History
For geologic epochs the river ran freely across arid grasslands and through riparian zones and extensive marshes to the Pacific Ocean, flooding in the winter and spring then running nearly dry in the summer and fall. Once out of the mountains, the river's course would change frequently with every heavy inundation. Sometimes, the river would change course to run into the Los Angeles River in the west, and sometimes the Santa Ana River's floodwaters would travel westwards into the San Gabriel from Santa Ana Canyon.
The San Gabriel River basin was historically part of the homeland, for over 8,000 years, of the Tongva—Gabrieleño Native American people. Together with the Los Angeles and Santa Ana Rivers, the San Gabriel River provided sustenance for thousands of members of this powerful coastal tribe whose territory extended across the entire Los Angeles basin, San Fernando Valley, and Channel Islands. The Tongva had permanent settlements and temporary hunting and foraging camps in their territory.
In 1771, the Spanish invaded and founded Mission San Gabriel Arcángel which was originally built on the banks of the Rio Hondo, a tributary of the San Gabriel River in the Whittier Narrows, in 1771. After being flooded in 1776 it was relocated to the location, now in the present day City of San Gabriel. The river's Spanish name is from the mission's. The Spanish colonizers also renamed the Tongva people, as the Gabrieleño Mission Indians after they were relocated to the mission.
After California was admitted to the United States in 1850, the Pueblo de Los Angeles founded in 1781, grew into the City of Los Angeles. In this period, agriculture and ranching, on the lands of the former Spanish and Mexican land grant Ranchos, were the primary economy of the San Gabriel River basin. When the railroads arrived, and especially after the Los Angeles Aqueduct began service in 1913, the development booms in the basin expanded greatly, creating many of the towns and cities that now line the San Gabriel River. Some were named after their founders and others, such as Azusa, derived from the location's Tongva language settlement placename, although the contemporary motto of that city is "everything from 'A' to 'Z' in the 'USA'."
Read more about this topic: San Gabriel River (California)
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“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)