them with food, water, and materials for building and hunting. For food, they hunted deer and rabbits and gathered acorns and pine nuts. They took water from the streams that gushed down from great heights. Chaparral was an abundant source of many necessities. Manzanita berries were pressed for cider, and the leaves were smoked. Greasewood provided arrow shafts for hunting. Yucca fibers were used to make nets and ropes.
To obtain these materials, and to visit and trade with other peoples across the range, American Indians made the first footpaths into the mountains. According to Will Thrall, foremost collector of San Gabriel Mountains history, who personally searched out these ancient routes at a time when they could still be followed, the main Shoshone trail across the range ascended Millard Canyon, traversed behind Mount Lowe to Red Box Saddle, descended the West Fork of the San Gabriel River to Valley Forge Canyon, climbed up that canyon to Barley Flats, went down and across the head of Big Tujunga Canyon and up to Pine (Charlton) Flat, and continued on to the west end of Chilao. Here, the trail forked. One branch followed the high country northeast to Buckhorn, and then went down the South Fork of Little Rock Creek to the desert. The other branch dropped northwest into upper Alder Creek, and then ascended Indian Ridge (where traces of the old footpath can still be seen) to Sheep Camp Spring on the west slope of Mount Pacifico, and dropped down Santiago Canyon to Little Rock Creek and along it to the desert. Another cross-range trail ascended the North Fork of the San Gabriel River, climbed over Windy Gap, and descended the South Fork of Big Rock Creek to the desert. For perhaps two or three centuries before the arrival of the white settlers, these and many shorter canyon trails were trod by hundreds of American Indians every year.
The arrival of the Spaniards changed life in the pleasant valleys below the mountains forever. In 1771, along the grassy banks of the Rio Hondo, Mission San Gabriel Arcángel was founded, and soon thereafter, the Gabrielinos were incorporated into the mission community. Mission San Fernando Rey de España, founded in 1797, became the home of the less-numerous Fernandeños. At the height of mission activity—around 1800—these two outposts of the cross numbered some 2,000 American Indians in their widespread flocks.
Several decades later came the era of the great ranchos, bringing a pastoral way of life to the valleys. These spacious cattle ranches that spread out below the south slopes of the range bore the familiar names of San Fernando, Tujunga, La Cañada, San Pascual, Santa Anita, Azusa de Duarte, and San Jose.
The Spanish and Mexican Californios used the mountains very little except as a source of water. When there were buildings to be constructed, woodcutters sometimes took timber from the lower canyons. Vaqueros did some hunting in the canyons and foothills. Grizzly bears, numerous in the range then, were stalked and captured, and then dragged to the bull ring in the Pueblo of Los Angeles to be sacrificed in brutal bear-bull contests.
There is no evidence that the Spaniards ever penetrated into the heart of the mountains, although they certainly explored the fringes. Gaspar de Portolá and Pedro Fages, on their epic journey northward in 1769, toiled through the narrow canyon of San Fernando Pass and found “high, barren hills, very difficult for beasts of burden” before dropping into pleasant Newhall Valley. On another path-finding trip in 1772, Fages crossed the eastern end of the range in the vicinity of Cajon Pass and continued northwest below the northern ramparts of the mountains, discovering the Joshua trees. Fray Francisco Garcés, the missionary-explorer-martyr, explored both sides of the range in 1776. Fray José María Zalvidea almost circled what is now Angeles National Forest in 1806.
It was the Spaniards who gave the mountains their name—two names, in fact, that have existed side by side until relatively recent years. In 1776 Garcés referred to the range as Sierra de San Gabriel, borrowing the name of the nearby mission, and this name was used in Spanish records frequently in ensuing years. But the mission padres usually referred to the range as Sierra Madre (“mother range”). Both San Gabriel and Sierra Madre were in common usage until 1927, when the U.S. Board on Geographic Names finally ruled in favor of the former. Today San Gabriel Mountains is almost universally accepted.
With the coming of the Anglos—from the 1840s onward—the San Gabriels began to receive more attention. Prospectors, hunters, bandits, homesteaders, and squatters were pioneers in unveiling the secrets of the mountains. These hardy individuals first entered the wooded canyons, and then forged their way over the ridges and into the hidden heart of the range—terrain the rancheros had scorned.
Stories of gold in the San Gabriels go back as far as the 1770s, but not until 1842, when Francisco Lopez discovered gold clinging to the roots of a cluster of wild onions in Placerita Canyon, near present-day Newhall, was there what might be called a gold rush. The San Fernando Placers, as the discovery was called, were worked on and off for about a decade, until strikes elsewhere drew the miners away. By far, the largest gold strike in the San Gabriels occurred on the East Fork of the San Gabriel River. The precious metal was discovered in the canyon gravels in 1854, and for the next seven years the East Fork was the scene of frenzied activity, an estimated $2 million in gold being recovered. A smaller strike occurred in Big Santa Anita Canyon about the same time. During the next half century, prospectors rushed into the mountains at every rumor of bonanza, tearing up hillsides in their frantic search for wealth.
Bandits, including Jack Powers, Salomon Pico, Juan Flores, and the legendary Tiburcio Vásquez, turned to the San Gabriels for refuge. They drove stolen cattle and horses up the canyons and pastured them in backcountry flats. Utilizing the faint network of old American Indian trails, these outlaws established isolated hideouts deep in the mountains.
The pioneer trail builder in the San Gabriels was Benjamin Wilson, who in 1864 reworked an old American Indian path up Little Santa Anita Canyon to the top of the mountain that now bears his name. During the next three decades, trails were blazed up all the major canyons of the front range, some of them continuing over the ridges and into the backcountry. In increasing numbers, homesteaders and squatters followed these trails and found favorite spots on which to build their cabins. The names of many of these early mountain men have endured to the present, attached to canyons, camps, and peaks—Wilson, Millard, Henninger, Newcomb, Chantry, Chilao, Islip, and Dawson, to name a few.
Almost all these pioneers came into the mountains for utilitarian reasons—to mine gold, to cut timber, to find refuge, to pasture livestock, or to establish a home. Around 1885 a new reason for going to the mountains arose—recreation. Great numbers of San Gabriel Valley residents journeyed to Mount Wilson on weekends and holidays to enjoy the cool mountain air and take in the fabulous panorama. (This was before air pollution muddled Southland skies.) Hunters entered the range seeking big game, plentiful in the San Gabriels until around the turn of the century. Grizzly bears, black bears, deer, mountain sheep, and mountain lions were stalked by bands of thrill-seeking hunters who penetrated far into the mountains. Sportsmen packed in for a week’s fishing on the trout-filled West Fork of the San Gabriel River. For the less energetic, there were Sunday afternoon picnics in such woodsy haunts as Millard and Eaton Canyons.
Other people entered the mountains for a different reason—exploitation. Most Americans of that day assumed that our natural resources were inexhaustible and therefore there was no need to conserve them. Lumber was needed to fuel Southern California’s great boom of the 1880s; why not use the timber close at hand? Indiscriminate cutting of forest trees appeared imminent. Furthermore, the value of chaparral for the mountain watershed was little understood. Brush fires, some deliberately set by cattlemen to clear land for grazing, raged across the mountains until extinguished by rain. Fortunately, some farsighted residents in Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley became alarmed at this exploitation and devastation of the local mountains, and they began working to preserve the lands.
One of these was Abbot Kinney, a rancher, botanist, and land developer who lived at his Kinneloa Ranch above Altadena. Kinney is best remembered as the creator of Venice, the Southern California beach town that once had canals for streets, but it was as chairman of California’s first Board of Forestry that he did his most important work. In the first report of the Board of Forestry to Governor George
