Stretching 22 miles long and 8 miles wide, Catalina Island has fascinated early Californian Indians, Spanish conquistadors, movie stars, tourists, artists, hikers, yachtsmen, fishermen, scuba divers and honeymooners.
Even a herd of around 200 American buffalo that descended from 14 turned loose after a movie shoot in 1924 are happy there — keeping company with eagles, foxes, antelope, deer and an assortment of other critters.
The surrounding sea is home to swaying kelp beds teeming with life.
Scholars are uncertain about how long humans have lived there, but generally agree the first were Gabrielino-Tongva Indians from villages along the Southern California coastline and as far inland as Palm Springs.
Anthropologists believe there are about 2,000 middens on Catalina that were trash dumps for the early Indians. Many have been excavated, the artifacts giving light to life on the island in ancient times.
The Tongva considered courage as the noblest quality of character. Cowardice was a disgrace, and proving their courage, men would allow themselves to be smothered with red ants.
They were also excellent basket makers and soapstone carvers — believing in a supreme being who brings order to a chaotic world.
In 1742, Spanish-Portuguese conquistador Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo aboard his flagship San Salvador, accompanied by two other ships — La Victoria and San Miguel — landed at San Miguel Island off the coast of Santa Barbara to spend the winter.
The Tongva living there no doubt believed chaos had indeed arrived — and attacked them.
While trying to help his men, Cabrillo stumbled on a jagged rock and shattered his shin bone. It soon became infected and turned to gangrene. He died on Jan. 3, 1543, and his body was buried somewhere on Catalina Island, 120 miles southeast.
Historians still debate what nationality Cabrillo really was. Many believe he was Portuguese and several towns in Portugal claim to be his birthplace — though he sailed for the Spanish Crown. Others however say he was born in Spain.
Americans call him the founder of California when he claimed the massive region for Spain.
Cabrillo was not a good guy.
“In the 1530s, Cabrillo made his fortune in gold mining,” according to a report in A&E Television’s Biography. “He benefited greatly from the encomienda system, an economic practice where Indigenous inhabitants of specific areas of land were highly subjugated and expected to pay tribute to Spanish authorities.
“Cabrillo broke up Indigenous families by sending the men to work in the mines and turning over the women and girls to his soldiers and sailors.”
Bartolome Ferrer took over command of the fleet after Cabrillo’s death, but the Spanish failed to take advantage of Cabrillo’s claim for the next 226 years.
On St. Catherine’s Day eve, 33 years after Cabrillo, another Spanish explorer — Sabastian Vizcaino — arrived at Catalina Island and named it Santa Catalina, in honor of Saint Catherine.
It wasn’t until 1769 that the Spaniards returned, bringing missionaries and armed soldiers to start developing the land Cabrillo claimed. They called it Californio.
One of the missionaries was Father Junipero Serra — founder of California’s 21 Catholic missions on El Camino Real from San Diego to San Francisco.
The next exciting event on Catalina happened in the 1830s when a man named George C. Yount claimed he found a ledge of gold-laced quartz at low tide at a secret location. A chunk of that “find” accidentally got lost overboard — and never found.
Some say the quartz ledge may be at the island’s west end — maybe Arrow Point — but it’s still a mystery.
Some gold has been found elsewhere on the island, but more ore with silver, lead and zinc — like in Idaho’s Silver Valley.
The island was also a haven for smugglers and otter hunters. Then cattle were imported, and ranching became a big part of life on the island.
In 1846, Californio’s Mexican Governor Pio Pico (his name now on a major east-west street in Los Angeles) awarded the entire island to Thomas Robbins as a land grant.
The ownership changed several times after that, but it was William Wrigley Jr. who made the island world-famous with financing from the chewing gum company he founded in Chicago in 1891.
He came to Chicago from Philadelphia when he was 29 years old and had only $32 in his pocket.
He started the Wrigley Scouring Soap company, offering premiums such as baking powder to buyers. Later his company switched to selling baking powder, using chewing gum as a premium — two packages of gum for every can of baking powder purchased.
Chewing gum soon became more popular than baking soda, so Wrigley jumped into the chewing gum business. He died in 1932, but the Wrigley family continued to run the company until 2006. Now it’s Mars Incorporated, the biggest chewing gum company in the world.
William Wrigley Jr.’s success made it possible for him to buy Catalina Island in 1919 and immediately began developing it as a resort island.
By then, he was also majority owner of the Chicago Cubs baseball team, so he built a spring training camp for them at Avalon, starting in 1921 — which they used for 30 years, except during World War II.
He’d watch them practice from the bay window of the mansion he built on the hill overlooking Avalon Harbor. Today, the home is a ritzy B-and-B.
Early as the 1920s, visitors also came to the island by air. One of the earliest to offer airline service was Western Air Express that later became Western Airlines (now part of Delta Airlines). Flying Loening C2H and Sikorsky S-38A seaplanes, they would taxi up and down concrete ramps at Avalon, then located between the Casino and beach.
More recent plane passengers flying to Catalina will remember the twin-engine Grumman Goose seaplanes.
Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, all tourism and baseball training on Catalina shut down, as the military took over the island to train Merchant Marines, Army and Coast Guard personnel.
None of them knew that the government was also training secret agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA, at Toyon Bay just two and a half miles north of Avalon.
At the Toyon camp, that was previously the Catalina Island School for Boys, the agents were taught black ops, guns, daggers and explosives. There were no roads leading to the camp — only beach access from the sea.
As soon as the island was taken over by the military, all tourism came to a sudden halt, and many of the permanent civilian residents also left, fearful that the Japanese would invade Catalina first and use it as a staging base for an attack on the mainland.
Radar and anti-aircraft guns were set up around the island, and residents who remained were given special ID cards, and blackout orders went in effect in case of enemy attack, requiring windows to be covered with roofing paper at night.
One person who stayed for a while during the war was Marilyn Monroe. Her husband James Dougherty was a Merchant Marine lieutenant stationed there.
Another prominent personality on Catalina in those days was ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau who helped train scuba diving to Frogmen, now called Navy Seals.
In the sea next to the Casino in Avalon, a bronze plaque attached to a rock on the sea floor gives tribute to the great scuba pioneer, calling him “A legend who gave us a vision and the keys to the silent world.”
When the war ended, Catalina would become a sports diving mecca — much popularized by TV’s “Sea Hunt,” starring Lloyd Bridges.
In the 1970s, Cousteau’s son Jean-Michel would conduct Operation Ocean Search expeditions on the island from Toyon Bay, with this writer serving as Dive Master.
Every January, Jon Hardy, a former general manager of the National Association of Diving Instructors (NAUI) would organize a team of divers to remove trash from the sea be in Avalon Harbor.
Catalina Island basks in the richness of its history, beauty and opportunities to escape from civilization.
A century of profits from selling chewing gum has made Catalina one of America’s top resorts. The Wrigley family still owns it, and they still have a vision of taking it one step further to becoming a truly world-class destination.
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Contact Syd Albright at silverflix@roadrunner.com. Thanks to Bob LaRue of Hauser, History Club, for research assistance.
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The dark side…
On the night of Nov. 28, 1981, actor Robert Wagner had gone to bed alone on his motor-yacht Splendour, anchored at Two Harbors on Catalina Island, after dining at a beachside restaurant. On board was his wife actress Natalie Wood, actor Christopher Walken and boat skipper Dennis Davem. Sometime during the night Natalie disappeared. At 8 a.m., a helicopter search found her body floating a mile away. L.A. County Coroner Thomas Noguchi said an autopsy revealed alcohol and seas-sickness medication in her blood, and bruises on parts of her body. No one knows how the tragedy happened.
The Idaho connection…
In 1864 during the Civil War, 83 Union Army soldiers of Company C of the 4th Infantry, California Volunteers occupied Catalina, planning to make it a reservation for Indians from Northern California — but it never happened.
The military commander of the Military District of California was Brigadier General George Wright who earlier was commander of the 9th Infantry stationed in the Pacific Northwest, where he was ruthless in his treatment of the Indians.
Most notably was his infamous hanging of Yakima Chief Qualchan and shooting his father Chief Owhi.
In 1858, to stop the Indians from waging war — and to avenge a defeat of one of his detachments led by Colonel Edward Steptoe at the Battle of Pine Creek, he ordered the massacre of 800 tribal horses — including those from the Coeur d’Alene Tribe.
The killings took place a hundred yards north of the truck weigh station on Highway I-90 just west of Post Falls near the Idaho-Washington border. A monument to the tragedy can be seen from the parking lot behind the station.
During the Civil War, Wright was promoted to general. After the war ended and he was assigned to California, and later reassigned as commander of the Military Department of the Columbia and ordered to Washington Territory. He never made it.
Sailing aboard the ship Brother Jonathan, the vessel sank during a heavy storm off Northern California. He and his wife Margaret perished. His body was found six weeks later.
The Army detachment based at the Isthmus on Catalina’s west end was ordered to evict everyone from the island to make way for turning it into an Indian reservation for warring tribes in Northern California.
That intent was never made public, and it was believed that the eviction was to prevent Confederates from occupying Catalina. In the end, only a few miners were allowed to stay — after they took the matter to court — and the ranchers also remained and sold beef to the Army detachment.
The soldiers stayed on Catalina about a year before being disbanded. Only their barracks remains today, and in the 1920s and ‘30s, they were used as lodging for film crews.
Movie making on Catalina…
So much filming was done in Two Harbors that it became known in the 1930s as the Isthmus Movie Colony. “Wrigley was very open to the movie industry, particularly at Two Harbors… (William Wrigley Jr.) even installed a dark room for processing dailies at the legendarily beautiful Casino movie theater he built in Avalon in 1928. “That way the dailies didn’t have to be sent and developed over on the mainland.”
— The Hollywood Reporter
How do you get there?
High-speed Catalina Express passenger ferries link Catalina with San Pedro, Long Beach and Dana Point in about an hour — with 30 trips per day. IEX Helicopters offers on-demand charter service to Avalon from Long Beach and San Pedro and several other Southern California airports. There’s an airport on the island for private pilots.
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