Simi by the Book : Historians’ Archives Give Shape to Ghosts of City’s Past

Digging hard through microfilms and musty ledgers, city historian Pat Havens is working on a book she hopes will lay bare this city’s past.

For beneath Simi Valley’s public face--a veneer of tract homes, block walls and strip malls barely four decades thick--lie rich centuries of history.

Three other books this century have told of Simi Valley’s Chumash chieftains and Spanish missionaries, of the old-time citrus ranchers and modern land barons who shaped the city and, indeed, Southern California.

But Havens, head of the Simi Valley Historical Society, wants to surpass them all.

She and a team of scientists, archivists and historians are writing what they intend to be the ultimate chronicle of this tawny-hilled suburbia.

This newest history must weave a dense, crisp tapestry of Simi Valley’s past with 450 pages of prose and 350 photos, with maps and genealogical charts, scientific treatises and oral histories.

And when “Simi Valley--A Journey Through Time” goes on sale this fall for $49.95 ($29.95 paperback), Havens said, it must be accurate.

She politely declines to point out flaws in the earlier books, including inaccuracies marring the most recent one. That 1990 text invited local businesses to help write their own roles into city history, taking up fully one-third of the volume’s 200 pages.

While her own effort may not be perfect, Havens admits, it must be the best that the Historical Society can muster.

“I’ve known for a long time we needed to do a definitive book,” she said. “I want to try to do this with as many people happy with it as possible when we’re done.”

Like past histories, this one will draw heavily on the society’s archive of photos, including many shot in fine detail on huge glass-plate negatives by Simi photographer John Sparhawk Appleton.

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“Mr. Appleton, thank heavens, had acquired a really good camera around the turn of the century,” Havens said. “And he took thousands of photos. It’s just fun thinking of him out there recording what was going on.”

But past writers have not dug hard enough for Simi’s deepest roots, she said.

Broad-brush historians of Southern California often miss the kind of small-town detail that Havens and her team are gleaning from mission records, state archives and newspaper morgues.

“For the longest time, people didn’t pay any attention to what had been going on out here, they focused their attention on Los Angeles and the larger cities,” she said. “I’m just trying to say that the same things were going on here, the same types of history.”

Before the Spaniards came, the Chumash village of Shimiji thrived in the western corner of the broad, grassy valley, and the village of Ta’apu in the northeast.

Santa Barbara historian John Johnson has mapped these and other Chumash villages in Ventura County, drafted a genealogy of their chiefs and written an entire chapter on Chumash culture for Havens’ book.

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CSUN paleontologist Ali Tabidian has written a chapter on the water history of the valley, from the prehistoric rains that carved the Arroyo Simi to the citrus and walnut ranchers who killed their own business by bleeding the aquifers dry.

And two geologists--CSUN’s Richard Squires and independent rock expert Bruce Lander--have crafted a chapter explaining the formation of Simi’s distinctive knolls and ridges.

“The people who buy the book for the paleontology and Chumash stuff alone will be getting their money’s worth,” Havens said.

The book will also diagram the waves of conquest that swept across the valley.

The Chumash Indians gave way to the Spaniards, as missionary armies behind Father Junipero Serra and Capt. Gaspar de Portola trooped up and down the Pacific coast, setting up religious missions and military presidios in hopes of stiffening Spain’s somewhat tenuous claims on the vastness of California.

In 1795, King Carlos IV of Spain rewarded one of those worn-out old soldiers for 20 years of faithful service, granting the 113,000 acres of El Rancho Simi to Santiago Pico. Pico died in 1815. But his family carried on raising livestock and grapes there, even as Mexico won independence from Spain in 1822.

The Picos sold the rancho in 1831 or 1832 to Spanish cattle rancher Jose de la Guerra, Havens said.

But a decade and a half after Mexico ceded California to theUnited States in 1848, the de la Guerras had a run of bad luck. Brutal droughts in 1863 and 1864 forced the family to sell the rancho to East Coast investors, who further sliced it up and doled it out to land speculators, cattle barons, citrus ranchers and grain farmers.

As the land changed hands, the way it was chopped up and sold also changed.

A crudely drawn disen~o (a map from Pico’s time) points out the Chumash villages and rolling hills with all the precision of a child’s crayon sketch.

De la Guerra sealed his purchase with an old Spanish custom, yanking branches off a few trees, then scooping up and scattering handfuls of earth.

But by the time Simi Valley fell into the grip of the Simi Land & Water Company, rigid lot lines and beautifully calligraphic ranch names crisscrossed a meticulously surveyed map showing each mountain, creek and arroyo.

“That’s why the Spanish and Mexican owners of the land lost out to the white settlers, because they [the whites] had all this worked out to a science,” Havens said.

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And when citrus and walnut farmers drained the local water supplies dry, they quickly sold off land in the 1950s to suburban developers who had come from the San Fernando Valley looking for fresh territory.

As other histories have included maps, photos and a recitation of the valley’s ever-changing ownership, so will this one.

But it also will be juiced up with oral histories of the city’s pioneer families, as told by their descendants, Havens said.

And while no huge scandals lurk in the city’s past, Simi Valley was home to a handful of cults that Havens hopes to describe in detail.

One was the mysterious Great Eleven Club of the 1920s and ‘30s, which built a massive gilded wood throne for the coming of “the Christ” and kept its leader’s daughter’s body embalmed in a bathtub for three months in salt, ice and herbs.

Another saw the long-haired, silk-robed followers of Master Krishna Venta set up an enclave of rock shelters in Box Canyon in the 1950s, until a couple of disgruntled acolytes with a satchelful of dynamite killed the master and, as Havens puts it, “blew it all to smithereens.”

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The book will also trace the history of Simi Valley’s commercial development, from the earliest general stores and farming collectives through the aerospace experiments of Rocketdyne’s Santa Susana Field Lab and the growth of the ubiquitous strip malls.

Havens said she hopes the book will be greater than the sum of its varied parts, “an anthology of our history.”

“I’m not writing a novel,” she said. “I’m trying to write a reference book . . . I don’t want to monopolize this thing, this is a team of writers.”

As for when the newest history of Simi Valley will be open to its residents, Havens admits she is still sorting out software problems and sifting facts: “It’s still very vague,” she said of the publication date. “We’re working just as hard as we can work. We’ve got to be sure it’s right.”