Sticky Treasure Chest Yields Tar, Fossils Galore

Most Angelenos whiz past it every day, thinking it’s just another tourist attraction.

But this is no Disneyland of dead bones: It’s science.

In the heart of the mid-Wilshire district, amid high-rises and busy streets, is an attraction that no other city can boast: a sticky Ice Age graveyard, a paleontological zoo’s worth of extinct species -- even Los Angeles’ first reputed murder victim and her dog.

More than 3.5 million fossils have been extracted from the muck and ooze of the La Brea Tar Pits over the last century.

Its name is an exercise in redundancy, inasmuch as “La Brea” means “The Tar.” But the name has, well, stuck.

The 23-acre Hancock Park, near Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, includes two museums -- the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries -- along with inviting walkways, grassy picnic areas, tar pits, a lake, viewing sites and a 150-seat red granite amphitheater.

Although the Page Museum sits alongside the art museum, it is a research and educational branch of the Natural History Museum, which is several miles away in Exposition Park.

Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the site was better known for the pioneer families who owned it and for something else that lay beneath the soil: oil.

Methane and asphalt seepage bubbled up in odd spots over a section of the 4,000-odd acres that in 1828 were deeded to Antonio Jose Rocha as Rancho La Brea. The site included the present-day exclusive neighborhood of Hancock Park. La Brea Avenue, several blocks east of the pits, runs north-south through what is roughly the middle of that original land grant.

Rocha, a Portuguese sailor, allowed local residents to continue to extract as much brea as they needed for fuel, waterproofing their roofs and canoes, and greasing wagon wheels. He himself used it in building his adobe, which stands near Farmers Market at 3rd Street and Fairfax Avenue. Early Angelenos trekked all the way from El Pueblo along La Brea Trail, now Wilshire Boulevard, for supplies of prehistoric asphalt pudding.

The tar did a fine job, except on the hottest days, when Angelenos knew not to seek shade under the eaves lest the gooey stuff drip on them.

It isn’t really tar, but that’s what Gaspar de Portola’s explorers named it in 1769 when they saw the pits on his first expedition here.

In 1860, as Rocha’s heirs waited for the U.S. Supreme Court to declare the land grant legal -- as it ultimately did -- they paid their legal expenses by selling most of the property. Major Henry Hancock and his brother, John, bought most of the rancho for $2.50 an acre.

Henry Hancock was a Harvard Law School graduate, a Mexican War veteran and a surveyor who arrived here about 1852. Under orders from the U.S. government, he mapped Los Angeles between the Pacific Ocean and the San Gabriel River. For two years’ work, he received $300, along with 35 acres for every 500 acres he surveyed.

In 1863, Hancock, 41, married Ida Haraszthy, 20 years his junior. Her father, Agoston Haraszthy, was a Hungarian count who became a state legislator from San Diego -- and a California wine visionary who imported myriad grape varieties from Europe, including Zinfandel.

In the 1870s, the Hancocks began to mine the asphalt ore, shipping it to San Francisco and selling it for $20 a ton. It was used as a preservative for pipes and railroad ties and, later, for cementing cobblestone streets.

In 1875, the same year the Hancocks’ son, George Allan Hancock, was born, thousands of tar-soaked bones -- theretofore considered a curiosity and a nuisance -- were first recognized as fossils. Hancock showed a scientist friend, William Denton, a tooth, which Denton recognized as the 11-inch “saber” of an extinct saber-toothed cat. Excited, Denton reported the find to a Boston museum, which didn’t seem to share his excitement. The tooth got little attention.

Five years later, Hancock sold 256 acres, including the Rocha adobe, to Arthur F. Gilmore, who opened a dairy farm. It would become an oil field, baseball field, football stadium, midget-car racetrack and Farmers Market.

Despite his wealth of land, Hancock was cash-poor. When he died in 1883, his family ran a truck farm, selling beans, watermelons and chiles to passersby.

It wasn’t until the turn of the century, when Gilmore was drilling for water, that the world discovered the Salt Lake Oil Field beneath the asphalt. Young George Allan Hancock signed 20-year leases allowing local oil companies to drill hundreds of wells on 1,000 acres north of the family home. He even signed on as a wildcatter to learn the ropes.

Then, with a seed loan of $10,000 from his mother, Hancock drilled his first gusher. It was so big that when he hit oil, the explosion sent neighbors running for cover. Hancock’s Rancho La Brea Oil Co. soon had 71 wells, and lots more fossils.

In 1901, William Orcutt, a well-known Los Angeles geologist, enlisted academic help and began removing and researching the fossils -- among them skulls of a saber-toothed cat, dire wolf and giant ground sloth.

John C. Merriam of UC Berkeley and some of his students uncovered and identified more fossilized remains. In 1908, Merriam published a report in a scientific journal about Rancho La Brea fossils. But it was his subsequent articles in popular magazines like Sunset and Harper’s Weekly that attracted reporters and more excavation teams.

Museums around the country wanted to share in the treasures, but the Hancocks refused, saying, “They belong to Los Angeles and must stay here.” But a biology teacher at Los Angeles High School got Hancock’s permission to take students on “digs.” They took fossil trophies back to school for display.

From 1913 to 1915, scientists from the county museum excavated more than 750,000 fossils in 96 pits, including the nearly intact 9,000-year-old skeleton of La Brea Woman.

“She was discovered 8 1/2 feet below the surface in Pit 10,” said John Harris, chief curator and head of paleontology at the Page Museum. “She’s much too old to belong to any of the known Native American tribes, and hers are the only human remains discovered here.”

She may be Los Angeles’ first homicide. Her skull, jawbone, pelvis and left femur were almost perfectly preserved by the asphalt, but her skull was crushed and her lower jaw was broken. The skull of a dog -- her pet? -- was beside her. She seemed to have been buried ceremonially.

Her remains are hidden away now, but her holographic model is a Page Museum showpiece. The museum no longer calls her a murder victim, however, acknowledging that her skull could have been damaged in an accident or after death.

The pits may yet yield more criminal evidence, but so far only one murder weapon has turned up: a .25-caliber handgun that was tossed into the muck back in the 1920s. An unfaithful wife had persuaded one of her lovers to get rid of it after another lover had killed her husband. But within a few years someone squealed; police found the gun near the surface of the water that hid the asphalt.

Not until the 1940s were fences put up, reportedly after some boys got stuck in the muck while chasing rabbits.

Over the years, the tar pits became a tourist attraction. Visitors have included regular folks here to see Hollywood, U.S. presidents, a succession of princes -- even the heir to the British throne, Charles, the Prince of Wales, who came to the museum’s opening in 1977. (This was four years before his ill-fated marriage to Princess Diana.)

George Hancock, whose fortune came from oil, real estate and banking, died at 89 in 1965, the year the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened where his family home once stood.

But it was George C. Page, who made a fortune with his Mission Pak holiday fruit boxes as well as land development, who funded the Page Museum to house tar pit treasures.