach and in Temescal Canyon.
At Topanga Beach, they discovered 34 skeletons, all of which appeared to have been buried at the same time. Men and women, young and old, were buried close together, but predominant were older men, identified by their worn-down teeth. Other reports said that pieces of over 100 skeletons had been found, and speculated that 300 skeletons would be revealed when the mound was fully excavated.
At least one of the skulls had an arrowhead embedded in it. Others were crushed. A Stanford Archaeology class came to assist, and conjectured that the graves were evidence of a massacre that had occurred around the year 1200.
Strangely, the class reported that the skeletons “were almost dwarfs in size,” and listed other abnormalities.
The brow is almost totally lacking, rising from the line of the eyebrows only three-quarters of an inch, and the top of the head being almost flat…. [The nose] projects horizontally, hornlike, and with no resemblance to the human nose. A spirit level laid from the top of the head to the tip of the nose would show but a slight inclination.
These queer tribesmen had bulging heads in the rear and unusually heavy jaw bones, due probably to their diet of clams and other shell fish, the shells of which they crushed between their teeth.
—“Unheard of Race,” Marion County Progress, 1910-11-12
Another of the skulls had horns, which protruded from near the front of the ear cavity and encircled the head. These horns, which were two or three inches in length, were apparently of the same bone composition as the skulls and had evidently been a part of them; but they were so slender and mellow with age that at the first handling after exposure to the air the horns became separated from the skull.
—“Will They Be Interpreted?” Los Angeles Times, 1911-02-05
Artifacts discovered in the mound included flint arrowheads, deer-bone whistles, shell ornaments in the shape of fish and animals, necklace beads, stone discs, mortars, and small cups with holes on either side near the top. One newspaper reported that the artifacts were unlike anything known from the surrounding Native Americans (for example, flint isn’t found in the area, and “other articles had been made of stone that is not found in this part of the world”). Another reported that large rocks, cut into the shapes of “spinning tops,” resembled the fishing lures of Channel Islands Natives.
When the class returned to Stanford, credit for their discovery was suddenly claimed by a miner and self-styled “amateur archaeologist” named William Wills Coolbaugh (1839-1912), who was homesteading at Topanga Beach in a cabin he called Jack Rabbit Lodge.
Coolbaugh said he’d been “prospecting along the beach when he came upon a six acre flat, at the delta of the Topango,” that had a 40’ x 100’ mound of darker soil on it. The mound was 5-8’ high and overgrown. Digging into it, he noticed a protective layer of boulders, then ashes and tiny seashells, and finally whale bones covering 44 skeletons with their knees bound to their chests.
Coolbaugh left the skeletons “lying visible in their tombs” as a macabre attraction, charging tourists 25 cents to see them. By August 1910, he had begun selling artifacts to Professor Ira M. Buell (1849-1931) of Beloit College, Wisconsin, including a 4” arrowhead for $10. The college still has over a dozen stone tools from the site in its collection.
Professor Buell, “The Bone Man,” had come to Los Angeles earlier that year to collect bones from the La Brea Tar Pits. In July, his wife Lillian (b.1858), an artist and art teacher, had an exhibition of her drawings in the parlor of the Witherow Hotel on Ocean Ave. The Daily Outlook wrote, “She has been sketching around Santa Monica and Topanga for four months and has many of our most interesting views.” It seems natural that she would have drawn Coolbaugh’s homestead or the mound.
When Professor Buell inspected the Topanga Beach skeletons, he also noted their abnormalities. He conjectured that the burials had taken place 500-1,000 years ago.
Interestingly, he observed that some of the bones were buried in a rotting wooden box, and concluded that they had been dug up before and reburied. On the ground nearby, he found evidence of lodge sites.
At Coolbaugh’s request, the Smithsonian Institute came to study the mound, but no information could be found about their research.
Enjoying the publicity, Coolbaugh offered up many of his own conjectures. He imaginatively linked the graves to legends he’d heard from “the oldest Spanish families” concerning local Native Americans who’d been killed by an invasion of Aztecs from Mexico.
…in the days before the face of white men had been seen along the Coast of Southern California… there occurred an Indian massacre, when all of the inhabitants of a Topango village were killed by a marauding enemy that fell upon them. The bodies of the dead were piled in a heap, according to the prevailing custom, covered with stones, and a funeral pyre burned over their heads. The fire thus started, so the legend runs, leaped deep into the fissures between the rocks; it gave birth to the mountain, whose intermittent smoking continues to this day.
—“Will They Be Interpreted?” Los Angeles Times, 1911-02-05
The Burning Mountain was a real phenomenon that existed by today’s Bel-Air Bay Club. Oil deposits are suspected as the cause of an underground fire that burned there for hundreds of years, until 1944.
Coolbaugh was especially captivated by a polished bone statuette on which “The eyes and nose of the hand made god show plainly.” He said it was a royal scepter, comparing it to one that explorer Francis Drake had observed in 1579.
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| Jack Rabbit Lodge and a long barn, circa 1910. Photo courtesy of Acker Archives |
In May 1911, a cast of hundreds trampled the area while making a Western called Crossing the American Prairies in the Early Fifties. Never released, the film was about Native Americans attacking a wagon train, and “Of course virtue in the form of the frontiersmen triumphed.” It was directed by D. W. Griffith (1875-1948), whose most famous film The Birth of a Nation(1915) praised the Ku Klux Klan.
In September 1911, a Western was made at the mound itself. The film, called A Chance Shot, was directed by Pat Hartigan (1881-1951) and starred Ruth Roland (1892-1937). Its publicity irreverently boasted that it had used the artifacts as props. The fate of this film is unknown. The racist plot was summarized as…
Red Fox, an Indian brave, wins White Doe, the chief’s daughter, but to emphasize the fickleness of the Indian husband he becomes enamored of Mary, a settler’s daughter. Finding that his pleas for her love have no effect on the white girl he captures her and [binds] her to a tree….
—IMDb, www.imdb.com/title/tt0195591
In June 1911, the Los Angeles Herald published a story about a Spanish priest at the San Gabriel Mission, Eugene Surgranes, who’d built a museum of artifacts, many of which he’d dug up himself. “The Topango region proved a very fertile ground.”
Jesus Santa Maria (1849-1944), Topanga’s first settler, had another impressive collection.
…this collection increased through the years to become his stock in trade many years later…. Proudly he would show his strange collection of Indian curios, odd rock formations and local fossils. There was such a demand for the articles that Jesus decided to build a small lath house in which to display them and open a curio shop.
—A History of Topanga by Ivan L. Nelson, serialized in Topanga Journal, 1952-01-18
Russell K. Hart (1898-1967), Santa Monica mayor during the 1950s, said that he had collected artifacts from the mound as a boy.
Where these three collections are today is unknown, although Santa Maria did donate a portion to the Los Angeles Museum.
In October 1911, dozens of graves with artifacts were discovered at Malibu Canyon beach. Similarities between the sites led to speculation that the Natives of Topanga Beach had made these burials too.
In January 1912, University of California anthropologist Nels C. Nelson (1875-1964) recorded the Topanga mound in his “Archaeological Reconnaissance Notes” on coastal sites in Southern California.
At the time of the examination the mound proper promiscuously dug over measured approximately 50 feet in diameter and about 6 feet in height, but the refuse scatters over an area of about 100 x 300 feet.
The composition contains a great deal of earth and beach rocks but many mussel, clam and abalone shells are present. Human and animal bones were observed and many fragments of well worked mortars and pestles were found.
A few of the fragments Nelson found are still at the University of California Berkeley in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.
In September 1914, a new discovery was made by ground squirrels, whose burrows were observed to contain dark earth, human bones, and shells. The underground source of these artifacts, in the vicinity of the mound, could not be determined.
In 1915, deputy sheriffs stopped allowing people onto the old homestead property. Anxious to find out what had become of the artifacts, Professor Buell got permission to explore the area in August. He reported that “a carload of Indian relics are lying on the surface,” and complained that he wasn’t allowed to do further research.
In July 1916, Deputy Sheriff Edward M. Williams amused himself by exhuming artifacts (including a tomahawk) that he sent to the Los Angeles Museum. Where they are now is unknown.
Also in 1916, a Tongva Native named Setimo Lopez told ethnologist John P. Harrington that the word “Topanga” came from the Chumash Ventureño language, which implied that the Chumash boundary was farther south than had previously been thought. José Maria Zalvidea, another Tongva Native, told Harrington that there had been a cemetery at Topanga Beach with whale bones as markers, and that many of his ancestors were buried there.
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| "The new highway pierces the site of the ancient Playano village and seals the rifled tomb of its aboriginal population." 1923-01-07, "A Forgotten Race," Los Angeles Times. |
In the 1930s, the Radiant Springs Water company was bottling the water from a popular roadside spring two miles up the Canyon. According to owner Joy R. Pierce (1891-1961), who lived with his family by the lagoon, “the spring was known to the Indians, who came from as far south as San Diego to get water from it to give to the sick.”
In the 1940s or ‘50s, the mound was given the Native American site number LAN-133 by Sophie Bayler, who wrote that it had contained beads, abalone spangles, and flint arrowheads.
In 1950, another Native site, LAN-215, was recorded on nearby Parker Mesa (later Sunset Mesa) by archaeologist S. L. Peck, who noted that most of it had already been destroyed by plowing.
In 1961, the Parker Mesa site was rediscovered by anthropologist Dr. Chester King and archaeologist Tom Blackburn. Artifacts found there included bowl fragments, a basalt projectile point, a chert knife, sharpened animal bones, a partial house floor, a circular pit thought to be a yucca-roasting oven, and stones that were shaped into discs, mortar blanks, balls, and crescents. The site was estimated to have been inhabited until at least 1000 B.C., making it much older than the one at Topanga Beach. Unfortunately, the scientists had little time to study it before grading for the Sunset Mesa housing development began.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, Topanga Beach residents found several artifacts like rock bowls, arrowheads, beads, grinding stones, and a carved rock that appeared to have been hung on a string. Nevertheless, when State Parks took over the beach in the late ‘70s, archaeologist P. Barclay wrote that he’d found no evidence of the site and declared it completely destroyed.
In the 1980s, State Parks reported finding shell midden. In 2001, when they bought the rest of Lower Topanga, they made a new survey of the land. “Eight previously unrecorded sites were discovered, containing a variety of artifacts,” according to The Topanga Story edited by Louise York and Michele Johnson (2012).
In 2002-3, State Parks archaeological monitor Sarah Jenkins drilled several feet underground and pulled up shell fragments and artifacts.
In 2004, Topanga Ranch Motel resident and Tongva tribal litigator John Tommy Rosas nominated the Lower Topanga area as a Native American Sacred Site, while fighting his and the community’s eviction.
In 2007, as some of the last houses were being bulldozed, further State Parks monitoring revealed shell midden and artifacts. Because the earth had been moved around, the discovery couldn’t be attributed to LAN-133 with certainty, so it was given the separate site number LAN-3759.
Today, Topanga is known as a mountain town, but archaeologists believe that the Canyon is actually named after the Native American village that was at the beach.
Geologically, Topanga’s place in the mountains is also relatively recent. This is why traces of marine life can be found throughout the hills, like the 1,800-lb. fossilized sea lion discovered by Geologist W. R. B. Osterholt (1895-1958) near Mulholland Drive.
All media, when carefully examined, give strength to the belief that the Topanga area is of marine origin and that none of its structure is continental, as for instance, the palisades upon which the city of Santa Monica are located.
—A History of Topanga by Ivan L. Nelson, serialized in Topanga Journal, 1951-06-01
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This is an excerpt from the book Topanga Beach: A History, 1820s-1920s. Author Pablo Capra is a former Lower Topanga resident, and continues to preserve the history of that neighborhood on his website, www.brasstackspress.com, and as a board member of the Topanga Historical Society, www.topangahistoricalsociety.org.
