How long have you been in Topanga? It’s a frequent question but a mostly meaningless one. A single visit may be enough to make one fall in love with the canyon for life; while some, even if they have lived here for years, may never really see the things that make this place special to others. One thing, however, is true: the only people with any real claim to the title “Topanga Native” would be the descendants of the Tongva and Chumash people for whom this was native land. Topanga is home to one of the oldest Native American cultural heritage sites in the Santa Monica Mountains. Organic material excavated at the “Tank Site,” now part of Topanga State Park, has been carbon dated to more than 6,000 years BCE. Compared to that, the rest of us are just newcomers, no matter how long we’ve been here.
The first European and Mexican settlers didn’t arrive until the nineteenth century. Much of the California coast was carved into land grants by the Spanish and then the Mexican governors of California. The first grants were more like free leases than outright gifts. Under Spanish rule, private land ownership was not permitted. The local Spanish land grants included Rancho Las Virgenes, 17,760 acres in what is now Agoura Hills and Calabasas, granted to Miguel Ortega in 1802; and Topanga Malibu Sequit, 13,000 acres granted to José Bartolomé Tapia in 1804, now the city of Malibu.
After Mexico broke away from Spain, land grants went from being long-term leases to becoming actual land ownership agreements. Mexican land grants in the Topanga area included the Boca de Santa Monica, awarded in 1839.
Although land grants surrounded Topanga, they did not include the canyon, which remained a sort of no-man’s land. It is estimated that as much as 90 percent of the Chumash population died during the first years of the Spanish occupation. The Tongva people also experienced catastrophic population loss. When California became part of the United States in 1849 Topanga was largely uninhabited and it stayed that way, despite passage of the U.S. government’s Land Act of 1862, which opened surveyed public lands that had previously belonged to Native Americans to any homesteader willing to file a claim, pay a small fee and make improvements. If at the end of five years, the claimant could show that they had met the requirements they could file for a land patent, or deed.
Many parts of the West experienced land rushes after the act was passed, but not Topanga. The remoteness and steepness of the terrain may have protected this area from all but the most determined. Today, Topanga is perched on the edge of one of the largest American cities. In 1862, the population of Los Angeles was barely more than 4,000. Los Angeles County was home to just 11,333, and the entire population of California was only around 400,000. It wasn’t until the more accessible and desirable land was all snapped up and the population of Los Angeles rapidly expanding that settlers looked to stake a claim in Topanga.
The earliest Topanga homesteaders on record were Jesus and Elena Santa Maria, who arrived in 1880. Manuela and Francisco Trujillo were the next to arrive in 1886. For the next five years these two families were almost entirely on their own.
Christopher Columbus “Mose” Cheney and his wife Lucy arrived in 1891 and staked a claim on 160 acres. Their son Arthur was born in the canyon in 1894.
Claude Morton Allen arrived in 1893. He made a living in the early years cutting the oaks that grew on his claim and selling fire wood. His sister Stella and her husband Fred McAllister, eventually joined him, but in those early years he was alone.
Several of the earliest Topanga homesteaders, including Jesus Santa Maria, came alone to scout the territory long before they staked a claim, and then set to work clearing the land and building a shelter before bringing their families out to what was essentially wilderness. Wives, children, parents and siblings joined them once some improvements had been made and the claim was secure.
The first homesteaders had no roads, no neighbors, and no infrastructure beyond a rough track over Santa Maria Canyon and down into the valley. Settlers had to be self-sufficient and ready to cope with everything from winter flooding to the wells and springs running dry in summer, and from snake bites to broken bones and childbirth.
Getting goods in and out of the canyon was an arduous task. There was no one to help if a horse became lame or a wagon broke an axle. A trip into town could take days. The Topanga Historical Society’s indispensable history book, The Topanga Story, recounts how Claude Allen— known as “Mort”—freighted his firewood over Santa Maria Canyon into the valley in a horse cart. If he couldn’t sell it in the scattered farm communities there, he would undertake an arduous trek over the Cahuenga pass into Los Angeles. The intrepid Lucy Cheney is said to have been one of the first to drive a horse-drawn wagon down the canyon to the coast before it became a stagecoach route in 1898.
It’s hard to visualize just how remote and rugged life in Topanga was before the advent of the road in 1915, but the federal census records help provide some of the details on the Canyon’s population during the homestead period. What is now Topanga is only identified as “Calabasas Township” on the 1900 census. The inhabitants of the community called it “Garapatas,” or “Garapatos” for Garapito Creek, the upper tributary of Topanga Creek, where many of the early homesteads were located (the name is derived either from “el garapito,” the Spanish word for the water strider insect, or from “la garrapata,” the Spanish word for tick, but either way, the etymology is rooted in entomology).
The population of Garapato in 1900 was around 100 people, give or take a few. The Santa Maria family had ten children at the time—the youngest was just one month old and didn’t have his name yet. This one family was fully ten percent of the population.
Topanga pioneer Joe Robison is in the 1900 census, with his older brother William. The Greenleaf family are here, too—Charles and Lucy, and their daughters Mabel and Bessie. The Santa Marias, Cheneys, Robisons, and Greenleafs are remembered in the place names associated with their homesteads, but most of the people who carved a life for themselves out of the mountains in those early years are forgotten.
Farmer is the most common profession in the 1900 census, followed by “wood chopper” and “wood hauler.” Morton Allen was one. His sister Stella and her husband Fred had not yet joined him in 1900.
There were only a few farm hands—most families couldn’t afford help. However, the Lewing family farm employed a cook—Sarah Couch, who was 44 and born in Arkansas. A man named George Rowley also had a cook: Antone Rose, born in Portugal. The Trujillo family had both a hired man and a boarder—the first on record, but not the last.
Among the farmers and woodchoppers and farm hands and cooks, one William Landing stands out. His profession is given as “miner (gold)”.
A number of the earliest Topanga homesteaders, like Jesus Santa Maria and Francisco Trujillo, were born in Mexico. Others, including Anton Leuthier, or Luther, came from Germany. There are a few from England, France and Canada, and one from Ireland, but the vast majority of these first Topanga homesteaders came west from other states or moved to the Topanga area from other parts of California.
The population in 1910 was around 150. Some of that number represents the growing families of the first homesteaders. Topanga farm children attended school in the little red one-room school house by Garapatis Creek and helped with the chores at home.
Names like “Topanga Canyon” and “Santa Maria Canyon” are now on the record, when before there were no real street names, but Topanga is still part of “Calabasas Township.”.
Farming remained the main profession in the canyon in 1910, but now there was a plumber, a postal clerk, and a superintendent of the water company. Francis (Francisca) Santa Maria, who was just six in 1900, was now 16 and listed as an artist instead of as a school girl. There were more ranch hands in 1910 than in 1901, reflecting the growing prosperity in the canyon. Several of the ranches even had foremen. Joe Robison’s brother has moved on, but Joe is listed with his wife and their two-year-old daughter in this census.
There were new homesteaders, too, including Lametta Le Croq and her 14-year-old niece Albana, immigrants from Austria who were homesteading in Topanga on their own. Lametta’s profession is given as “rancher.” German-born August Schmidt and his son Paul, also new arrivals, were prospecting for a different kind of gold than William Landing. Their profession is listed as “bee.” The 1910 census also records the presence of Topanga’s first entertainment industry professional: Edward Allen Templar, an English-born singer who is listed as being on the “stage.”
Landing, the gold miner, isn’t in the 1910 census, but Mort Allen is still there, along with his sister, Stella McAllister. She arrived between the two censuses and opened Topanga’s first boarding house and restaurant, the Topanga Tavern, in 1908. Stella’s husband Fred died not long after their move to the canyon. Stella soldiered on without him. It was a hard life, but she was a strong and determined woman with a good head for business.
Topanga was still primarily an agricultural community in 1920, but things were already changing. The automobile brought tourism and made this once remote community much more accessible. The paved canyon road was completed in 1915. The change that it brought was already evident in the 1920 census.
The population had more than doubled from the 1910 count. It included highway laborers, oil well drillers, truck and tractor drivers, a mail carrier, and even a few retired people. Mose Cheney has ceded the title “head of household” to his son George, who is now married, with a son of his own. Stella is still here, only now she is a hotelier. The German beekeepers are here, too, and they too have come up in the word, with apiaries instead of just “bees.”
The census records are imperfect. Not every census taker had good penmanship or spelling skills. Some records are incomplete. The 1890 census is missing—most of it burned in a 1921 fire at the Commerce Department.
Not everyone was counted, despite the best efforts of the census takers, and in a place like Topanga, it’s easy to imagine there were omissions: homesteaders and hermits who lived down rough tracks or up steep ravines, people who may have lived here in the years between the census, and squatters and traveling folk who didn’t stay anywhere long.
There are stories about people who aren’t recorded in the census, like a man named Simonds who is said to be the first resident of what is now the Post Office Tract and who was thrown from his horse when the creek was running high and drowned, or Alma Pitlinzer, reported in the gossip column of the San Francisco Examiner to have been a Cincinnati socialite who was jilted at the altar and fled to the wilds of Topanga for solace.
The census is not a definitive record, but it does provide both a snapshot of the lives of the people who lived here, and a way to track some of them over time. Reading between those often hard to read lines with their prosaic statistics one gains a glimpse into other lives and the joys and sorrows of the people who lived them: births, deaths, professions. Lives the world has mostly forgotten. There’s an important message among those dry and dusty pages: it doesn’t matter how long one is here; it matters what one does with that time.
