Hail to the Overdressed Hilltop Chief

Part white elephant. Part white-man whimsy. That’s Chief White Eagle for you.

The 14-foot figure of an American Indian has stood sentinel atop a rocky ledge overlooking Agoura for 64 years.

A Polish nobleman created the sculpture as a tribute to Native Americans who first inhabited the Santa Monica Mountains and its grassy valleys.

But instead of representing Chumash Indians who hunted and gathered seeds in local coastal mountains for hundreds of years, Count Jean de Strelecki’s statue was modeled after a Seminole Indian from the East Coast.

Rather than lightly clad and friendly looking, Chief White Cloud is a stern-faced warrior wearing a heavy robe and a flowing feathered headdress.

It was an honest mistake.

“He’d heard about a resort near here called Seminole Hot Springs, so he figured the Seminole Indians must have lived around here,” pioneering Agoura Postmaster Bob Boyd once said of De Strelecki.

Boyd, now deceased, was one of 20 Agoura men who in late 1939 volunteered to carry pails of wet cement up a hill to the rocky outcropping that De Strelecki called “Mt. Estrella.”

De Strelecki shaped the cement over chicken wire wrapped around discarded iron bedsprings and old automobile axles. He positioned the statue so that it faces east with its right arm raised as if greeting visitors.

The 13-ton statue’s location was appropriate.

Artifacts found in half a dozen small caves hidden in the cliff showed that the Chumash had camped beneath the outcropping, drawing water from a still-flowing spring and gathering acorns from oaks that shade the area.

According to legend, the largest of the caves -- one big enough to hold two horses -- was a hide-out for legendary bandit Joaquin Murrieta and a hiding place for stolen gold.

In the pre-freeway days, two-lane concrete Agoura Road was known as the Ventura Highway. Boyd’s post office, Ma Neale’s tiny grocery and a few other stores at its intersection with Lewis Road formed the center of town for its 200 residents.

The area had been part of a 16,880-acre sheep ranch owned by Basque Frenchman Pierre Agoure in the late 1800s. Rancher George Lewis operated it between 1901 and 1924, when brothers Leon and Ira Colodny subdivided it into $800 per-acre parcels they called “Independence Acres.”

The tiny town was briefly called Picture City because of nearby movie studio back lots before the name was changed in 1927 to Agoura when residents petitioned for a post office. Although some say the “e” in Pierre Agoure’s name was dropped by postal officials for ease of pronunciation, Postmaster Boyd always contended it was because of a government typo.

It was against that backdrop that De Strelecki passed through Agoura in the early 1930s and promptly became enchanted with the place.

De Strelecki at the time was a well-known artist who was prominent in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara social circles. After acquiring several lots that included the rocky outcropping, he built a sprawling, arch-accented home and studio he called “Villa Mt. Estrella” that featured a huge cooking oven similar to those he remembered from his native Poland.

Soon, he was attracting other Polish expatriates to Agoura, including Prince Leonidas Dudarew-Ossetynski, an internationally known writer-director-actor whose title came from his family’s Russian roots. He and wife Elizabeth Ossetynska opened a Polish restaurant called Wilno, which attracted Hollywood stars such as Poland-born silent-screen vamp Pola Negri to Agoura. Elizabeth Ossetynska Hughes later became Agoura’s first female real estate agent and helped bring piped-in water to the growing community.

According to Las Virgenes Historical Society documents, De Strelecki first placed a stone marker on the rocky hilltop honoring “brush fire victim Ray Taylor,” who was killed fighting an Agoura blaze in November 1930.

The Indian was his greatest hilltop memorial, however.

Native American actors Iron Eyes Cody, a Cherokee, and Jay Silverheels, a Mohawk, visited Mt. Estrella and placed their handprints in wet cement during the statue’s construction. More than 30 Indians from several tribes were in the crowd when the statue was unveiled May 5, 1940. The Chumash in the crowd politely kept their surprise to themselves when De Strelecki pulled away a canvas cloth that covered the headdress-clad figure, according to Boyd.

An account of the ceremony published the next day by The Times included a photograph of a proud De Strelecki standing next to the statue during what was described as “a picturesque program.” After an invocation, there were talks by a representative of the Los Angeles Museum and music by singers from the Metropolitan Opera Company and a string ensemble, the report noted.

De Strelecki’s money ran out before he could build a planned observatory on the hill above the statue. The artist himself was killed in a car crash and his villa was later destroyed by another Agoura brush fire, according to Mary Sears King, who purchased the property in 1948.

When King sold the land, she made a point of making it “a condition of the escrow that the Indian was not to be removed or torn down.” But, as she acknowledged in a 1986 memo to the historical society before her death, “being hindsight is so much better than foresight, I should have reserved that little bit of ground it stood on.”

The hilltop was flattened and Ray Taylor’s memorial marker was bulldozed up in 1980 by a developer preparing pads for 10 homes. Another development company took over the property and in the mid-1980s ran into trouble with the newly incorporated city of Agoura Hills when it tried to shoehorn houses beneath the rocky cliff. Exasperated, one company official threatened to “paint the Indian statue black” to signify “mourning for Agoura Hills.”

Responding to the dispute, Agoura-area water district director Tad Mattock, now of Camarillo, led an ill-fated campaign to have the land around the statue designated a city park. Mattock explained he had a personal attachment to De Strelecki’s work because of his own Polish heritage.

A statue preservation plan was worked out in 1990 when the city and developers agreed that future owners of land beneath the statue must either maintain it or grant the city a 20-foot access easement so municipal crews can repair and repaint it.

For the past 1 1/2 years, homeowners Donna and Scott Sava have owned the statue. They say they are uncertain whether it will be up to them or to city workers to repaint Chief White Eagle when his mauve robe and black-and-white headdress fade.

“Until we find out, we’re just basically watching over it,” said Scott Sava, an animation studio owner.

“I’m an artist myself. But I don’t necessarily want to climb up and paint it.”