Before the Engine: The Pre-Automotive Los Angeles

In the beginning, there was water. Not the violent Pacific that would later crash against the city's western boundaries, nor the crystalline streams that tumble down from the San Gabriel Mountains in winter, but something gentler—a river that didn't so much flow as meander through a landscape of wetlands and meadows, willows and sycamores, a river that spread itself across the floor of a basin like a lazy serpent seeking warmth, drinking from snowmelt and summer rains alike, depositing its silt and its blessings across what would one day become the most automobile-dependent metropolitan region on Earth. This was the Los Angeles River in its natural state, a waterway so undramatic that early Spanish explorers barely bothered to name it, referring to it simply as el río de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula—the river of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of Porciúncula—a name so lengthy that it would be shortened, over centuries, to something almost unrecognizable in its brevity. But in those earliest times, before the engine and before the asphalt, this modest river was everything. It was the axis around which life in the basin turned, the source of sustenance for the indigenous peoples who had lived along its banks for millennia, the determinant of where settlements would rise and where they would not, the hidden hand that shaped a region's destiny long before the first automobile would transform that destiny beyond recognition.

The geography of this place—before it became a place—demands careful attention, for it was geography, more than any human decision, that would set the parameters within which Los Angeles would eventually bloom into its peculiar, sprawling, automotive-dependent form. The Los Angeles Basin is not, as visitors from elsewhere often assume, a flat expanse of nothing but freeways and tract houses. It is a basin, yes, but a basin of considerable topographical complexity: a flat alluvial plain, yes, but rising on three sides to meet the chaparral-covered slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains to the north, the san Gabriel Mountains to the northeast, and the lighter, more modest hills—the Puente Hills, the Repetto Hills, the Santa Ana Mountains—that frame its southern boundary. To the west, the basin opens toward the Pacific, though the distance is substantial enough that the ocean's influence on the interior climate is moderated, attenuated, felt more in the form of morning fog and evening breezes than in the direct assault of salt and storm that characterizes the California coast to the north. The basin's floor is composed of alluvial sediments deposited over millions of years by the Los Angeles River and its tributaries—the San Gabriel River, the Rio Hondo, the Santa Ana River—spreading their loads across a plain that slopes gently from roughly three hundred feet elevation at the base of the foothills down to sea level at the coast. It is a landscape of gentle gradients, of horizons that seem impossibly distant, of light that arrives sideways and paints everything in shades of gold and amber that have inspired poets and painters and, eventually, the promoters who would sell this light to the world as a commodity as surely as any oil or orange.

The original Los Angeles River followed a course that modern residents would scarcely recognize. Before the Army Corps of Engineers encased it in concrete during the mid-twentieth century—before it became the linear concrete channel that today carries storm water through the heart of the city at speeds and volumes never intended by nature—the river wound through a corridor of riparian woodland that supported an ecosystem of extraordinary abundance. Willows and cottonwoods lined its banks, their roots drinking deep from the water table that lay just feet below the surface. Sycamores, the great California sycamores with their mottled white bark and their canopies spreading fifty feet or more, stood sentinel along the waterway, their autumn leaves turning to gold and falling in drifts that early observers compared to the most beautiful forests of the eastern United States. Cattails and bulrushes grew thick in the marshy areas where the river spread wide in flood season. And the water itself was clean, cold, clear—fed by mountain snowmelt and spring water, running over gravel beds that filtered it to a purity that settlers would later describe with something approaching reverence. Fish swam in its pools: steelhead trout that migrated up from the Pacific, their silver bodies flashing in the sunlight as they navigated the river's gentle rapids; native rainbow trout in the colder upstream reaches; and the slow-water species—largemouth bass, catfish, carp—that thrived in the river's deeper pools and oxbows. Birds filled the canopy by the thousands: red-winged blackbirds in the marshes, great blue herons stalking the shallows, osprey and bald eagle hunting the fish, and in the margins where water met land, the rich assemblages of waterfowl that would draw hunters from across the continent in the decades before the marshes were drained and filled.

This was the landscape that greeted the first human inhabitants of the region—the Tongva, whom the Spanish would later call the Gabrielinos, though that name obscured a complexity and diversity that European categories could not easily accommodate. The Tongva were not a single tribe in the sense that European ethnographers understood the term, but rather a network of clans and lineages, speaking related languages of the Uto-Aztecan family, organized into small, mobile groups that moved with the rhythms of the seasons, the availability of resources, the demands of kinship and trade. Their territory encompassed not just the Los Angeles Basin but extended into the Santa Monica Mountains and along the coast from what is now Santa Monica to Newport Bay, and inland along the rivers to the foot of the mountains. They numbered perhaps three thousand to five thousand individuals at the time of first European contact—a population density that reflected the richness of the land rather than any failure to exploit it fully. The Tongva were sophisticated people with a deep understanding of their environment, a complex social organization, rich ceremonial traditions, and an economic system that integrated hunting, gathering, fishing, and trade across a region of considerable extent.

Their relationship with the Los Angeles River and its floodplain was one of intimate knowledge accumulated over thousands of years. The Tongva knew every pool and riffle, every bend and oxbow, every seasonal variation in water flow and temperature. They knew where the steelhead gathered in autumn, preparing for their upstream migration, and they constructed elaborate fish traps—wickerwork weirs and corrals that channeled the fish into enclosures from which they could be easily harvested—that exploited the fish's own behavioral patterns. They knew which plants grew where, which roots were edible and which toxic, which bark could be used for medicine and which for fiber. They burned portions of the chaparral selectively to encourage the growth of plants that they valued—wild clover, wild onion, basket-making sedge—and to drive game toward waiting hunters. They managed the land with a sophistication that European observers, steeped in assumptions about "primitive" peoples and "untouched" wilderness, failed to recognize or record with any accuracy. The Los Angeles Basin that the Spanish would encounter in the late eighteenth century was not a primeval wilderness but a landscape that had been shaped, maintained, and improved by human intervention over millennia—a landscape that was, in the deepest sense, a human creation, even if the humans who created it would soon be displaced by others who could not read its history.

The Spanish colonial period began in 1769, when an expedition led by Gaspar de Portolá, with the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra and a company of soldiers,