Building a Future on the Graveyards of Dinosaurs : History: From ancient Del Mar Man to writer Marshall South, North County residents share a bond with the people and events that shaped the region over 75 million years.

The bulldozers on once-pristine hillsides serve as constant reminders of the more crowded, urbane region in North County’s future.

Harder to find, but still all around, are the signs of history, dating back thousands, even millions of years.

When North County people think of the area’s past, they usually conjure up memories of a rainbow of flower fields as far as the eye could see along Interstate 5 south of Carlsbad, of plump pumpkins polka-dotting green fields in the San Dieguito River Valley.

These sights are fading memories of the area’s recent history, preserved only in photographs and nostalgic reveries.

The more enduring reminders of yesterday include cone hills that once were active volcanoes, gold mines and missions and rare dinosaur bones. And rocks that bear the imprints of art hundreds of years old.

North County’s varied landscape contains a million witnesses to history; these are just a few to serve as guides into the colorful past.

Early Residents

Long before the coastal slopes and valleys were shaped into today’s undulating North County landscape, creatures roamed the rugged land and swam the briny sea where tracts of expensive homes and clusters of industrial parks now stand.

The high land where Palomar Airport sits was a coastal island in those days--75 million years ago--and the ocean reached far inland to San Marcos.

As bulldozers dug into the hillsides to make way for houses, they unearthed fossils from that Cretaceous Period, providing paleontologists with a glimpse of ancient sea life inhabiting the area near where La Costa lies today.

Shells of ammonites, nautiloids, clams, snails and crabs were daily finds as grading advanced inland. The sea creatures, some of whom resembled a cross between a giant snail and a squid, were bounteous, as their fossil remains testify.

Then, in 1987, a San Diego Natural History Museum staffer was checking a newly dug sewer trench east of Palomar Airport and found, instead of the common seashell fossils, petrified bones of a dinosaur.

Brad Riney, the paleontologist who made the exciting find, had earlier found partial remains--a thigh bone in 1983, 13 tail vertebra in 1986--of a hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur. His 1987 discovery was of a very rare armored dinosaur, or nodosaur.

It was during the construction of College Boulevard in southeastern Carlsbad, as trenchers dug down 60 feet and kicked up evidence of bone fragments, that Riney knew he had struck Mesozoic pay dirt.

“I saw it and I thought, ‘Aha!’ I knew that sucker was in there. And it was,” he said of his discovery. It is the first time nodosaur remains have been found west of the Rocky Mountains and is one of less than two dozen finds in North America. Other nodosaur remains discovered in Kansas and Wyoming showed the same bony armor-plate covering, leading some scientists to speculate that the Carlsbad nodosaur was merely an early tourist who headed west with his peers.

Other paleontologists have argued that the scaly beast was actually a sea creature, although the size and weight of the dinosaur’s bony armament belied its ability to do anything but sink like a rock in water.

Despite its impact in paleontological circles, the nodosaur was no great shakes in its Cretaceous Age. It measured probably no more than four feet in height at the shoulder, and stalked around on stubby legs, eating greenery and menacing no one. Its 12-foot length was made up mostly of tail.

The well-preserved thigh bones and rear leg bones are on display at the San Diego Museum of Natural History in Balboa Park. Riney’s sketch of the way the beast must have looked is there, too.

Riney, who works as a paleontological watchdog on construction sites in San Diego and Orange counties, now has his eye on a steep bank on the edge of an Oceanside freeway. He already has found evidence of early primates in Oceanside’s soils and anticipates that when that bluff falls to make way for freeway widening, “there will be incredible finds in there.”

The Beginning

North County has it all, geographically speaking: mountains and desert, the pine forests and the sagebrush plains, fertile coastal slopes and sandy beaches.

As varied as the landscape is the history of the region and how it came to be a potpourri of photogenic mountains, stark deserts and coastal lagoons. Geomorphologists--scientists who argue and postulate about the world’s landforms and how they came about--figure that North County was a part of the Pacific Plate, a massive piece of the earth’s crust that traveled northward, stopping for a millennium or so to rest, then journeying on until it came to form the California coast. Its latest stop might be permanent, but more likely it is here just for a visit.

North County, and the rest of Southern California’s coastline, docked on the North American Plate at the infamous San Andreas Fault about 20 million years ago, according to Monte Marshall, a professor of geology at San Diego State University.

The meeting of those two land masses and the intrusion of a third submerged tectonic plate caused a surge of volcanic activity that created the rugged peaks and valleys of the back country, Marshall said.

“It’s a very hot topic and far from settled on just how far south the present coastal plate once rested,” Marshall said. Marshall, a paleomagnetist who employs the earth’s magnetic forces to gauge the location of iron-bearing rocks at certain points in prehistoric time, debates with his peers of more traditional bent over whether North County once rested off the edge of South America or was merely an adjunct of southern Mexico.

Marshall’s opinion is that the Pacific Plate is probably a former part of Mexico, “or Central America, tops.”

At a recent seminar, paleomagnetists debated the issue with their traditionalist counterparts, Marshall said, “and everybody came away pretty much confused.”

Marshall said that this coastal part of California still is inching northward at a rate of 2.5 inches a year. At that rate, North San Diego County should be North San Francisco County in 14 million years or so, because the Bay Area rests on the more stationary North American plate.

The Laguna mountain range was formed in earthquake and volcanic eruption about 5 million years ago, yet it contains rock formations dating back 150 million years ago, he noted, “so there are still a lot of questions to be answered in this game.”

Clive Dorman, another SDSU geology professor, might take issue with some of Marshall’s opinions and label him a “paleomagician” instead of paleomagnetist, but he agrees that there are plenty of blank spaces to be filled in the 4-billion-year-old history of the earth. And North County still holds its share of those prehistoric secrets.

One point on which most geomorphologists agree is that the coastal plains and valleys of San Diego County, where 90% of the county population resides today, didn’t exist in its present form before the Ice Age, less than 3 million years ago.

There was an uplifting of the land, perhaps caused by a coastal plate that had submerged 20 million years before to make way for the arrival of the Pacific Plate, which then began nudging its way upward, he said.

As the coastal land rose from the sea, sometimes in sudden upthrusts, sometimes gradually, the result was layers of sediment, each accumulated over a 3,000-year to 18,000-year period, Dorman said.

“Drive up along I-5 and you can see them, like rings on a bathtub,” Dorman said.

The final touches were added when mighty rivers, formed from the melting glaciers of the Ice Age, cut through the soft sediments of the coastal mesas, forming steep canyons on their race to the ocean.

Wide estuaries that once marked the mouths of these glacier-fed rivers became shallow inlets as their sources diminished and centuries of sediment accumulated there to form the sights that perhaps most mark North County’s geography: the coastal lagoons.

These long fingers of brackish water, which change from salty to fresh water with the sweep of the ocean tides and the flushing action of winter storm runoff, form an ideal habitat for migrating birds and many forms of ocean life.

The ocean currents and tides wash up sand continuously, sealing off the entrances to the coastal lagoons with sand bars, turning them into special ecosystems unlike the inland lakes, fed only by freshwater streams, or the salty ocean. For months and sometimes years, the living organisms within the lagoons are trapped in fetid ponds until the force of waves from winter storms or heavy runoff from winter rains force out the sand plug and let the ocean in, rejuvenating the stagnant habitat.

Early man apparently shunned the lagoons in favor of the ocean bluffs and beaches, but foraged in the lagoon larders for shellfish during summer by the seashore.

When Spanish explorers and Franciscan friars journeyed northward through North County, they found the lagoons more bane than boon. Swarms of biting insects rose from the lagoons as the journeyers passed by and marshy land forced them to detour miles inland.

That inland route is now the famous El Camino Real (Kings Highway), and the intruding North County lagoons are named for saints or for their own attributes: Penasquitos (little cliffs or rocks), San Dieguito (little San Diego), San Elijo (St. Elijah), Batiquitos (little watering place), Buena Vista (good view) and Agua Hedionda (stinking water).

Del Mar Man

Del Mar Man, whose ancient remains caused a longtime archeological argument, once could have laid claim to being North County’s first known resident. And, of course, he chose the choicest part of the coastal bluffs to die, and presumably to live.

The skeleton also claims a place in history for growing younger as the years went by.

Del Mar Man’s partial remains (the skull and several bone segments) were found in 1929 on an ocean bluff by San Diego Museum of Man archeologist Malcolm T. Rogers. He estimated his find as being from the La Jollan culture that made its home in the area from 9,000 to 2,000 years ago.

In the mid-1970s, the bones from Rogers’ dig were examined by Jeffrey R. Bada of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Using a new dating system, Bada dropped a bombshell in archeological circles when he pronounced the Del Mar Man to be about 48,000 years old.

That date placed Del Mar Man in North County long before human life was presumed to have existed on the North American continent.

Del Mar Man’s skull was given an honored place at the Museum of Man while the battle over his age raged.

The first formal challenge came in 1981, when University of Arizona scientists used the school’s new atom-blaster to estimate that the Del Mar Man was no more than 11,000 years old.

Then, in 1984, Bada and a group of colleagues from Oxford University defended the validity of Bada’s method of age-dating in a British science journal article and blamed a “measuring stick” bone erroneously dated by UCLA archeologists for throwing off Bada’s first estimates. The new age Bada estimated for the Del Mar Man was a mere 5,400 years old.

An even later dating test by James Bischoff of the U.S. Geological Survey reduced the Del Mar bones’ age to 4,900 years, give or take 40 years, and Museum of Man officials discreetly retired Del Mar Man from view.

Digs show that humans had used the scenic Del Mar bluff north of the San Dieguito River mouth to picnic and enjoy the view as long as 7,000 years ago. Human remains found by Malcolm on the bluffs above La Jolla’s famous “swimsuit-optional” Black’s Beach were dated as 8,360 years old, give or take 75 years.

Rock Art

Most signs of early Indian culture in North County must be dug and sifted; others are literally carved in stone.

Pictographs (rock paintings) and petroglyphs (rock inscriptions) date as far back as 2,000 years, when ancestors of Diegueno and Luiseno tribes roamed river valleys, often following the San Dieguito or San Luis Rey rivers to the beach in the summer and heading to the desert in the winter.

Ken Hedges, chief curator at the San Diego Museum of Man who specializes in these Indian artifacts, has visited most of the 50 or so sites of rock art scattered around North County. Hedges warns that many are located on private land or on Indian reservations and are unavailable to the curious or studious. Others are on public land, but their locations are jealously guarded by the scientists who study them because of previous vandalism and souvenir hunting.

He knows of one site “not more than 50 yards from housing pads,” that already has been marred by vandals who added their modern rock art in the form of graffiti, and he’s not about to draw a map to it.

Most of the accessible rock art is located in the eastern mountain and desert regions of North County: at the peak of Pala Mountain in Wilderness Gardens County Park, or in Anza Borrego Desert State Park, in a cave in Cougar Canyon, on rock piles in Clark Valley or in Smuggler Canyon.

In Blair Valley’s Smuggler Canyon, the Kumeyaay Indians left impressive pictographs in red and yellow on a large boulder, for generations of archeologists to ponder. Series of linked diamond designs are believed to represent rattlesnakes, and many of the designs are thought to be linked to young girls’ puberty rites, although no one knows for sure, Hedges said.

The most accessible and elaborate North County rock art is located on the southern shores of Lake Hodges in Rancho Bernardo’s Westlake section. There, near rows of homes and the lakeshore, are series of pictographs in red, black and white, concentric mazes, designs whose meaning has been lost.

The Mission Era

The tiny Mission San Antonio de Pala, tucked away in the foothills of North County, has little of the size and style that mark the Catholic missions that stand along El Camino Real--the King’s Highway along the California coast.

But the tiny Pala chapel is distinctive. It has survived in its original form, long after some of the more imposing missions have fallen to floods and vandals.

Today, the adobe church and its free-standing bell tower look little changed from what they must have looked like when dedicated in 1816.

In those early days, the Pala church was an asistencia , or branch, of the mighty Mission San Luis Rey on the coast in what is now eastern Oceanside.

Pala, far to the east on the upper reaches of the San Luis Rey River basin, consisted of the chapel and residences for the priests and visitors. The Catholic church compound was surrounded by granaries, bean fields, a vineyard, orchards and grain fields belonging to the mission and worked by many of the 1,300 Indians in the area who had been converted to Catholicism. Almost immediately after its dedication, classrooms were added to the mission compound.

The mission served as a trading center as well as a spiritual and educational center for the Luiseno tribes who lived in the surrounding hills and river valley in those early days. After Mexico became independent from Spain in 1835, the vast mission land holdings were confiscated from the church and divided among Mexican noblemen. Some of the Spanish missions were abandoned and their roof tiles and timbers stolen by newcomers settling on the former mission lands.

The remote location of the Pala mission protected it from extensive vandalism and large portions of the compound stand much as they were 174 years ago.

When the floods of the late 1800s and early 1900s washed away some of the larger coastal missions, Pala Mission was only slightly damaged. Its free-standing bell tower was undermined in the flood of 1916, but quickly repaired, this time with a stone and concrete foundation to replace the ubiquitous early building material, sun-baked adobe blocks.

Today, Pala Mission remains as serene and isolated as it was in the 18th-Century glory days of Spanish rule and Franciscan missions. Gnarled pepper trees have grown to shade the grounds and adjoining cemetery where, according to a hand-carved sign, “thousands of Indians and Pioneers are buried in the marked and unmarked graves.”

Father Xavier Colleoni, the present mission pastor who has been at Pala only four years, said the tiny parish still serves about 1,300 Indians on the Pala, Pauma, Rincon and La Jolla reservations, plus members of a small Latino settlement nearby.

The Feast of Corpus Christi, a festival celebrated the first Sunday of June, is the high point of the religious season.

Visitors stop by to browse among the Indian handicrafts and religious artifacts housed in a small museum on the mission grounds.

Bea Ornelas, a Luiseno Indian who runs the museum, said that her mother knew how to make the intricately woven baskets like those on display, but admitted that she never bothered to learn the art.

“We were too cool, too smart, to learn,” she said. “Now it is a lost art.”

Father Xavier cherishes the serenity after pastoral stays in Cincinnati, Chicago, San Diego and Los Angeles. The Italian-born priest is a member of the Comboni Fathers of Verona, a group that took over the mission in 1959, rebuilding and reopening the Indian mission school--the only Catholic mission school still operating in California.

Today, Pala Mission classrooms are filled to capacity--170 students--with a long waiting list. Donations subsidize the mission’s religious and educational efforts, as do the annual Corpus Christi fiesta and the sale of student-made Christmas cards.

“It is very peaceful here,” Father Xavier said, “and there is very little to do and nothing to worry about, except, of course, money for the school.

“After 13 years in Los Angeles, this seems a lot closer to heaven.”

Battlefield

While most North County history molders in the files of historical societies and museums, one memorable event comes to life each year in the San Pasqual Valley.

That event, the Battle of San Pasqual, is re-enacted annually on the site of the original battle, now a sandy drainage ditch in the river bottom land above Lake Hodges.

On Dec. 6, 1846, it was an Indian village where a small troop of Mexican cavalry--Californios--were camped during the Mexican War when a Gen. Stephen Kearny’s mounted troops swooped down in a dawn attack, hoping to catch the Mexican troops off guard.

His strategy failed. The Mexican horsemen won the battle quickly, killing 22 troopers of the U.S. Army of the West. One Mexican warrior died.

Kearny was wounded and taken to a nearby hill by his men and his scout, Kit Carson. For four days, the remaining American soldiers held out atop the hillock, eating their pack mules to survive while messengers galloped on weary horses to the fort in San Diego to summon help.

San Diego troops arrived in time to save the beleaguered soldiers and disperse the Mexican cavalry headed by Maj. Andres Pico.

The hill that has been memorialized as Mule Hill still yields bits of history in the form of spent cartridges, horseshoe nails and other relics of the siege. And near the site of the battle, on California 78 southeast of Escondido, a state museum stands in memory of the battle and the fallen men.

Since 1986, when the museum was completed and the battleground dedicated as a state historical site, the Battle of San Pasqual has been re-enacted on a weekend close to the Dec. 6 anniversary.

Properly attired troopers, usually portrayed by the BOOTS (Boosters of Old Town San Diego), take on the Alta California cavalry, usually represented by the Charros of Escondido, in staged battles for audiences of 500 to 1,000.

The museum, which is open year-round, displays murals of the battle but clouds over the outcome. Without mentioning the defeat of Kearny’s U.S. Army troops, the museum legend points out that the battle was a turning point in the war that ultimately gave Alta California--California--to the United States.

The Golden Days

It was late one February afternoon near sundown when a disillusioned prospector who had drifted down to the Julian area from California’s Mother Lode country spotted flakes of gold in a creek bed, and North County’s gold rush was on.

The prospector who had spotted the gold in a stream near the foot of Volcan Mountain, where he had stopped to water his horse, was Fred Coleman; the year was 1870.

News spread fast. Within a month of the gold discovery, 40 claims were filed along the creek, which immediately was named for him, and south along the Banner Grade toward Cuyamaca.

Julian turned into a boom town full of greenhorns who had missed the glories of Sutter’s Mill but wanted to find the pot of gold they just knew was waiting for them.

It soon became apparent that placer mining was not the key to riches in the Julian area, so the hard task of finding and following the seams of gold-bearing quartz in the surrounding mountains began. Gold-bearing minerals were extracted and crushed so that the flakes of precious metal could be extracted.

Not only did the Julian quartz seams bend and vanish in a most distressing way, but the San Francisco financiers who had bankrolled the Northern California gold rush were now canny enough to know that gold mining was not a blue-chip venture. Eastern bankers had to be wooed to finance the Julian strike.

The local miners went about their work in a hit-or-miss manner in the same way that financing came in--a method that almost assured failure. Amazingly, some good strikes were brought in.

Ore from the veins was rich, bringing in $75 to $200 per ton at a time when gold was worth $20 an ounce.

Most of the small mining operations around the Julian-Banner area bloomed and faded by the late 1870s, but the Stonewall Mine south of Julian--probably the most famous and most profitable of the lot--operated well into the 20th Century. Stonewall reportedly recovered close to $2 million of the $5.2 million in gold taken out of the Julian hills during the North County gold rush.

Interest revived in the Julian gold deposits during the 1970s after equipment was developed to mine efficiently among the irregular veins of gold-bearing quartz. But no new gold rush followed. Instead, a trickle of tourists visit the Julian mines today and listen to tales of the glory days.

Although it has been more than 50 years since gold mines were producing in the Julian area, there are still two that are making money by charging tourists for a guided walk back to the way it was.

Eagle Mining Co. owner Harlan Nelson has been giving guided tours through Eagle and High Peak mines daily for the past 24 years. Hours are 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and it is just a six-block walk from Main Street, up the hill on C Street. The tours last 1 1/2 hours and cost $6 for adults, $3 for children.

Olivenhain Colony

Imagine a young German merchant, bored with the sedentary place that Denver had become in the 1870s, sitting in a neighborhood bar and spinning tales of the wonders to be found in California.

For most young men, dreaming of greener fields would have been enough. For John Pinther, it was just the beginning. The ideas he expounded to his drinking buddies over a brew or two became concrete plans and eventually flowered into the founding of Colony Olivenhain in North County.

Olivenhain, or Olive Grove, became one of North County’s earliest coastal communities and certainly its first ethnic enclave because Pinther’s dream-come-true called for a colony made up of Germans--just like himself.

He set to work on his project by advertising in German-language newspapers throughout the eastern United States, seeking to recruit his Teutonic followers, promising a new life in paradise for just a few dollars down.

Of the more than 200 serious replies that Pinther received, he selected about 100 colonists, being sure to include those with the skills he knew his new colony would need. A smithy, a butcher, a doctor, a minister, a cabinet maker, and a representative of almost every other profession or trade.

Pinther decided against enrolling lawyers, explaining that Olivenhain colonists would settle their differences among themselves. He also banned pawnbrokers and insurance salesmen.

He came to San Diego to seek out the perfect place for his new Eden in 1880 and ran into a couple of the county’s big dealers, Warren and Frank Kimball, who sold him Rancho Encinitas--4,431 acres of coastal land where the city of Encinitas now sprawls--for $5,225.

What Pinther did not know, and local San Diegans did not tell him, was that $15 an acre for unproven land along the North County coast was an outrageous price to pay. Most of the property in that stretch of beach was going for as little as 50 cents an acre in those days.

Pinther and his band were undaunted by the difficulties of reaching the new Colony Olivenhain and arrived in November, 1884, to build their dream.

One of the first tasks they undertook after raising temporary lodgings and using the old Rancho Encinitas estancia as their gathering place was to dig for water. They found water readily enough, but it was brackish and undrinkable, too salty even for irrigation.

Olivenhain leaders went back to the Kimball brothers to demand the return of their money, charging bad faith on the part of the pair in selling them unusable land with no fit water. Pinther may have had a second thought or two about not recruiting lawyers into his colony band.

The rank-and-file colonists then discovered that Pinther and their governing board members had been accepting kickbacks from the suppliers, movers and land salesmen. The Olivenhain Colony founders were banished and many of the group moved out of the colony to homestead 160-acre tracts nearby.

But the dream of Colony Olivenhain stayed alive. The German families rallied to renegotiate the Rancho Encinitas land sale, returning the original rancho property, and purchasing 440 acres from the Kimballs (at the “outrageous” $15 an acre) to re-establish the village of Olivenhain about five miles inland from the coast, where the water was good and the land was arable.

Ten years after their arrival, the Olivenhain settlers gathered to build a town hall in celebration of the realization of their dreams. The village was surrounded by orchards and farms, vineyards and bee colonies by then and the surrounding land was filling with other settlers brought by the railroad.

For 96 years, the meeting hall has served the village, first as a dance and beer hall, later as a community center. Descendants of the early colonists still live in the area, the Denks and Schillers and Wiegands whose ancestors signed the Colony Olivenhain pact that bound them to donate one month of service each year or pay $60 to avoid the obligation.

In retrospect, the Olivenhain settlers might have been smarter to have purchased all of Rancho Encinitas, now prime beachfront properties and thriving commercial centers, instead of a small inland chunk.

And one wonders, too, what happened to the Olive Grove. Among the early imports of seed and plantings by the colonists, there was not one order for an olive tree.

Riding the Rails

The sailing ships that brought immigrants to California and sent the products of the countryside to Eastern markets passed the North County by. There was no harbor.

The prospect of gleaming rails stretching coast-to-coast and ending up in San Diego County prompted local civic leaders to offer anything--money, miles of land, honors unlimited--to bring this intercontinental lifeline.

Eastern railroad promoters promised much but delivered little, often taking the money collected from townsfolk and merchants, then disappearing into the sunset only to work their scam on other cities.

What good was the bounty of North County’s fields if it could not be shipped to markets? What value did the land have if no one could get there? San Diegans decided to settle for half a loaf and began negotiating for a rail link with a transcontinental line headed for Los Angeles.

Not until October, 1880, did the desperate San Diego businessmen make a deal with Boston bankers to build a line to link them with the rest of the world.

That East-West combination, California Southern, boldly laid its rails from a desert rail center in Colton through mountains, down gorges, past Fallbrook to the coast at Oceanside, then down the bluffs to San Diego and National City. The line was completed in 1882, and a year later the brash young company was bankrupt, the victim of heavy rains that swept the railroad line to oblivion.

The tracks of the California Southern went inland near the Santa Margarita River north of Oceanside, followed the river through what is now Camp Pendleton Marine base and through narrow Temecula Canyon. Ignoring the warnings of area residents, builders laid the rails along the quiet little river in their haste to complete the 127-mile-long task.

When the winter rains came in 1883, with 13 inches falling in 14 days, the California Southern was no more. Six miles of track through the Temecula Canyon was washed into the ocean. Rocks and mudslides blocked the narrow gorge and entire trestle bridges were seen floating in the ocean along with telegraph poles and other debris.

A more cautious Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway followed up a year later on a more stable route along the coastline from Los Angeles, bridging rivers and lagoons with sturdy bridges that lasted until the next big flood in 1891.

Between storms, the railroad brought prosperity to North County. For the first time, a wave of settlers could get to the north coast without long overland journeys in horse-drawn wagons.

Within months of the railroad’s coming, the land rush was on. North County’s future cities were platted by enterprising land sales agents, who built hotels on their holdings and organized weekend “open houses” for prospective land buyers.

Excursion trains brought the customers down from Los Angeles or up from San Diego, where they were housed for the night and given sumptuous dinners before being taken on a tour of the homesites in Del Mar, Encinitas, Oceanside or Escondido, which was served by a spur of the railroad from Oceanside.

Land sales boomed and cottages sprang up on $50 lots, where not long before only cattle had grazed or orchards had stood. Both Oceanside and Escondido became cities in 1888, boasting populations in the hundreds but little in the way of modern roads, water systems or governments. The railroad was the only modern convenience needed to bring prosperity to North County.

The boom turned to bust by 1890, and North County villagers were left to their own resources to build the necessary infrastructure to go with city life.

The sumptuous hotels built to lure landbuyers have all burned down or been torn down to make way for more modern buildings, but many of the sturdy Victorian-style railroad stations remain to mark North County’s first permanent settlements. In Encinitas, the station has been moved and converted to a coffeehouse. In Carlsbad, the depot now houses the Chamber of Commerce, and in Escondido, the depot now sits in Grape Day Park.

Dreary Life on a Desert Mountaintop

Toward the beginning of the Great Depression, Marshall South sought his haven--strangely enough, in the desert.

South was a British writer who loaded up his 1928 Model A Ford in 1931 and set out for what is now the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park with his wife, Tanya, a poet. There they built an adobe home on top of Ghost Mountain and lived for 15 years, much like the prehistoric Indians had lived.

South built an elaborate catchment basin and cistern to trap what little rain fell in the arid desert region and gathered firewood from the meager scrub that grew on the rocky peak.

There Tanya bore him three children, whom she raised and tutored herself while South was busy writing novels. In one of his works, “Flame of Terrible Valley,” he described the hard life on the barren mountain and also the beauty and tranquility of the area.

The South family reportedly wore animal skins for clothing and lived off the land, trapping small game and eating the sparse edible vegetation, although Marshall South did not write of this, nor did his wife refer to it in her poetry.

There were lapses in the South family’s primitive life style. South made trips to Julian for canned goods and building materials and other necessities that the desert did not supply. All of this had to be carried up a steep mile-long trail on the back of a burro or on the backs of the family.

South found solitude, but not always paradise. The spot was laden with wildflowers in spring, but during the winter, blustery winds bombarded the mountaintop and temperatures fell uncomfortably low. In summer, the temperature rose to 120 at times.

After 15 years, the South family came down from its mountain aerie, never to return. Tanya South sued for divorce, which she was granted, along with custody of the children and child support of $25 a month. Marshall South remained in Julian, where he died two years later.

Modern-day hikers willing to climb the mile-long switchback trail up Ghost Mountain can still see what little remains of South’s adobe home, its archway entry and sophisticated water system. There is even a sundial, which was restored by latter-day conservationists--and there always will be the unexcelled view of the desert and mountains.