History of Long Beach—Blog One
The Long Beach Conservancy is dedicated to education and preservation of our history.
We do our best to provide the public with the best information from reputable sources. History is always a work in progress. New information often comes to light which can confirm what we know, prompt reevaluation, or a give fuller understanding. Please know we will do our best to correct, expand, and will amend and add new information as our knowledge and understanding grows.
—The Long Beach Conservancy
The Original Inhabitants
“Wiyot’s Children,” Gabrielino Indian Village of Sa-angna By Mary Leighton
The benevolent climate and exuberant vegetation and wildlife of the LA Basin and surrounding areas made it a population center for tens of thousands of years. Food was available both on land and from the sea. The climate didn’t require movement with the seasons. Agriculture developed. The Tongva, this area’s original caretakers and stewards of this land, called it “Tovaangar” living here and cultivating its fertile soil for hundreds of years. The 4,000 square mile area, including the Channel Islands, was highly populated with settlements and people for the last ten thousand years.
Long Beach had at least three major settlements. Tevaaxaanga was an inland settlement near the LA River. Ahwaanga and Puvunga (many spelling variations) were coastal villages. Puvunga (where Cal-State Long Beach is now located) is a deeply sacred place. It is a spiritual center from which their lawgiver and creator god—Chungichnish—instructed his people.
The Tongva fished, hunted, and cultivated the land. Long Beach is a natural deep water harbor and the Tongva created trades routes along the Pacific Ocean (north and south) edged by twin rivers (when full) to easily move people and goods inland and back to the coast. Waterways were the freeways of the past. Signal Hill, with its high ground, was a communication beacon and used for sending smoke signals across the LA Basin.
First European Contact
1542
Painting depicts Cabrillo’s arrival in San Diego, his first California contact. National Park Service
Spanish explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo was the first recorded European contact to the area on October 7, 1542. Cabrillo reached Catalina Island and sent a boat to the island.
The boat was met by “a great crowd of armed Indians appeared”. The next day Cabrillo arrived in San Pedro Bay and saw Long Beach and vast LA Basin and calling it the Bahia de los Fumos “Bay of Smokes” due to the thousands of American Indian* cooking fires. Even then, our weather, with its onshore breezes and marine layer, trapped the human generated smoke in the basin which was held in place by the ring of mountains.
No one went ashore, but Cabrillo claimed the region for Spain. Cabrillo also noted in his log: "is an excellent harbor and the country is good with many plains and groves of trees,” The next day, they stopped and noted Santa Monica Bay. Fortunately for the Tongva, the Europeans concentrated conquering the east coast of North America for the next couple hundred years delaying the arrival of European diseases and enslavement. The American Indians of the Los Angeles Basin and Channel Islands were eventually impacted as European diseases spread westward through American Indian trade and migration west.
*Per The National Museum of the American Indian regarding terminology: “Consensus is, whenever possible, Native people prefer to be called by their specific tribal name. In the United States, Native American has been widely used but is falling out of favor with some groups, and the terms American Indian or Indigenous American are preferred by many Native people.”
Alta California, New Spain
1769-1821
Misión San Gabriel Arcángel (177) by Ferdinand Deppe, 1828 California Historical Society Collection, USC
The 1769, the second Spanish contact was by the Gaspar de Portolá land expedition, including a Spanish soldier named Jose Manuel Nieto. The Los Angeles Basin was part of the province of New Spain called Alta California. By then, diseases had already started the decimation of the Tongva who had lived and fished in the area for thousands of years. In 1771, Catholic missionary, Junipero Serra, founded the San Gabriel Mission. (The original inhabitants, the Tongva, in this area were called the Gabrieleno Indians by the Spanish due to their proximity to the San Gabriel Mission.)
Under the mission system, the Spanish forced the Tongva’s relocation, religious conversion, and enslavement. The Tongva were, again, exposed to European diseases for which they had had no immunity and died in great numbers. These twin catastrophes led to the near total collapse of their society and culture. By 1800, the Tongva-Gabrielenos were missionized, dead, or had fled to other areas to inter-marry into other tribes. To understand the scale of loss during the mission period: "The precolonial Indigenous population of California is estimated to have numbered around 340,000 people, who were diverse culturally and linguistically. From 1769-1832, at least 87,787 baptisms and 63,789 deaths of Indigenous peoples occurred, demonstrating the immense death rate at the missions in Alta California.” (1).
In 1784, the Spanish started granting land to soldiers to raise cattle and food. One of the first land grants and and the largest, Jose Manuel Nieto was granted 300,000 acres (later reduced to 167,000 acres) including much of the LA Basin and it was called Ranchos Los Nietos, which included the area which would become Long Beach, California.
Eddy, G. A. (1937) The old Spanish and Mexican ranchos of Los Angeles County. Los Angeles: Title Insurance and Trust Company, Los Angeles. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress.
Alta California, Mexico
1821-1848
The Mexican War of Independence ended Spanish rule of LA Basin and the area became part of the Mexican Republic in 1821. Few permanent non-Native and non-Hispanic, by birth or descent residents lived in Alta California during this period. In 1826, Jedediah Smith led the first group of American citizens, trappers, overland to California.
In 1834, Governor Jose Figueroa declared the Rancho Los Nietos grant under Mexican rule and ordered its breakup into six smaller ranchos. Rancho Las Bolsas was given to Nieto’s widow, Catarina Ruiz. Rancho Santa Gertrudes was given to Josefa Cota (the widow of Antonio Nieto), Rancho Palo Alto and Rancho Los Alamitos went to Juan Jose Nieto. Rancho Los Cerritos was given to Manuela Nieto de Cota and her husband, Guillermo Cota. Long Beach sits on the land of two Ranchos: Rancho Los Alamitos in East Long Beach and Rancho Los Cerritos, in West Long Beach. The dividing line between the two ranchos was Alamitos Avenue. The first organized group of American settlers crossed the plains to California in 1841. The two Ranchos located in Long Beach were purchased by Americans: Abel Stearns bought Rancho Los Alamitos in 1842. John Temple bought Rancho Los Cerritos in 1844.
The Decisive Battle of Rio San Gabriel Painting by James Walker
Mexican-American War
1846-1848
A territorial dispute in Texas sparked the Mexican-American War in 1846. The U.S Navy was ordered to take all California ports. August 1846, the USS Cyane entered Long Beach Harbor and U.S Marines took the command of Pueblo de Los Angeles only until a month later when the Los Angeles resistance forced a retreat. February 1848 the Mexican-American war ended and a military governor was appointed to over see California. Long Beach, California became American Territory.
September 9, 1850 California became the 31st state of the United States.
We do our best to provide the public with the best information from reputable sources. History is always a work in progress. New information often comes to light which can confirm what we know, prompt reevaluation, or a give fuller understanding. Please know we will do our best to correct, expand, and will amend and add new information as our knowledge and understanding grows.
—The Long Beach Conservancy
Sources
Cite:
(1) Jones, Terry L.; Codding, Brian F. (June 22, 2019), Lozny, Ludomir R.; McGovern, Thomas H. (eds.), "The Native California Commons: Ethnographic and Archaeological Perspectives on Land Control, Resource Use, and Management”.
Tongva
https://home.csulb.edu/~eruyle/puvudoc_0000_about.html
https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/faq/
Alta California