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California's Channel Islands
A History
By Frederic Caire Chiles UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4922-6
CHAPTER 1
California's Channel Islands: An Introduction
THESE ARE PLACES WHERE THE DEEP PAST SEEMS MORE STARKLY PRESENT. LITTLE HERE IS OVERLAID, AS IT IS ELSEWHERE, WITH THE THICK MULCH OF RECENT EVENTS. PHYSICAL REMAINS OF EARLIER AGES LIE JUST BENEATH THE SURFACE, SCARCELY COVERED.
MODERNITY IS ALMOST ABSENT, CUT OFF BY THE [SEA]. Adam Nicolson
Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides
Within the Southern California Bight, the rough arc of coastline between the cities of San Diego and Santa Barbara, the archipelago of the eight Channel Islands of California range in size from one square mile (Santa Barbara Island) to ninety-six square miles (Santa Cruz Island). The northern Channel Islands—San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, and Anacapa—form an east–west chain off the coast of Santa Barbara County. The southern Channel Islands—Santa Catalina, San Clemente, San Nicolas, and Santa Barbara—are more widely dispersed, fringing the southern half of the bight roughly between the cities of Los Angeles and San Diego.
As one leaves the mainland, heading out to sea, each island swims into view, an undefined ridge floating in the haze. In the middle distance, they are usually gold and dark green. The gold is the dried brush and grasses dropping toward the cliffs. The dark green, mostly in the canyons, is the typical chaparral brush of California, sometimes interspersed with oak, fern, or pine. In spring, the brush is a luxuriant green with myriad yellow flowers, but that season is usually brief. Drawing nearer, as the distant Southern California mainland's solid layer of modernity becomes hazy and indistinct, the islands come into focus with their aura of existence before the measurement of time. Gradually they fill one's field of vision with a California before history. These are entryways to a wild California that has all but disappeared from the mainland, with the added appeal of plants and animals that flourish nowhere else on earth, profoundly shaped by the size of each island and its distance from the mainland—from the coastal proximity of Santa Catalina and Anacapa, to the remote wildness of San Miguel, San Nicolas, and San Clemente.
As one reaches five of the six islands where the public is welcome, cliffs often soar forbiddingly above, while at approach level waves crash into vertical rock bases, hissing and booming in sea caves. Shearwaters skim the surface and the cries of seals, sea lions, gulls, and other seabirds create a cacophony of sound far removed from the machine hum of daily life to which we are accustomed. Here ruggedly dressed visitors shoulder their packs and step through a dramatic time portal. Signs of human habitation are perhaps reduced to a basic dock, with flights of iron stairs ascending a cliff above, or a sturdy wharf leading to a road that disappears around a bend into a valley hidden from view. Santa Catalina differs. Avalon, its main port, resembles a Mediterranean seaside village in France or Italy or perhaps a coastal California town from the 1940s or 1950s. With a tidy yacht basin, it is anchored at one end by a domed casino and at the other by well-kept, steeply climbing streets. Here thousands of visitors stream off the hourly ferries, wearing every type of outfit from flimsy resort wear to sturdy backcountry hiking gear.
In the interior of the islands, visitors discover a California seemingly frozen in time. Minimal human habitation intrudes. California as it appeared in pre-contact days is the visible reality, with distinctive flora and fauna. The work of scientists from Charles Darwin and his successors of the present day reminds us that islands such as these are "unique evolutionary laboratories." They are high-resolution demonstrations of the evolutionary forces that shaped the plants and animals that we find on them today.
The Southern California maritime boundary differs from a typical continental shelf in that it encompasses large depressions as deep as almost seven thousand feet below sea level and island peaks as high as almost twenty-five hundred feet above the sea. The geological evidence suggests that coastal and offshore Southern California changed from a more typical shelf-slope condition to one of basins and ridges in the cataclysms beginning twenty-five to thirty million years ago. Converging tectonic plates, shearing and tearing each other, were accompanied by fiery volcanoes in an age that lasted until about ten million years ago.
It was at this time that Southern California emerged as a distinctive part of the North American land mass. Today's California Channel Islands came to be formed in embryo, changing their sizes and shapes as this part of the planet went through ages of fire and ice. The islands probably became distinct from the continental land mass in the Pleistocene Ice Age, which began about 2.6 million years ago and was characterized by a complex mixture of plate tectonics, volcanism, and the raising and lowering of sea levels.
The Channel Islands are continental islands, outliers of the western shelf of the North American continent. It seems likely that at the end of the last great ice age—about twelve thousand years ago—the four northern islands, San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, and Anacapa, were connected, forming one large island that geologists call Santarosae. It was cut off from the mainland by a narrow but steep marine canyon. Pleistocene mammals on this large island included mammoths, which are said to have swum the narrow channel and evolved into a dwarf form. Other evolutionary examples were giant deer mice and two species of flightless geese.
With the melting of glaciers, the sea level rose about 150 feet, dividing the large Santarosae into the four individual northern Channel Islands approximately nine thousand years ago. It is only in very recent geologic time—about four thousand years ago—that the islands reached their present size, although we can trace the combination of uplift and changing sea levels over the past two million years from the characteristic wave-cut marine terraces on some of the islands, most notably Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, San Nicolas, and San Clemente. On San Clemente as many as nineteen terraces are exposed above sea level, with another two below.
The topography of the northern Channel Islands can be described as the exposed top of a single, dissected mountain range. The island ridge is lower at either end (San Miguel and Anacapa) and highest in the center (western Santa Cruz and eastern Santa Rosa). The straits between the islands are described as broad transverse valleys that were exposed when lower sea levels allowed the islands to all be connected. Higher seas resulting from melting ice during warm interglacial periods, combined with local uplifting of the earth's crust, may have alternately submerged and exposed the islands at various times, except for the highest parts of Santa Cruz. The stepped series of marine terraces suggest that the largest part of their land mass was covered by water from time to time.
The sea around the islands today, the waters of the Southern California Bight, show another complex pattern. The cool California Current heading down the coast is altered by the bight, and an eddy system is developed in which the water swings inward toward the coast in the area of San Diego, with a surface flow up the coast forming the California Countercurrent. This countercurrent creates a transitional zone in which surface water combines with deep water welling up from below three hundred feet. This flow is blocked by the northern Channel Islands and diverted westward to merge with the California Current west of San Miguel Island. This system provides an important source of cold water and nutrients that rise up from the deep ocean, creating a rich oceanic ecosystem. The mixing of temperatures and salinity levels brings together northern- and southern-ranging organisms, a diverse array of fish, plants, birds, and marine mammals, to form an area hugely rich in biodiversity. More so than for other island chains, there is a justifiable claim that the sea makes these islands what they are. It not only defines them, it moderates their climates and creates conditions favoring the survival of species of plant life not seen on the mainland in millennia.
This eight-island realm is in the intertidal or littoral zone, where the land and sea overlap. In a constant demonstration of the edge effect, it contains characteristics of both terrestrial and oceanic habitats, giving rise to the richest zone on earth in terms of organism diversity. This is most obvious in the luxuriant kelp beds and tidal zones where a large variety of mollusks, sea mammals, fish species, and seabirds are prevalent. In general, if it were not for the islands of California, where nesting birds can find refuge from terrestrial predators, seabirds would be largely absent from the California coast. The avian and marine life of the California coast is rich and varied, and the islands represent relatively unspoiled coastal havens crucial to the continuation of that biological diversity.
While they share many characteristics, the islands are also set apart by differences. The northern islands are less arid, closer to shore, and closer to each other than their southern counterparts. They are also generally larger and higher in elevation. There is a trend toward greater ecological diversity and increased numbers of species on these larger wetter islands. The absence of terrestrial mammals such as coyotes, bears, raccoons, rabbits, and gophers, makes it highly unlikely that the islands were part of the mainland after the emergence of these creatures there, though other life forms did make the journey across the channel, probably by flotation, rafting, flying, and intentional or accidental transport.
The flora of the northern islands is characterized by a high proportion of species found on the mainland north of Point Conception. They hark back to prehistoric ice ages when northern species invaded Southern California during glacial episodes and then retreated during warmer times. Their remnants continued to survive, largely due to the cooling influence of the California Current, and some of the survivors of the island adaptation competition have evolved into endemics, distinct plant or animal forms restricted in their distribution to a particular insular locality.
The key factor behind the large number of endemics on the islands is isolation. The populations of several islands, especially those in the northern group, appear to be more closely related to populations found on the mainland from Point Conception north than to those along the drier, adjacent coast of Southern California. Ratifying island biogeography theory, the southern Channel Islands—Santa Barbara, San Nicolas, Santa Catalina, and San Clemente—support proportionally more endemics than do the northern ones, life forms that have grown and interacted in isolation—immigrants that continue to evolve after their arrival, to survive on their new island home. The natural selection within the limited island gene pool enhances adaptations that are valuable for survival in an island environment. The housecat-sized Channel Islands fox, a dwarf form of the mainland gray fox, is found on all the Channel Islands except for the two smallest, Anacapa and Santa Barbara. Its coloring and body proportions are similar to the mainland fox, but its overall size is much slighter. Another mammal that has evolved to suit island life is the island spotted skunk, found on both Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa. These creatures have a larger head and body than those on the mainland, but a shorter tail and fewer white markings. Larger than its mainland relative, the island deer mouse is the only terrestrial mammal common to all eight islands, though each island has its own distinctive subspecies. Birds too have developed on the islands as species and subspecies. The most distinctive is the Santa Cruz Island jay, a third larger than its mainland counterpart and considerably brighter blue in color. In all, there are thirteen birds that have evolved into island endemics.
The islands' human prehistory, stretching back to the earliest human life on the continent, is a tapestry of intersecting currents and themes: climate change, invention and adaptation to that change, and commerce and alteration of the insular environments by the people who called these islands their home for thousands of years. In the post-contact era, the last 450 years or so, the islands' recorded histories reflect in many ways the strong personalities and vision of the Europeans and European Americans who stepped forward and claimed all or part of them. Often with the best of intentions, they engaged in activities that over decades altered the island ecosystems even more dramatically than the actions of previous inhabitants over many millennia.
The post-contact era saw the decimation of the Native human population through disruption of local economies, introduced disease, and violence. This was related to the virtual elimination of the otter, the northern fur seal and the northern elephant seal early in the nineteenth century through overhunting. The removal of the Chumash Indians and their southern cousins to mainland missions opened the way on some of the islands for Mexican government land grants, and, later, U.S. government ownership of the others. With the rationale of nineteenth-century land husbandry and a focus on profitability, the agriculturalists who followed the Chumash people provided a series of examples of the magnified effect of species introduction into a circumscribed insular environment. Uncertain rainfall meant that populations of sheep and cattle swung between good years, when their numbers were allowed to soar, and drought years, when they starved or were killed for tallow, fleeces, and hides. A proportion of the goats, pigs, and sheep deposited on most of the islands soon reverted to a wild state and reproduced rapidly, often extirpating many plant species and certainly altering almost all plant communities. Before the modern era of "scientific range management," the numbers of introduced animals often exceeded the carrying capacity of the islands. A lack of predators meant that they were allowed to seriously damage fragile plant communities that had existed for thousands of years isolated from grazing pressure. It was not until the twentieth century on Santa Cruz Island and Santa Rosa Island in particular that conservative ranch management principles were put in place.
The prehistory of the Native peoples and the documented history of the last four centuries form two strands, and taken together they span at least thirteen thousand years, if not more. The habitation of the Channel Islands can be divided into four main phases. The first was the prehistoric phase, lasting perhaps thirteen millennia, overlapping with the era of Spanish exploration, which ended when the islands were largely depopulated, either by voluntary or involuntary removal of the Native populations to the mainland or by the ravages of diseases to which the Indians had no immunity. The last known Indigenous resident on any Channel Island was the so-called Lone Woman of San Nicolas, who was taken to Santa Barbara in 1853. Her story is taken up in chapter 8.
The first recorded contact between local Indigenous populations and Europeans was in the great age of Spanish exploration, in 1542, when two ships, San Salvador and La Victoria, traveled among the islands under the command of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo. In the reports of the expedition, written years afterward, the northern islands of the group were referred to as the Islas San Lucas. At the end of the century, in 1595, Sebastián Rodríguez Cermeño visited some of the islands, although it is unclear which ones. It is thought that they were Santa Rosa, San Miguel, and Santa Catalina. Three years later the Manila galleon San Pedro was wrecked on Santa Catalina Island and the ship's company was stranded there for several months. In 1602 Sebastían Vizcaíno explored the west coast of North America, visiting several of the islands and later publishing extensive notes. This was the last recorded voyage in the initial burst of Spanish exploration. Thereafter, the imperial Spanish found themselves distracted by the complexities of administering and defending the richest and most complicated empire of the age.
It would be 167 years before the discovery routes of Cabrillo, Cermeño, and Vizcaíno were again followed. In 1769, with the Spanish monarchy now troubled by Russian and British threats to its empire's vulnerable Pacific coast, Gaspar de Portolà was dispatched to mount a land and sea expedition. The expedition's land-based contingent founded Mission San Diego de Alcala that year, and the maritime element of the expedition visited several of the Channel Islands, notably Santa Cruz and San Clemente. As if to validate Spain's fears, the maps that finalized the names of the eight islands off the Southern California coast resulted from the voyage of George Vancouver, flying the British flag in 1793.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from California's Channel Islands by Frederic Caire Chiles. Copyright © 2015 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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