by Paul R. Spitzzeri
While the words Arroyo Seco mean “dry creek” in Spanish, this watercourse that runs for some 25 miles can certainly have abundant flow in its northern reaches in the San Gabriel Mountains, which historically has meant significant volumes through its passage in Pasadena and the northeast communities of Garvanza, Highland Park and Montecito Heights before it empties into the Los Angeles River.
As posts on this blog have discussed, major flooding in the 1910s led Los Angeles County to develop a flood control program to control water in a variety of rivers, streams, creeks and washes, including the Arroyo Seco. One of the earliest projects that was completed, this being in 1920, was Devil’s Gate Dam, where La Cañada-Flintridge meets Pasadena and Altadena and near which is Hahamongna Watershed Park in Pasadena and the western trailhead of the Gabrielino Trail at Altadena.
When water was plentiful and plant life in profusion, the indigenous people of the village of Hahamongna benefited from the richness of what the Arroyo provided. With Spanish colonization and the establishment of such local missions as San Gabriel (1771 in the Whittier Narrows and a few years later at its current site) and San Fernando (1797), the effects on the natives were, of course, enormous and catastrophic. The situation continued to worsen in the Mexican period of 1821-1846 and the early American period that followed.
Two large ranchos were on either side of the upper Arroyo, including San Rafael, one of the first land grants under Spain when given in 1784 to José María Verdugo and on the west side of the watercourse, and San Pascual, granted a half-century later to Juan Mariné and situated to its east. Through the first quarter-century or so of the American period, both ranches were subjected to many changes in ownership and subdivisions.
In 1873, the Indiana Colony established what was soon renamed Pasadena, while to the south, the Lake Vineyard Land and Water Company, which initially included F.P.F. Temple as treasurer, formed in what later became the Alhambra area. Naturally, both tapped the Arroyo Seco for its waters and one of the earliest located newspaper references to the Devil’s Gate came in 1877, by which time Temple’s bank, Temple and Workman, failed during an economic downturn, though Benjamin D. Wilson and his son-in-law, James deBarth Shorb, the Lake Vineyard principals pressed on with the project.
The 12 June edition of the Los Angeles Express reprinted an account from its competitor, the Los Angeles Herald, which informed its readers, “we availed ourselves of the courtesy of Mr. P[rudent] Beaudry to inspect the work which the Lake Vineyard Land and Water Company have been doing to make Los Angeles county independent of the rainfall.” The winter of 1876-1877 was a very dry one, so the account continued that,
Our course lay along the Arroyo Seco, on the road to the Indiana colony. Before we reached this favored spot, we struck into a cañon, surmounted by a high hill, which Mr. Beaudry at his own expense, is tunneling . . . After inspecting this work, which, when completed, will abridge the distance to the Indiana Colony about three quarters of a mile, and which will, besides, dispense with some formidable grades, we again retraced our course and struck into the Arroyo Seco.
Beaudry, recently a mayor of Los Angeles and part-owner, as was Temple, of the Herald was the possessor of several hundred acres of the San Rafael in the Garvanza area. The account provided some details about the Indiana Colony (Pasadena) and the 6,000 acres of Lake Vineyard, which, it was noted, had a much more advanced water delivery system from the Arroyo than its neighbor.
This included a cement zanja, or ditch, deemed “the finest of its kind in California” and which sent water from the Arroyo in the San Gabriels (often known then as the Sierra Madre Mountains) to large reservoirs. The Herald remarked “we could not help speculating upon what this tract would be in the near future, when the energy of the Indiana Colonists had been fairly emulated and soil, sun and water had been made to do their wonderful work.”
Under the heading of “A Glorious Grove,” the account continued that “a brisk trot . . . brought us to the umbrageous covert whence, at the head of the Arroyo Seco, spring the plenteous waters which will, one day, make the Lake Vineyard Land and Water tract the beauty spot of Los Angeles county.” The piece added,
We were at the foot of the Devil’s Gate, a point where two prodigious granite formations come within twenty-five feet of each other. They had doubtless been disrupted at some early day. It occurred to Mr. J. de Barth Shorb, who supervised the construction of the concrete ditch before alluded to, that the probability was that, at the foot of these granite pillars, were the bed-rock once reached, a great body of water would be struck, independent of the supply at present relied upon to fill the zanja. Acting on this idea, he began to excavate between the rocks; and as a result, at a depth of only four or five feet, water is pouring out like a millrace. This excavation will be prosecuted till the bed-rock is struck, and an invaluable volume of water will be secured.
It was added that “a hundred yards or so further down, in a leafy grove, we sought a coign of vantage for our picnic lunch. We found it where two superb springs . . . dash out of the very mountain’s side . . . and never drank we such water, for coolness and purity, as that.” Moreover, the bottles of champagne and claret bought for the feast were cooled “where these regenerating waters had hollowed out a crypt in the rock” and the unnamed writer proclaimed, “the rod of Aaron never released wholesomer or sweeter draughts from prisoning rock or earth than those we drank from those springs.”
Beaudry’s tunnel was to be 400 feet long, 9 feet wide and 10 feet high and carry wagon traffic, while the dam was to be 35 feet high and form a reservoir of fifteen acres holding 49 million gallons. The base of the earthen structure was to be 150 feet wide, while a catchment basin was to be at least 1,000 acres and a waste ditch was to be added “with a cross section considerably larger than that of the old water course in the ravine. Water from the reservoir was to be sent to a distributing reservoir “206 feet above the dam” and pipes would convey the precious fluid to the company’s properties.
As for the Lake Vineyard company, the account noted that it was formed in 1875, just before the economic downturn, and it held those “6,000 acres of the finest land in the San Gabriel Valley.” Shorb’s ditch was 12,000 feet long, while nearly 38,000 feet of iron pipe, ranging from 5 to 11 inches in diameter, were laid throughout the tract, and five reservoirs, with capacities for 3 million gallons each except for one at 21 million, were also built.
A “submerged dam” was to be built “at the head of the Arroyo Seco, which will increase their supply four fold and possibly much more.” The assumption was that, when these water works were finished, the supply of the Lake Vineyard firm “will be far superior to that of any other land scheme in Southern California.” Another key source was from Kewen Canyon and from the Lake Vineyard, near Wilson’s residence and which “is about one-half a mile long and is a never-failing source of supply,” with water from both locales sent to reservoirs at the southern sections of the tract. The location of the Lake Vineyard, or Wilson’s Lake, is today’s Lacy Park, southwest of the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, which is where Shorb’s house was situated.
The piece ended with praise for Beaudry, Shorb and Wilson and it was posited that “the idea of a mammoth concrete ditch was doubtless suggested to Col. Wilson by his travels, in early life, in Mexico, New Mexico and Arizona.” It bears noting that he came to this area from New Mexico in 1841 with the Rowland and Workman Expedition, though what specifically he may have encountered in those days or earlier is not known. It was asserted that “he has succeeded in imitating, perhaps in surpassing, the early Mission Fathers of Mexico and California.”
The financial malaise of the period, part of the “Long Depression” that spanned most of the Seventies, continued into the early 1880s, but, after a direct transcontinental railroad link was made to greater Los Angeles by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe at the end of 1885, the Boom of the Eighties ensued, peaking during the administration of William H. Workman as mayor of the Angel City. This boom reactivated part of the Lake Vineyard scheme, including the development of Alhambra, while Pasadena also grew dramatically. Not surprisingly, water battles emerged with respect to tapping the Arroyo Seco’s flow from the mountains.
Another important use of the Arroyo, however from Devil’s Gate northward into the San Gabriel range was recreation. Other than hunting parties, fishing (especially as trout was introduced into mountain streams in the 1880s) and picnics, access to the range was somewhat limited until the full flowering of the Great Hiking Era, which spanned from the 1890s to the Great Depression, and this involved not just hiking, but camping at a great many resorts.
North of Devil’s Gate and up what is now the Gabrielino Trail were such well-known camps as Oak Wilde and Switzer’s, also known as Switzer-Land. As America’s economy, especially in industry, boomed, an expanding middle class with more disposable income and leisure time, took to the mountains (as well as beaches) in greater numbers as the 19th century led into the 20th.
Another important element of these leisure activities was the growing availability and use of the personal camera, which began in the 1890s. More affordable cameras also led to cheaper means of producing photos, including on the real photo postcard, which as very popular in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century. For a brief time, moreover, the cyanotype printing process was widely used, with the “Prussian blue” tint first developed in the early 1840s, but not coming into vogue for some four decades and then well into the early 1900s. As one source puts it, “the stability and affordability of the process made it a popular choice for printing snapshots” and other uses, including architectural “blueprints.”
The featured photo from our collection for this post is an oval-shaped “snap” printed on a postcard of the rushing Arroyo Seco coming out of the Devil’s Gate, with its distinctive granite outcropping especially visible at the right side. Some references are that the edge of that side includes a profile of the devil, but the message on the reverse states otherwise. Sent to a recipient in Providence, Rhode Island and postmarked on 25 June 1908, the card has an interesting statement:
This is where I have spent the day, it is called “The Devil’s Gate” & today was certainly well named as it was as hot as his abode there! Can you see in the rock at the right a resemblance to an Indian’s face? I have marked with a pencil the nose, it is really a very good profile. Lois Greene, my old lady friend & I found ourselves prisoners for the day in the shady canyon just below for we had walked two miles from the Pasadena cars [of the Pacific Electric Railway] & I really did not dare go back in the sun, 92 [degrees] in the shade!
Around the time the photo was taken, apparently on the 23rd, printed and sent, there were a few notable media references to the Devil’s Gate area, including a proposal mentioned in the 21 May edition of the Los Angeles Times to acquire water plants from the southern limits of Pasadena to Devil’s Gate and which would also involve widening Arroyo Drive from South Pasadena northward as far as above Devil’s Gate. A leader of the project was Dr. Rudolph Schiffman of the Arroyo Seco Park Association.
There was also a scheme to develop a streetcar road, but with automobile-like conveyances rather than trolleys, in the area around Devil’s Gate from Pasadena and Altadena to what became La Cañada-Flintridge, while the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors were petitioned to approve an auto highway that was essentially Foothill Boulevard west of the Arroyo and extending to Ocean View Avenue in La Crescenta and then south to Verdugo Boulevard in Glendale.
It is also fun to see that, for the Tournament of Roses parade on New Year’s Day 1908, the Pasadena Land and Water Company, which tapped the Arroyo for water, entered a “Devil’s Gate” float, considered by the Times of the following day to be “one of the most original and artistic of the entries.”
The horse-drawn float had a system by which water was pumped from a tank under the vehicle down a rock waterfall, while running along the center was “a reproduction of the Devil’s Gate bridge,” a noted landmark. Moss and ferns were used to further enhance the realistic effect and red geraniums and roses with smilax and ferns hid most of the mechanical components, so that “only the head and shoulders of the driver were visible” and those operating the pump could not be seen by those watching the parade.
This photograph is certainly a interesting one, both for its unusual cyanotype tint as well as the message, while the context of some of the history of Devil’s Gate over the preceding three decades is also of note.
As noted in this post, Indigenous people in California were enormously and catastrophically affected by Spanish colonization through the mission system, and later by Mexican and American rule. A simple review of historical data shows that their population declined by nearly 90%, from an estimated 300,000 to just 30,000, over little more than a century. However, recent statistics indicate a surprising resurgence, with over 450,000 individuals in California self-identifying as Native American in the 2020s. This dramatic increase not only caught my attention but sparked my curiosity about how it came about as well.
I understand that many who now identify themselves as native Americans may have only a very small fraction of Indigenous ancestry. I also believe the rapid and widespread growth of tribal gaming casinos in the 1980s likely played a significant role in encouraging individuals to claim tribal affiliation and heritage. Other motivations may include access to government funding, cultural benefits, or political supports – as seen in the widely publicized case of a prominent politician who suddenly identified herself as a native American, much to public surprise.
Regardless of the motivations – be they financial, cultural, or political, so long the result is the preservation and revitalization of Indigenous traditions, languages, practices, and ceremonies, then I personally think it is ultimately a positive movement and development.
Hi Larry, thanks for the comment and it is important to note that many indigenous people intermarried with other ethnic groups, particularly Latinos. So, how they self-identified or were identified by others, such as in census counts in which Latinos were denoted as White for most of the enumerations, is also an important element to this. This is especially important, as you noted, because there was a later resurgence in native American identity.