Luther A. Ingersoll Ingersoll's Century History Santa Monica Bay Cities (Being Book Number Two of Ingersoll's Century Series of California Local History Annals) Prefaced with A Brief History of the State of California A Condensed History of Los Angeles County 1542 to 1908 Supplemented with An Encyclopedia of Local Biography and Embellished with Views of Historic Landmarks and Portraits of Representative People. Luther A. Ingersoll: Los Angeles 1908, 512 pp., 1908, 1908a, pre-1769, See Text
The waters of the bay were sometimes disturbed by the rude boats of the Santa Barbara Channel and Island Indians; the valleys adjacent to the coast and the Santa Monica mountains were the homes of a people who have long since disappeared and of whose existence we know only by the occasional uncovering of skeltons and relics. Several caves and mounds containing curious collections of implements, weapons and bones have been found on the Malibu ranch at various times. These Indians roamed over the plains and through the cienegas, killing rabbits and small game and gathering acorns and grasses, roots and berries. They also fished along the shore, mostly with nets, and gathered shells-their most prized possession. It is said that these shells were particularly abundant along the shore where Ocean Park and Venice now [p. 123] stand and that the Indians from the interior and from Catalina used to visit this spot to secure shells which took the place of money with them.
Vizcaino describes the Indians seen along the coast of California during his explorations early in the seventeenth century as of good form and of active character, the men wearing a short cloak made of rabbit or deer skins, heavily fringed, the more industrious having their garments embroidered with shells. He describes a rancheria seen along the shore in this vicinity as composed of about twenty houses made of rushes over a frame of poles driven into the ground . These were very like the brush ramadas still constructed by the Indians of California. Bancroft states that the Indians of Los Angeles county ate coyotes, skunks, wildcats and all sorts of small animals. They would not eat bear meat or the flesh of large game for superstitious reasons. They were poor hunters having no effective weapons, and hunted deer by hiding themselves under a skin with the head and horn intact, until they were within bowshot. They made fishhooks, needles and other small articles of bone and shell, ground their acorns and seeds in a metate, or stone mill, and constructed wooden boats or tule rafts for their fishing expeditions, using seines made of tough bark.