Cars Now Roar on Routes That Deer, Indians and Explorers Used

In the waning hours of a hot August afternoon in 1769, a short, pale Franciscan friar named Juan Crespi and his red mule, Sonora Gal, traipsed through the groves of trees lining the Sepulveda Pass--part of the first Spanish expedition through California.

Crespi’s handwritten journal describes a hollow “much lined with large sycamores, live oaks and white oaks and also with a great many small walnut trees laden with quantities of small round nuts with very good meat, only their shells are quite thick and hard to crack.”

Today, mules and walnuts are far less common than Mazdas and Volkswagens along Crespi’s route, which eventually became the growling, concrete path of the San Diego Freeway between Westwood and Sherman Oaks.

Like the 405, many of Southern California’s most famous freeways follow historic routes that are hundreds, if not thousands, of years old.

Call it, in part, the mandate of geography. There are only so many ways across the mountains. Or call it, in part, just human nature. There are only so many places people want to go. And those places have remained remarkably similar through the ages.

“There is this sort of natural history to transportation systems,” said David Brodsly, author of “LA Freeway: An Appreciative Essay.”

“You don’t build roads where no one wants to go. Each generation of transportation adds to the one before it.”

And so it is that the tracks of mule deer evolved into the paths of Chumash Indians and then into the trails of Spanish explorers. From there, the roads between missions turned into stagecoach routes. Paved roads emerged, as did streetcars and finally freeways, all of them following each other through time.

Long before Crespi and other Spaniards ventured north into California from Mexico, scholars suspect that many of the trails they ultimately followed were blazed by local Indians walking between villages.

And not all of these trails were clear-cut. On several occasions, Crespi’s expedition was guided through confusing passes by Indians. After descending into the San Fernando Valley from the Sepulveda Pass, Crespi walked north through the Newhall Pass, where the towering overpasses of the Golden State and Antelope Valley freeways now loom.

On its reverse trip, the expedition returned along the Ventura Freeway corridor through modern Calabasas and over the Cahuenga Pass along a route that ultimately became the Hollywood Freeway.

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Before that, however, the general route became El Camino Real, the “royal road” linking the pueblo of Los Angeles with the northern presidio in Monterey. With the signing of the Treaty of Cahuenga in 1847, near where the Hollywood and Ventura freeways meet, hostilities in California were ended during the U.S.-Mexican War.

Already, wrote architect Reyner Banham in “Los Angeles: Architecture of Four Ecologies,” the routes that eventually became freeways were taking shape.

“By the time the Yankees moved in, or very soon after,” Banham wrote in 1971, “there must have been a well-established track running down to San Pedro, along which the ox-drawn carretas could rumble on their massive wheels, and by the end of the ‘sixties there began to be a well-beaten track branching off the Camino Real to go down to Santa Monica, and so forth.

“But movement was painfully slow; two days to Santa Monica, and in the memories of the grandparents of men my own age it could take up to a week to get into the Downtown area from the farms south of Riverside with a loaded wagon.”

During the 1860s, rail lines began to branch out from Downtown, first in 1868 to the harbor, then in 1874 to San Fernando and in 1875 to Santa Monica, Pomona and Anaheim. Maps of the lines look surprisingly like modern freeway maps.

“Geography is unforgiving,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, author of “Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States.”

“You can’t put a road where it does not want to go.”

Sometimes now, though, we do. Modern road builders don’t have to take the circuitous paths Crespi followed--they can bolt straight up a hillside rather than negotiate a series of switchbacks.

The contrast is visible on the Simi Valley Freeway through the Santa Susana Pass, where a driver can catch glimpses here and there of the old stagecoach route that snaked through the area in the 1800s. About 1860, a steep road was carved out of the rock face of the pass, with the steepest and most treacherous portion called Devil’s Slide.

Likewise in the Newhall Pass, now dominated by the concrete spaghetti of the Golden State and Antelope Valley freeways. Until 1862, travelers used ropes and pulleys to hoist stagecoaches over the treacherous pass.

But then workers using picks and shovels cut a 90-foot gash through the terrain, creating a toll road for horses, coaches and pedestrians.

By 1910, two tunnels--a 6,076-foot one for rail and a 434-foot one for trucks--were bored through the mountains.

The modern freeway is just west of these tunnels and the original gash, leaping over canyons that were not passable to coaches on wheels or even men on foot.

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Another reason that freeways mimic at least the general direction of the old trails is that there are relatively few places a lot of people want to go. Whether Angelenos were born in 1769 or 1969, they still might want to visit the beach.

“People tend to follow the same paths,” said Chuck O’Connell, district division chief of operations for the California Department of Transportation. But unlike long ago--and no matter how bad it gets on the Santa Monica--it rarely takes an entire day to get to the beach from Downtown anymore.