Betty Lou Young and Randy Young Santa Monica Canyon: A Walk Through History Casa Vieja Press: Pacific Palisades, CA, 1997, 182 pp., 1871, 1870s
"In 1871 . . . B.L. Peel put up a huge tent to accomodate thirty families . . . one busy Sunday . . . three hundred visitors arrived for the day and remained for an all-night dance . . .
" . . . [1872], a real hotel was opened in Santa Monica Canyon . . .
" . . .
" . . . Easteners drifting south from the Sierra Nevada gold fields . . . acquired large tracts of land at bargain prices. The Santa Monica area attracted the attention of Colonel Robert S. Baker . . . [who had] sold supplies to miners. Later he added to his sizable fortune by raising cattle and sheep in northern California and the Tejon country in Kern County.
"Baker established himself in Los Angeles and on September 3, 1872, purchased Rancho San Vicente y Santa Monica, paying the heirs of Francisco Sepúlveda $55,000 for over thirty thousand acres. A year later, on August 14, 1873, he bought an undivided one-half interest in Rancho Boca de Santa Monica, without patent, for $6,000 from Maria Villa de Reyes. In 1874 Colonel Baker married the widowed Arcadia Bandini de Stearns, a major landholder in her own right . . ."
"By 1874, two canyon hotels kept by Wolf and Steadman, the Morongo House and the Seaside Hotel, were popular . . . A road ran from Los Angeles to the shore at the foot of . . . (Colorado) St. in Santa Monica, where facilities at Shoo Fly Landing were used for shipping asphalt from the La Brea pits to San Francisco, the first sea-borne commerce from Santa Monica Bay. . . Wagons and carriages [continued on] the beach to the mouth of Santa Monica Canyon.
"Colonel Robert Baker . . . envisioned a new wharf at Santa Monica and a connecting railroad into Los Angeles."
" . . .
" . . . the Southern Pacific Railroad, in September 1876, finished its line to Los Angeles . . . absorbing Senator Jones' Los Angeles and Independence Railroad (in 1877)-its Los Angeles depot abandoned, the wharf condemned, and shipping transferred to San Pedro. . . . on December 8, 1878, the Outlook suspended publication . . ." p. 22