Griffith Park : . . . and Yesterday

What is known of Griffith Park’s past can be documented with certainty in two respects: Scientists know it was born amid spectacular geological upheaval. And its founder’s biography is an oft told but quirky one. However, who lived there during the several thousand years before the coming of the white man and how its prehistoric residents comported themselves rests on some shaky archeology.

Ever since the dinosaurs were alive and well, Los Angeles’ matchless urban sanctuary has been a frequent truant from the surface of Planet Earth. It has emerged from the seas during one cycle only to be hammered below the ocean during another. Each geological age has left its signature on the parkland as it exists today.

During the last 150 million years, it has been blanketed, stippled and filigreed with the debris of successive convulsions of the Earth’s crust. Scientists know this because the oldest exposed rocks in the park go back that far into prehistory.

Because of the different ages it lay under the sea only to be reborn, said Caltech geology professor Leon Silver, “it has an enormous geological variety. You see young and old rocks, the new juxtaposed against the old because of the many cycles that affected the land.”

Griffith Park is part of the Hollywood Hills, which constitute the eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains. Between 1 and 2 million years ago, these mountains began rising from the sea floor and, to the accompaniment of shuddering earthquakes, separating from the Los Angeles Basin.

“As a result, when the park was brought up it exposed the geological character typical of the entire basin,” Silver said.

Today, the trained eye can find in the park a record of its creation: granites, the product of what once was molten lava, intruded in ancient rocks left there millions and millions of years earlier. And alongside them, fossil-bearing mudstones deposited in the ocean 5 million years ago. And remnants of the ancient volcanoes from whence flowed the streaming lava.

The Indians got there first.

Debatable Inscription

A plaque at the entrance to Fern Dell Canyon says so. But a word of caution: Don’t necessarily believe what the plaque says, which is this:

“A Gabrielino Indian site. Archeological evidence indicates that Indian villages were located in Ferndell Canyon. Declared Historical Cultural Monument No. 112 on Feb. 21, 1973, by the Cultural Heritage Board.”

The problem is that no experts know of the existence of any such evidence.

It seems that the late Carl Dentzel, then director of the Southwest Museum and president of the Cultural Heritage Board, was responsible for the inscription. Ileana Welch, the city’s cultural heritage coordinator, recalls that she repeatedly asked Dentzel for evidence to support his conviction.

He finally produced a book about Los Angeles-area Indians, which proclaimed that “archeological surveys” had “discovered sites of villages at the mouth of Fern Dell Canyon.” The other board members then acceded to Dentzel’s persuasive powers and agreed to erect the plaque.

No Systematic Scrutiny

While experts concede that Dentzel may have had some information that has been lost to time, none said that he knows of any systematic archeological scrutiny ever undertaken in the park nor of the discovery there of Indian relics.

“Little work along this line ever has been done in urban Los Angeles,” said David Whitley, chief archeologist of UCLA’s authoritative archeological survey. However, Whitley and other archeologists say that without a doubt Indians once inhabited Fern Dell, and probably also other flat areas of the park, while they hunted animals in the mountains and canyons with bow and arrow.

“We can extrapolate,” said Whitely, explaining that the area would have been much too inviting a habitat to have been overlooked by the Gabrielinos, so named by the Spaniards because of their association with the Mission San Gabriel.

Griffith Park once was part of Rancho de los Feliz, a land grant awarded in 1796 to the corporal who had led three soldiers and 44 settlers here earlier to found the City of Los Angeles. His name was Jose Vicente Feliz and, as a reward for his service, he collected 6,677 acres, which remained in the Feliz family for several generations.

National Guard Helped

In 1882, Col. Griffith Jenkins Griffith, a Welsh immigrant who had made a fortune in mining in the American West, acquired the rancho, by then diminished to slightly more than 4,000 acres and situated just north of the burgeoning city. The colonel acquired his title courtesy of the California National Guard.

Griffith lived on the rancho for 12 years, and in the grandest of styles. He raised livestock there, but with little success.

Some historians claim that Griffith cynically decided to donate most of the land to the city in the late 1890s for tax purposes. Others insist that the gift was what it appeared to be, a munificent gesture. Certainly, the colonel was explicit in the numerous stipulations he made regarding the use of the land as a “people’s recreation grounds.”

The population of Los Angeles at the time was 100,000.

The “indenture” giving the land to the city and recorded March 5, 1898, was a reflection of a simpler time. It spoke of the boundaries as being, among other objects, a “four-by-four redwood post,” “a large sycamore tree” and “a black oak tree.”

Ahead of His Times

But, in other respects, the colonel appears to have been a man ahead of his times. He once proclaimed: “Public parks are a safety valve of great cities . . . and should be accessible and attractive, where neither race, creed nor color should be excluded.”

Five years after the gift, the colonel found himself in a heap of trouble.

He shot his wife.

The late Ed Curl, an amateur historian, recalled in a publication misnamed “The Griffith Park Quarterly” that Griffith suspected his wife of being “in league with the Pope and the church to poison him so she could turn all his money over to the Catholics.”

On a late summer day in a motel in Santa Monica, wrote Curl:

“He handed her a prayer book and ordered her to get down on her knees and say her prayers. He then told her to close her eyes and swear she had been a faithful wife. She said, ‘Darling, you know I have.’ . . . She opened her eyes and saw a pistol in her husband’s hand. At that instant she jerked her head and the bullet which he shot at the same moment went through her eye. . . .”

Lived to Testify

Mrs. Griffith lost the eye but lived to testify at her husband’s trial.

Griffith’s attorney, the legendary Earl Rogers, came up with what was then a novel defense: He argued that Griffith was a victim of “alcohol insanity.” The colonel drew only a two-year sentence and was a free man within a year.

And resumed his good deeds.

He donated land to enlarge the park and provide for the observatory and “a Greek theater,” prompting accusations that he was offering these as bribes to refurbish his image. Even upon his death in 1919 at 67, according to Curl, many citizens still “detested” him.

After his burial in Hollywood Cemetery, his will revealed that he had left a substantial sum to the city in the form of a trust fund to provide for the upkeep of the park and to be used toward the construction of the observatory and theater, whose design he outlined in exquisite detail. The current value of the trust runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars; funds from it were used this year to refurbish the copper dome atop the observatory.