USA > California > Los Angeles County > Pasadena > History of Pasadena, comprising an account of the native Indian, the early Spanish, the Mexican, the American, the colony, and the incorporated city, occupancies of the Rancho San Pasqual, and its adjacent mountains, canyons, waterfalls and other objects of interest: being a complete and comprehensive histo-cyclopedia of all matters pertaining to this region > Part 66
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THIS CALENDAR IS TO BE READ FROM THE BOTTOM UPWARD.
AGE OF ANGELS.
See Psalms 8:5 Luke 20:36 Mark 12:25 1 Cor. 15:44 Heb.2:2 to 9 Rev.22:8,9
HISTORIC PERIOD.
Spiritual Man of
Megalithic Man' the BIBLE.
Hunter Tribes.
Age of MAN.
Recent.
MYTHIC PERIOD.
Moundbuilders.
Cave Man.
-
AGE OF
Quaternary.
Champlain Epoch.
500
GLACIAL EPOCH.
Pliocene.
MAMMALS.
TERTIARY.
Miocene.
8,000
Eocene.
AGE OF
Aquates-Quadrupes ---
Marsupials.
JURASSIC.
800 to 1,000
TRIASSIC.
3,000 to 5,000
PERMIAN.
AGE OF
CARBONIFEROUS
Coal Measures.
.6,000 to 14,570
Sub-Carboniferous.
Catskill.
Chemung.
Devonian.
Hamilton.
9,050 to 14,400
Corniferous.
AGE
Upper Silurian.
Salina.
Niagara.
Trenton.
IN VERTEBRATES
Lower Silurian.
Canadian.
12,000to 15,000
AGE OF ZOOLITHS
Huronlan.
10,000to 20,000
"This Age alone was probably longer In dura- tion than all subsequent geological time."-PROF. LECONTE.
Eozoon Rocks ..
Laurentian.
80,000
Primordial Vegetation
Graphite Beds.
Metamorphic Granites.
Unstrati- fed.
AZOIC AGE.
Igneous
350,000,000 years in cooling down to 200° F. at the sur- face [PROF. HELMHOLTZ], & temperature at which very low forms Di vegetation can exist.
Depth un known.
Copyright 1879. . H. A. Real
"The existence of Pliocene man in Tuscany is, then. in :ny opinion. an acquired smentitic fact."; ~ See Appietoos' Internasional Sciensite Series, Vol. XXVII, p. 151. "The Miocene man of La Beauce already knew the nee of tire, and worked flint." - Th. p. 243. See also. Prof Winchell's "Pre-Adamaite:," pp. 426-7-8. "The human race in America is shown to be at least of an ancient a date as that of boe Europe Plincent."-Prof. J. D. Whitney. Similar views are held by Profs. Letdy, Marsh, Cops, Morse, Wyman, and other scientists of bighent Tepute
. No Life .--- EoZOIC TIME ---- PALEOZOIC TIME .--- MESOZOIC TIME .- - CENOZOIC TIME -- PSYCHOZOIC TIME .... OF
Bipes-Alares.
Birds.
CRETACEOUS.
9,000
REPTILES.
AMPHIBIANS.
AGE OF FISHES.
Oriskany
Helderberg.
6,000 $0 10,000
Cambrian.
Rocks.
FIRE CRUST.
* Paleolithic Man.
Terrace Epoch.
Feet in thick ness of the geological groups of rock form- ations.
Rude Agricul- ture.
542
HISTORY OF PASADENA. 1
The matter of geological age is determined by the fossils found in these coast mountains, as compared with those of other mountains or plains that belong to lower or earlier geological ages. Official observers have reported such finds in kindred mountain sections both westward and eastward ; and I have myself gathered specimens from Shell Rock creek, near Goleta in Santa Barbara county. Arthur B. Stevens of Pasadena, has gathered fossil shells from his father's plow-land at Chatsworth Park, twenty-five or thirty miles northwest from Pasadena. Prof. McClatchie of Throop Polytechnic Institute has found fossil shells in the Puente hills ; and Hon. Delos Arnold of Pasadena, during the winter of 1880-81, first discovered fossil fish in the chalklike hills about four miles south of the city. He has also gathered fossil shells of over two hundred extinct species of mollusks from the rocks of Deadman's Island and other points about San Pedro Bay, while there are not to exceed seventy-five species now living in the same vicinity .* Some of the species that are found here in the fossil state only, are found still living in the iceberg waters of Alaska, amid the rigors of a lingering glacial period. And this fact suggests a time when the climate of Los Angeles county was perhaps as frosty and frigid as that of Alaska is now. Such are the far-reaching lessons of geology."
Although no fossils have yet been found, distinctly within Pasadena- land, the reader will, nevertheless, wish to know what remains of extinct animals have been found in other sections, of same species as roamed here during the same geological periods. [See Prof. Holder's "Ancient Animals," etc., Chapter 31.] In the annual address of the President of the Los Angeles County Historical Society, 1888-89, he says :
"We have verified and recorded the discovery of a tusk of large pro- portions, the fragment found being six feet long and six inches in diameter, in a well at a depth of thirty feet, some twenty miles east of this city ; also of the skeleton of a whale on the summit of the Santa Monica mountains."
The Lewis "History Los Angeles County," 1889, says : " In asphaltum or tar springs west of Los Angeles [nine miles] a tooth of the saber-toothed tiger was found." And remains of the mastodon have been found at Tejunga, Los Angeles, Puente, and San Juan-by-the-Sea, at depths varying from five to twenty feet below the surface of the ground.
In Prof. Whitney's "Geology of California : Vol. I," there are many instances given of remains of extinct animals being found which existed in California at the same time with the primitive Man, whose remains were found and amply verified, under the great lava capping of Table Mountain. I hold that the primitive race of Man whose stone implements were found
*When Prof. E. T. Pierce, who served five years as principal of the schools of Pasadena, was princi- pal of the State Normal School at Chico, the Chico Daily Enterprise of Nov. 21, 1891, contained this item : "This morning Principal Pierce received the following letter from Senator Delos Arnold of Pasadena : ' I have this day shipped to your institution two boxes of specimens. One box conta ning about eighty species and varieties of Quaternary fossils ( Post pliocene), from San Pedro. They have all been iden- tified. and I believe are nearly correct in their names. I thought this collection of recent fossils, start- ing as it does, at the top of the great and wonderful geological column, twenty miles or more in height, would stimulate the inquirer to dig down towards its base, quite as lunch as one starting from the base and necessitating working up.'" About Nov. 10 the same year Mr. Arnold presented the Throop Poly- technic Institute with 150 varieties of quaternary and pliocene fossils found in Los Angeles county. And this was a duplicate of a similar collection which he had sent to the National Museum [Smithsonian Institute] at Washington. [See "Conchology Collection," page 212.]
543
DIVISION EIGHT-SCIENCE.
imbedded at Reservoir Hill, Pasadena, in February, 1874, was cotemporary in geological age with the " Man" of Table Mountain, and hence had the same animals as co-occupants of the land ; and therefore I give here some of Prof. Whitney's instances, as pertinent to this History :
Page 102 : Bones of mastodon and horse found in post-pliocene beds (gravel and boulders of gray sandstone) near Benicia on the Bay of San Francisco.
Page 232 : Bones of mastodon and elephant found in Tertiary and post- Tertiary beds in Tuolumne county. At Gold Springs in that county, bones of mastodon, elephant and horse found in great abundance.
Page 251 : Under lava flow in same county, bones of rhinoceros, an extinct species of hippopotamus, extinct species of horse, extinct species of camel resembling Megalomeryx (Leidy), and remains of Man were found.
Page 252 : Again in same county (post-pliocene beds) along with mas- todon, etc., were found bones of tapir and bison, and two species of horse --- one of these being identical with the living mustang or Indian pony. Remains of mastodon and elephant constantly spoken of as being very abundant ; and rude stone implements of Man found in same formations.
KINDS OF ROCKS.
The rocks of these Pasadena mountains present nearly every variety of the granitic series ; but no mass or stratum of any of the limestones, sand- stones, shales, or carboniferous formation. In Rubio canyon there is a bed of peculiar silverglint rock which has the soap-like feel of steatite, and I have classed it as micaceous talc- a hydro-mica-schist formation. The layers of different kinds of granitic rocks are somewhat defined, and some approach to systemic stratification can be traced. I have identified massive bodies of porphyry, apparently consisting of a mass mixture of feldspar, hornblende, and augite or pyroxene, with disseminated crystals of white feld- spar, and called by miners simply " black spar." Of this structure is the dark greenish rock wall on the east side of Rubio canyon, where the Pavilion platform rests on the abrupt mountain slope. Farther up this canyon there are layers of micaceous granite, quite friable, and steadily de- composing. Then a layer of syenite, which merges into a stratum of gneiss at the Hanging Cliffs. And beyond that again are lofty, towering masses comprising thousands of feet of syenite in various degrees of hardness, of texture, and of color-this being that form of granite which is composed of quartz and feldspar, combined with hornblende instead of mica : and these rocks are often interjected with seams, dykes or veins of quartz, or quartz and feldspar in fused or metamorphic combination. Above this again lies a bed some hundreds of feet in thickness, of a brown, ferruginous gneissic rock, with marked schistose peculiarities, (also called quartzite) and coming the nearest to a real sandstone of any massive body of rock that I found ; but it seems to be both brecciable and solutive, and its mass readily decom- poses or fractuates on exposure to air and moisture ; hence it is of no value
544
HISTORY OF PASADENA.
as a building stone. This brown sandstone layer is seen plainly imbedded around the walls of Echo ampitheater, next below the layer of white feld- spar mottled syenite rocks which form the north rim or crest at summit of the ampitheater. And this marked contrast between the white syenite rocks and the brown gneissic layer is traceable all through these mountains. There are on Mount Wilson and Mount Lowe, and some other points, a lim- itless supply of beautiful, fine-grained, bluish syenite- a kind of granite most excellent for building stone, alike as to pressure resistance, weather resistance, good working quality, and susceptibility of a fine polish.
On Mount Lowe, and on the south-easterly facings of Mount Mark- ham and San Gabriel Peak there are inexhaustible beds of decomposed feld- spar or kaolin, from which the common table dishes or China ware of com- merce are manufactured : but all the specimens that I found showed such admixture of iron oxide or other impurities as to vitiate their commercial value. Some beds of a purer quality may possibly be discovered yet.
HOW THESE MOUNTAINS WERE MADE.
Some mountains are made by volcanic upheaval and outpour ; some by anticlinal or roof-like uplift of their whole series of stratified rocks ; some by a great cataclysmal fracture and "fault," whereby the rocks on one side of the fracture are tilted up, and the other side depressed or pushed under, but the stratifications remaining more less intact ; and some are formed by the crushing and mashing together of the rocks, which results from con- traction of the earth's crust in its steady process of cooling. Our Pasadena mountains partake of the last two methods. The mashing and crushing process, or its results, are specially illustrated at several points ; but per- haps more plain to be seen in Granite Cut, on the Great Incline Cable Rail- road up Echo Mountain, than elsewhere. I examined this point particularly on August 5, 1893; and from field notes made at the time I quote this memorandum :
" Found some ferro-micaceous sand rock and gneiss, frequently inter- jected with dykes, seams, or pockets of pellucid quartz, white and pinkish feldspar, and laminated mica ; also seams of metamorphic trap rock : and numerous fractures infiltrated with breccia and sandwash from above. Much of the formation is gneiss or gneissoid schist, passing into pulveru- lent sand rock -the nearly completed disintegration of what miners and water-tunnelers call "rotten granite." And there are gneiss laminations, micaceous seams, and porphyritic dykes lying at all degrees of inclination and all angles of intersection. The rock colors here are gray, brown, drab, streaked, speckled, green, white, pinkish, tawney, slate, yellow. These colors appear mostly in separate bodies, or in distinct seams, veins, or dykes; but sometimes they all appear in a confused mass within a few square yards of space.
This mixed medley of formations is characteristic of the compression or crushing process of mountain making. And the same process or method is further illustrated and proven by the fact that the layers of different
545
DIVISION EIGHT -SCIENCE.
kinds of rock all through these mountains are not solid, but all checked and cracked and seamed and fractured at every possible angle, and in every size of blocks, from the fine breccia to the gigantic boulder. This condition, existing as it does here deep in the rock beds, is due in part also to rapid cooling after uplift, and to earthquake vibrations in connection with the enormous compression. And this cracked or seamed condition explains in part why these mountains form such a wonderful absorbent and store-house for the water of the winter rains and snows, holding it like a mighty sponge, and giving it out gradually during the dry season, by percolation down to the springs, ooze places and tunnels in the innumerable canyons of the range, or the lands below. It is furthermore the reason why large storage dams cannot be used successfully here, as the water will seep away through the cracks and crevices and fine seams in the rocks-and no large artificial water storage can be relied on unless the bottom and sides of dam or reservoir are solidly cemented.
The fracture and "fault " process of contiguous uplift and depression is illustrated by the fact that all along the south face of these mountains the layers of rock present a broken-off edge, and have a dip to the north, vary- ing from 25 degrees of inclination up to a complete perpendicular. On the other hand, the Pasadena geological basin is, in my opinion, depressed toward the mountains, but having a south rim or lip along the line of the South Pasadena bluff, the Raymond hill, Oak Knoll, Col. Mayberry's bluff, the bluff north of the old B. D. Wilson ranch house, etc. From these and many other correlated facts, I conclude that the line of peripheral shrink- age-pressure was from the ocean side, with a line of resistance on the north caused by the previous uplift of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and of the great plateaus which now form the Mohave desert at an altitude higher than our Pasadena mountain tops. These older elevations had become a rigid continental mass, immovable, and the cretaceous or pre-tertiary ocean washed their foot-hills and beachy slopes. But the great round earth's peri- pheral shrinkage from cooling continued to produce outer wrinkles analogous to what we observe in a shriveling apple, and the California coast range be- gan to bulge up out of the water by sheer necessity of crush-force displace- ment, till at last there was a mighty break, a crash, a slip, whereby Mount Wilson, Echo Mountain, and the rest, reared their heads up backward toward the north, with a fracture face looking south, while the layers of rock south of the line of fracture went under, making a depression or basin more than a thousand feet deep -yet with another fracture line and lesser uplift at Raymond Hill and its east and west range of co-ordinate bluffs. This great geological gulf extended from the Arroyo Seco eastward in- definitely ; but the Pasadena portion of it probably had an eastern barrier reef or ridge on the east side of the present outwash of Eaton canyon, and the basin has been entirely filled up with boulders, breccia, sand, gravel, soil and vegetable debris from the mountains-of course, filling highest near the foot of the mountains. And I think there was a lateral moraine or crowded up wall of boulders on the line of the Marengo Avenue ridge, from about where the Santa Fe railroad crosses it, down in almost a straight line southward to the adobe flat where the Raymond station is located. And a similar moraine in part formed the Orange Grove Avenue ridge. None of this work was done suddenly, except in spots ; it was rather the slow, steady process of unreckoned ages of time-for the pendulum of the geological
35
546
HISTORY OF PASADENA.
clock beats centuries for seconds-and the uplift may not have averaged more than one inch in a hundred years. The good book says, "With God a thousand years are as one day ;" and here we discern the polytechnics of his world-making work .*
Earthquakes, and especially the California " tremblers," have an im- portant place in the geological mechanism by which the Pasadena moun- tains were made. I presume all of you have at some time in your life heard the cracking sound of timbers or boards in a framed house when they were in process of contracting by cold during a frosty night. Or you have heard the snapping and cracking sound of a stove or stovepipe when cooling off. Well, that was a little earthquake - a phenomenon on a small scale precisely similar in principle to the earth tremblings which occur in California occa- sionally and are overdignified by the terrifying name of earthquake. The contractile pressure of the earth's crust in its cooling process has somewhere caused a crack, a fracture - and the earthquake is simply the jar produced by that tension click of the earth's rocky 'encasement-the fracture being generally, but not always, beneath the ocean or near a junction of land and sea. The extent of the earthquake, and its effects on land and sea in any given case, will of course depend upon the amount of rock displacement caused at the time ; sometimes it is so little -perhaps only a hair's breadth -that there is only a faint sense of trembling ; while at other times there will be one or more sharp shocks, and sometimes great and destructive com- motion in the ocean's waters, as-occurred on the coast of South America a few years ago. And every time one of these shocks occurs it is a stroke of God's great hammer forging another link in the mighty mountain chain around the earth.t
Our Pasadena mountain rocks were formed in layers beneath the ocean, from the disintegration and pulping of other and older rocks during an age when the ocean extended to the Sierra Nevada mountains and had the great Mohave desert for its sandy floor. Our rocks were formed by the joint action of heat and water, or in a bath of superheated steam under great pressure-thus giving them sometimes the appearance of aqueous and sometimes igneous rocks, but always marked as metamorphic rocks. It was the intensity of compression that gave the heat, and not the fire of combustion as in volcanic and primitive rocks ; and this pressure heat was continued through centuries upon centuries of time. Hence these are jellied rocks-cooked rocks-or metamorphosed by the prolonged intense moist heat into a composite magma, in quality and relation of parts con- siderably different from their original condition when deposited as sediment on the ocean floor -- and further changed in their crystallizing during the process of cooling, according as it went on slowly or rapidly in the different layers, either before or after their terrestrial uplift. Therefore all fossils, if they ever contained any, have been cooked into vapor and diffused undis- tinguishably through the common mass. Thus, too, the gold that is found was vaporized from older rocks below, and in part from the sea water itself,
*" The latter part of the Tertiary period has been the great mountain-building epoch in the earth's history. The principal part of the elevation of the Andes and the Rocky Mountains has taken place since the middle of the Tertiary period. * * * A considerable portion of this elevation of the chiefest mountain systems of the world occurred in what would be called post-Tertiary time-that is, has been coincident with a portion of the Glacial period."-" Man and the Glacial Period," p. 328 : International Scientific Series No. 69 ; 1892.
t" The frequent earthquakes on the Pacific coast make it not at all improbable that the process of elevation is still going on."-Prof. G. F. Wright, on " Prehistoric Man on the Pacific Coast," in Atlantic Monthly, April, 1891.
547
DIVISION EIGHT -SCIENCE.
and diffused through the mass of quartz and the mass of crude porphyry [" porphyritic dump" formation], both of which now hold it in molecular com- bination -with the result that it is not found as free gold, but only as flour gold, or verily "gold-dust," in small quantity after the ore has been ground to finest powder and the precious metal successfully separated.
THE GOLD VEIN.
There is a vein of auriferous quartz extending easterly and westerly along the wall of the front range of these mountains, with a dip northward at an angle of 45 degrees, or more. In 1886 an outcrop of this vein was found on Mount Wilson ; there was a flurry of excitement over it for a few weeks, and a number of claims were staked ; a little gold was found but not enough to pay for working, and the claims were abandoned .*
An outcrop of the same vein occurs in the west wall of Pine canyon, . which lies between Eaton and Rubio canyons ; and the "Carrie Mine " was there being developed by its owners, E. V. Carson and Jesse Dickey, when I visited it September 30, and again December 1, 1893. Their first tunnel starts into the face of. the mountain some 50 or 60 feet below the mineral outcrop and extends inward 100 feet on a level, running due north. At about 50 feet from the entrance it passes through the fissure vein, and at the inner end it strikes another vein less rich than the first, though still deemed worth working -but here a caving down occurred, and work at that point had to be stopped for the present. At the junction with the first vein side- drifts or tunnels were worked both eastward and westward, the west one dipping downward and yielding "pay rock" of the kinds called in miners' parlance, "oxide," "sulphide," "honey-comb," and "sugar quartz." Be- sides the "Carrie" mine, the same parties had staked the "Pine Tree" mine, adjoining it on the east ; the "Edith " mine on the west ; the "Sum- mit," a deposit of lead carbonate gold-bearing rock near the top of this mineral ridge; and the "Surprise," a twelve-inch vein of gold-bearing feroxide quartz several hundred feet lower down, and in the east wall of Pine canyon, all the others being in the west wall. The following assays were made and duly certified by Wade & Wade, assayers, of Los Angeles :
GOLD. SILVER.
July 26, 1893-Ore from the "Carrie " mine, per ton, $ 89.50 $ 3.85 66
249.07 12.28
Aug. 12,
135.18 4.97
July 13, 1893-Ore from the "Edith " mine, 75.45 1.92
Besides these results from professional assayers, Mr. Dickey had made numerous tests for his own satisfaction, by the method which miners call "horning out"-that is, reducing the ore to a fine powder in an iron mortar, then separating the gold by using a horn spoon for a washer, and weighing it in delicate pocket scales that tip the beam even to grains and pennyweights, or "the small dust in the balance."
The "Carrie," the "Edith," and the "Pine Tree" mines lie about 3,000 feet above sea level.
* " Parties down from Wilson's Peak today report about 300 men there prospecting now, and that there are 38 men at work on the new trail."-Pasadena Union. August 27, 1886.
The same paper of September 3, speaking of W. H. Korstian and Frank Hearn of Pasadena, said: " After spending a week in diligent testing of their claim, they have just returned laden with some very rich specimens. The official assay makes a showing of $369 per ton of pure metal." The Los Angeles Herald at same time reported: "There is gold in the giavel of the Santa Anita, Forsyth [Las Flores ], San Gabriel and Precipicio [Eaton] canyons, which approach each other very near in the mountains. Various ledges between these have been sampled and assayed, and yield gold from $50 to $300 per ton."-Los Angeles Herald, September- , 1886.
548
HISTORY OF PASADENA.
June 22, 1894, a corporation was formed called the "Loris Gold Min- ing Company," to operate these Pine Canyon mines under a patent process for reducing the ores and extracting the precious metal in some quicker and cheaper way than by the old stamp-mill process. The inventor of this patent was Geo. W. McGee of Chicago; and of the new company, the Star said :
"It is formed with Messrs. Ed. Kennedy, M. McCament, J. V. and Eugene Carson, J. H. Dickey (all of this city), A. W. Myers of Ishpeming, Mich .; Newell W. Bloss of New York City, and Geo. W. McGee of Chicago, as incorporators. All these gentlemen except Mr. McGee, are now here and have thoroughly examined the property in Pine canyon which they have bought for the purpose above set forth. They will order mill machinery and engine at once, and prosecute the development of the mines and the milling of the ore vigorously, having plenty of capital at their command."
The company was named "Loris," from Mr. Kennedy's little daughter, about six years' old, he being the largest stockholder, and was organized by electing Ed. Kennedy, president; N. W. Bloss, vice-president ; J. O. McCam- ent, secretary, and San Gabriel Valley Bank, treasurer. A good pack trail was made from the mines down to the wagon road ; a band of burros se- cured; a mill erected, with ample ore-deck at top; machinery put in; a forty- horse-power oil-burning steam engine set in place to drive the mill; and M. G. Burns, a miner of twelve years' experience in the Black Hills, engaged to superintend the works. The capital by this time invested was said to be about $12,000.
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