This is an adaptation of research for a piece I’ve been working on for a separate publication. In the process of writing I’ve realized this segment is better adapted as a standalone work.
Some quick advice: If you’re driving from LA to San Francisco on The Five, your last chance to get In-N-Out burger for 91 miles is at the Tejon Outlets. It's right after you exit the Tejon pass and enter the San Joaquin Valley. Be careful though, because it gets really crowded.
While the In-N-Out is vital, the accompanying sprawling mall complex, set against the equally sprawling expanse of the southern valley feels utterly inconsequential. With that familiar anywhere and nowhere feeling, the mall does little more than serve as the last piece of semi-affordable Los Angeles luxury before entering the monotonous, more nakedly extractive, landscape of the San Joaquin Valley. However, this complex and the mountain pass it serves are a territory whose history is vital to the contemporary and historic development of California.
Beginning at the northern Los Angeles exurb of Santa Clarita, Interstate Five, or “The Five” as its uniformly called by locals, enters a critical segment in its Mexico to Canada route. Climbing to over 4,000 feet above sea level in a few short minutes of driving, The Five shoots north up the Tejon Pass through the east-west aligned Transverse Mountain Ranges. Reaching its summit near the mountain town of Gorman, the route then makes a rapid snaking descent to the town of Grapevine, and the “Outlets at Tejon” at the southern base of the expansive San Joaquin Valley. Thanks to a steep grade, freezing winter storms, and its crossing of two major seismic faults, Tejon Pass presents a major hazard to the thousands of trucks that service the route. Despite its danger the pass is a critical, if vulnerable, component to the entire state economy. Absent the Tejon pass, all truck traffic between northern California and the major ports of the Los Angeles area, (the largest in the country) would be forced onto indirect and often equally dangerous routes.
Tejon pass is a vital location for California today, but even before the mass adoption of freight trucking, its various controllers have deliberately positioned it at the center of state defining projects.
Prior to European colonization Tejon Pass and the surrounding Transverse Ranges were at the overlap of a diverse array of native peoples from three separate cultural and linguistic backgrounds. California as a whole was a fairly populous region compared to the rest of the southwest with an outstandingly high degree of linguistic diversity. Like the rest of the continent, this ethnic landscape was permanently altered by European contact and conquest. In the centuries-long period of Spanish and later Mexican control, the colonial power manifested primarily in the deadly, if often romanticized system of Catholic Missions. The nearest mission sites, San Fernando, and San Buenaventura, (the namesakes of the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County respectively) were isolated to the south of the Transverse Range. Native groups east and north of the Pass avoided complete European subjugation, if not their diseases and occasional attacks. For tribes near the missions, primarily from Chumashan and Takic language groups, a combination of coercion and economic incentives drove them to pursue religious conversion in exchange for laboring on the mission in a position somewhere between medieval serfdom and slavery. Both the cultural traditions and populations of these new “Mission Indians” were severely devastated, but their resultant Christian and settled agricultural lifestyles made them more amicable in the eyes of new Anglo-American settlers, if no less vulnerable to their frequent violence.
Prior to the California Gold Rush of 1848-1855, when natives were the outstanding majority population of the state, new settlements attempted to adapt the mission system of labor to more secular Capitalist ends. The Swiss immigrant John Sutter, owner of the initial gold discovery site at his mill near Sacramento relied almost entirely on native labor. Through the assumption of existing labor obligations and the coercion of unconverted tribes, Sutter produced a system of deprivation and punishment close to the model of Southern plantation slavery. Sutter’s ambitions to grow his model colony of “New Helvetia” were largely abandoned with the immense social and labor disruption of the Gold Rush, but experimentation in forcing natives into a system of concentrated secular labor continued.
While he did not exhibit the same degree of personal cruelty as Sutter, the Swiss’s successor, Edward Fitzgerald Beale cemented an equally negative legacy as the chief architect of California’s first native reservation at Tejon Pass. A navy veteran, Beale quickly rose through the State’s economic and political ranks cozying up to the emergent Yankee land barons. His big break came with his appointment as Superintendent for Indian Affairs for California in 1853 and to Brigadier General in the State Militia a few years later. In 1854, citing the need to protect more peaceful tribes from hostile settlers and local ranchers from native and outlaw thieves, Beale urged the government to establish a fort and native reservation near Tejon pass. Beyond the obvious desire by the state to accelerate the removal of nearby native groups, particularly the Yokut of the southern San Joaquin Valley, Beale’s personal greed was a factor as well. Using state and personal funds Beale purchased a massive tract of land around the pass by combining multiple prexisting Mexican land grants, establishing the Tejon ranch. He also set about formalizing a freight service between Los Angeles and Stockton that routed that used the Pass. With an initial population of around 2,500 the Sebastian Indian Reservation attached to Fort Tejon gave Beale a functionally captive and expandable labor pool of natives to work the land of his ranch, producing immense profits. He would mirror this effort in his work to develop Fort Defiance and its reservation along the Colorado river, which again serviced his own transportation interests and holdings.
As a brief aside, Beale’s two projects converged in his support for the short lived U.S. army Camel Corps. Beginning in 1856 the army experimented in using camels to patrol the arid trails from Southern California to Texas, with Fort Tejon serving as the patrol’s western terminus and Fort Defiance a critical juncture. While the imported Egyptian herd showed great promise, the project, initially backed by Southern military commanders like Robert E. Lee, fell out of favor with the onset of the U.S. Civil War.
While natives in Beale’s proto-company-town avoided explicit slavery, conditions remained dire. Wages, if any were provided, were meager and the State increasingly shrank official reservation lands ensuring the only form of sustainment was working on the Tejon ranch. Additionally, deaths from disease and attacks by settlers diminished the population from over 2,000 to a couple hundred in a few decades. The ranch outlived the fort and reservation’s official closure in 1864, still benefiting from the labor of increasingly desperate natives. The road and ranch would begin to decline in the 1870s as railroads avoided the steep pass and settlement patterns shifted. By the 1910s the remaining native community on the land of the ranch and former reservation, known today as the Tejon tribe were evicted. The ranch was finally sold by the Beales in the late 1930s to a consortium of Los Angeles businessmen headed by (the likely subjects of future articles) the Chandler family.
Still held by that consortium today, Tejon Ranch remains the single largest private property in the state at roughly 1,000 square kilometers, about 300 larger than New York City. It boasts extensive agricultural and timber holdings and immediate access to the The Five, likely thanks to its owners substantial political influence. Already an immensely wealthy group, the ranch owners have even greater ambitions. In an evolution of Beale before them, they hope to make the next great Exurb of Los Angeles. Tejon Ranch aspires to become a grand suburb of outlet malls (already built) and luxury gated communities surrounding the high slopes of The Five. This has resulted in a decades long battle both with environmental groups and the state. The environmental opponents’ arguments are largely predictable, albeit substantive. Continued development would devastate numerous vital habitats, while putting a substantial stain on air quality and water availability. Fire is the primary concern shared by both environmentalists and the state. Any substantive blaze, not uncommon in the area, and more likely to occur with further construction, would threaten both The Five and make any housing tracts along it. With only one means of entry and exit planned for these proposed communities, they are functionally deathtraps for residents and emergency crews.
If there is one lesson to draw from my rather meandering presentation of this history, it’s that, at least in our era, no place is truly a blank slate. This isn't just a land acknowledgment accounting for past crimes against indigenous peoples, it is also a recognition that the developmental programs of past eras lay upon each other. Unless you examine this history, the world, especially in recently built out places like California, becomes an incongruously baffling environment. In this environment you’re as alienated from the struggles outside your door as you are to conflicts on the other side of the world. Whether the single largest tract of land in the region becomes a suburban hell doesn’t have to be the dictate of one amorphous corporation. The Tejon tribe continue to assert their claim to the land they worked on for almost a century. Nearby mountain and valley towns struggle to build better lives for their residents in the face of environmental crisis and economic decline. There can be a more just arrangement, and, perhaps, a few more good places to eat.