Читать книгу Discovering Griffith Park - Casey Schreiner - Страница 11

Although the story of Griffith Park is often told in the scope of the timeline of the guy the park is named after, it should go without saying that the land that comprises Griffith Park existed long before Griffith J. Griffith set foot in the region.

The people who are today broadly known as the Tongva-Gabrielino (both the name and the spelling may vary) have thousands of years of history in Los Angeles County. Before Europeans arrived, this landscape would have looked significantly different—no manicured picnic areas or golf courses, but dense old-growth oak woodlands and sage scrub that supported large animals like grizzly bears. The Los Angeles River had no concrete boundaries, and it changed courses and directions often with the floodwaters and supported large fish like steelhead trout. And of course, the city’s ubiquitous freeways weren’t here—but you could still find travelers and traders tracing the future route of the 101 in the land known as Tovaangar, with villages stretching from present-day Santa Clarita to Palos Verdes and inland to the San Gabriel Mountains, western San Bernardino Valley, and Santiago Peak in northern Orange County.

Many findings are very new, but scholars now believe there were at least three Tongva-Gabrielino settlements in the vicinity of Griffith Park—one near Fern Dell, one west of Travel Town near Universal City, and one near where the Los Feliz adobe and ranger station are today.

The histories of the original inhabitants of this land—like many throughout the Americas—sadly were forgotten or actively erased by those who came later, but the descendants of those original people still live here. Indeed, Los Angeles is the city with the second-highest number of Native American citizens in the country, and thankfully there is a renewed interest and attempt to preserve and tell their stories. The Autry Museum inside Griffith Park continues to break new ground in bringing these histories back to life with a combination of scholarly research and personal outreach to modern Tongva-Gabrielino representatives.

The first known recorded instances of Europeans inside Griffith Park came with Juan Bautista de Anza’s 1775–76 expedition to establish an overland route from Sonora, Mexico, to Monterey, then the capital of Alta California. Anza brought 240 colonists and 40 soldiers on this 1200-mile trek. Their journey took them along the Los Angeles River in what is now Griffith Park, and there is record of the party camping there, although it’s not clear exactly where—some scholars think it was near today’s John Ferraro athletic fields; a plaque near the Pecan Grove picnic area commemorates the expedition.

One of the soldiers in the Anza expedition was José Vicente Feliz, who returned to Los Angeles in 1781 as the military leader of Los Pobladores—the original forty-four settlers and four soldiers who walked from Sinaloa and Sonora, Mexico, to found El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Ángeles Sobre el Río de la Porciúncula (“The Town of the Queen of Angels on the River Porciúncula”—think about that the next time someone complains about people shortening the full name of the city to “L.A.”). This event is commemorated on Labor Day weekend with processions, Masses, and a celebration usually held in the Pueblo de Los Angeles at Olvera Street.

Feliz spent some time in San Diego but returned to the Pueblo in 1787 to serve as the governor’s representative. For his efforts, he was given a Spanish land grant from Cahuenga Pass to the Los Angeles River, including much of the flatlands to the south. The land became known as Rancho Los Feliz.

Feliz died in 1822—one year after Mexico won its independence from Spain. His daughter-in-law Doña María Ygnacia Verdugo took over the operations of Rancho Los Feliz and immediately exercised some pretty sharp business and legal acumen during a period of relative instability in the region. She registered a lucrative personal cattle brand, successfully petitioned the new Mexican government for a confirmation of her land rights to Rancho Los Feliz, and—perhaps most importantly—secured the rancho’s water rights to the Los Angeles River.

The next few decades were tumultuous for both the Los Feliz estate and for California in general. Throughout the 1830s and ’40s, tension mounted between Californios and Mexicans, and eventually between Mexico and the United States, culminating in the Mexican-American War from 1846 to 1848. Even before California became part of the United States, American businessmen were moving into the region and taking advantage of the messy legal paperwork to basically seize rancho land. Doña María’s ironclad contracts kept most of them at bay, but by the 1850s she had sold off sections of the rancho to her daughters and passed the bulk of Rancho Los Feliz to her son Antonio, who would build the still-standing walls of the Los Feliz adobe house in 1853 (today, it’s the Park Film Office).

THE CURSE OF THE FELIZES

One of the best-known and most-told ghost stories in Griffith Park is the so-called Curse of the Felizes. According to legend, Don Antonio Feliz—then the bachelor landowner of Rancho Los Feliz—succumbed to a smallpox outbreak in 1863. Before he died, he sent his young niece Petranilla away to prevent infection while his sister Soledad stayed on.

When Petranilla was away, Don Antonio signed a deathbed will witnessed by his friend Antonio Coronel and an unnamed lawyer. Soledad got some furniture. Petranilla got a big fat nothing. And Coronel, by some strange stroke of luck, got all of Rancho Los Feliz.

It’s understandable, then, that Petranilla was a bit peeved when she returned to find her home no longer in the hands of her family. This is when she apparently cursed anyone who owned the land that rightfully belonged to the Feliz family, at least according to notorious yarn spinner Horace Bell. Local historian and outdoor author John W. Robinson dug into this legend in the 1980s and essentially said Bell made the whole thing up.

Misfortune did seem to be a regular occurrence at Rancho Los Feliz from then onward, though. Coronel quickly gave all the land to his lawyer, who was later shot and killed. Next up was Leon Baldwin, whose crops failed and cattle died, forcing him to sell to Griffith J. Griffith. Baldwin was later murdered by bandits in Mexico, and Griffith experienced his own series of unfortunate events, too. The ghosts of Don Antonio and Petranilla have both allegedly been seen at Bee Rock and at the old Feliz adobe but have reportedly calmed down now that the land is a public park.

Unfortunately, Antonio didn’t have as much luck with the rancho as his mom did. A combination of a smallpox outbreak and some shenanigans from Yankee lawyers brought the land into American hands and eventually to the park’s namesake, Griffith J. Griffith.