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Adrien Machefert (Artist), "Life and Travels of Richard Henry Dana,
Jr.” mural portraying early San Pedro and its harbor activity, c. 1939
Courtesy
Los Angeles Public Library, Works Progress Administration Collection
|
On October 8, 1542, the Portuguese explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed into a natural harbor and marshland at the northwestern end of San Pedro Bay. He called it Bahia de Los Fumas (Bay of Smokes) for the smoke rising from the surrounding hillsides where Native Americans hunted.
So began the area’s historic road to becoming the nation’s
preeminent port. The pathways on this road were many, some smooth, others
uncertain, and some treacherous. From Cabrillo’s “discovery,” to Spanish
settlement in 1769, to settlement surges during the Mexican and American eras,
to becoming Los Angeles’s official port in 1897, opportunities in pleasure and
tourism, industry and commerce inspired many.
In this post, we look at aspects of
the port’s history through a quieter lens, the place where the hermit fisherman
Tommy Leggett made his home.
Inspired by the photograph below, the
following essay was written by Shelly Kale, CHS's Publications and Strategic Projects Manager, for publication in the forthcoming issue of California History 94, no. 4 (Winter
2018), © 2018 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission. The author has
further illustrated it to provide a visual sense of time and place. California History is published by the
University of California Press in association with the California Historical
Society.
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Helen Lukens Jones (Photographer), San Pedro Fisherman, c. 1900
California Historical Society, California Counties Photography Collection
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“A
hermit’s life is one shifted by the tide of progress.”1
This photograph, made at San Pedro Bay around the turn of
the twentieth century, depicts the solitary fisherman, surrounded and nourished
by the ocean’s bounty. The clutter of accoutrements of life at sea—nets, ropes,
barrels, the catch of the day—nearly dominate the scene. Ocean and sky reflect
a peaceful allure.
The fisherman appears as a bridge between the land on which
he works and sea and sky. A close-up might show the customary signs of his
vocation: a face deeply lined and tanned from exposure to salt and sun, hands
calloused or hardened from working ropes and nets. Yet, his position in the
photograph is critical to the seascape, anchoring our eye as if to emphasize
the scene’s human element. Sitting on a jetty, corncob pipe in mouth, he cleans
his catch with seeming disregard of time in an idyllic partnership with the
sea.
As the
nineteenth century came to a close, however, the San Pedro mainland and bay
islands were not the same places of “peace and refuge”—as Los Angeles Harbor
historian Geraldine Knatz describes them—of only a few decades earlier.2 The
area was, in historian William Deverell’s words, one of “breathtaking coastal
beauty and the site of ruthless
industrial ambition.”3 Here humans led the inevitable march of
progress to today’s super-port complex of Los Angeles/Long Beach, with the
largest volume of commerce in the United States, importing an estimated $200
billion of cargo each year.4
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David Deis (Cartographer), Tongva
Sites of Los Angeles (detail showing San Pedro Bay)
Published in
Patricia Akida, ed., LAtitudes:
an Angeleno’s Atlas (Heyday, 2015)
Courtesy
https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/tongva-sites-of-los-angeles |
The transformation, of course, is inscribed in the region’s
human history. Native Americans found abundance here, establishing villages
from Redondo Beach (Engnovangna) to San Pedro (Harasagna, Ataviangana,
Xujungna) to Alamitos Bay (Puvungna).5 As early as 1850, when
California achieved statehood, San Pedro merchants eager for economic
development requested that Congress establish San Pedro Bay as an official Port
of Entry.6 San Pedro’s incorporation as a city in 1888; selection in
1897 as the official Los Angeles-area port (following the decade-long “Free
Harbor Fight” with Santa Monica Bay); incorporation into Los Angeles in 1909;
the port’s role in commerce and industry during two world wars and the
post-World War II boom and the onset of the container age in the 1960s—all are
signposts along the road to the port’s national preeminence by the turn of the
twenty-first century.7
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Detail, Port of Los Angeles Petition,
1850
Courtesy Los Angeles City Archives
|
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Letter, John Temple to U.S. State
Senator Thomas Hart Benton, May 27, 1850
Letter
accompanying a petition to Congress to make the Port of San Pedro a Port of
Entry
Courtesy Los Angeles City Archives
“Los Angeles Harbor, 1930—with
tonnage second only to New York Harbor”
California Historical Society
Collections at the University of Southern California
|
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U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Map of
Port Facilities at Los Angeles, Calif., 1967
Courtesy Los Angeles Archivists
Collective
|
And what of the hermit’s life during this “tide of
progress”? Writer and amateur photographer Helen Lukens Jones’s photograph
above of fisherman Thomas (Tommy) Leggett cleaning his catch of crabs—perhaps
on the old East Jetty in East San Pedro on Rattlesnake (later Terminal)
Island—provides no visible clue.8 But we know that he occupied
various squatters’ shacks around the bay, beginning with Mormon Island in 1876.
There he lived in the old “Parson’s House,” a squatter’s claim owned by Captain
Albert A. Polhemus.9 According to David E. Hughes, ranking civilian
engineer at the Los Angeles Engineer District in the first half of the
twentieth century, the house was “in the way of repairing scows, so one evening
when he [Leggett] came in from fishing he found his shack on Terminal
[Rattlesnake] Island, instead of Mormon Is, but was soothed by offer of wood
and water.”10
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Detail, Topographic map, San Pedro
Bay, 1894
California Topographic Maps, University of
Texas at Austin, University of Texas Libraries
|
Despite the insecurities of a squatter’s life, Leggett was,
as his island squatter neighbor and friend Charles Fletcher Lummis wrote, “one
of the gentlest, most unselfish, and most lovable of neighbors.”11
Lummis was one of the over 100 residents from the 1880s to the 1910s who made
Terminal Island home, squatting in his beloved harbor cabin the Jib-O-Jib.12
He provided care for “Uncle Tommy” prior to his death and as the administrator
of Leggett’s estate, arranged for his funeral and the sale of his belongings
(two shotguns, a rifle, a stove, a lamp, a few saws, nets, skiffs, sail, and
mast, among few other articles), and notified family members across the
Atlantic.13
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Charles
F. Lummis (Photographer), The Jib-O-Jib, 1908
(printed mid-1900s)
Braun Research Library
Collection, Autry Museum of the American West
Gift of Mr. Charles F. Lummis, P.15607
|
Leggett
lived on Rattlesnake Island in the 1880s (his residence appears on an 1885 map)
and at Timms’ Point in San Pedro.14 At the end of the decade, he was
evicted from that residence and returned to Rattlesnake (then Terminal) Island,
where he died on July 14, 1909. During his nearly thirty years at the harbor,
he would see the San Pedro coastline burst with commercial fishing vessels; the
growth of shipping and railroad infrastructure, businesses, and homes; and the
construction of the Port of Los Angeles. In the year of his death,
consolidation with the City of Los Angeles would intensify the area’s
transformation, bringing city services to San Pedro and funding for further
harbor development.
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Hansen & Solano, Map of a Part of
the Rattlesnake Island (details) showing “Leggit” residence (top of detail at
right), October 27, 1885
|
 |
F.
H. Maude, Pacific Stereopticon Co., Lantern slide of fishing fleets at Terminal Island, 1900s
Braun Research Library
Collection, Autry Museum of the American West,
LS.13664
|
To Leggett it must have
appeared that the world had rushed in to San Pedro Bay, but this writer is
convinced that, as much as possible, he would have maintained the seafaring
routine for which he was known: “Tommy lived by his wits, and sustained himself
by the bounty of the sea,” Geraldine Knatz has written, “At night he would take
his boat out for a 10- to 12-mile run, dragging his nets, getting back early
the next morning. He scraped by, earning a few dollars here or there, selling
fish and investing it in nets. That didn’t set too well with the Department of
Fish and Game, who issued a complaint against him in February 1900 for fishing
without a license. Hermits just don’t get fishing licenses.”15
 |
Charles F. Lummis (Photographer), Thomas Leggett, May 21, 1909
Braun Research Library
Collection, Autry Museum
of the American West,
Gift of Mr. Charles F. Lummis, P.32473
|
NOTES
The author thanks Geraldine Knatz, PhD, former executive
director of the Port of Los Angeles, and Liza Posas, head librarian and
archivist of the Autry Museum’s Braun Research Library, for their research assistance.
1. Geraldine
Knatz, “The Hermits of Terminal Island—Part 1: The Tale of Tommy Leggett,” Historical Archives at the Port of Los
Angeles, September 23, 2015; Portlaarchives, https://portlaarchives.wordpress.com/2013/09/05/the-hermits-of-terminal-island-part-i-the-tale-of-tommy-leggett/, accessed October 5, 2017.
2.
Naomi Hirahara and Geraldine Knatz,
Terminal Island: Lost Communities of Los Angeles Harbor (Los Angeles: Angel
City Press, 2015), 21.
3.
Ibid., 9–10, 19.
4.
James Preston Allen, “A Long Journey from Brighton Beach,” Random Lengths News, August 15, 2015; http://www.randomlengthsnews.com/2015/08/a-long-journey-from-brighton-beach, accessed
October 5, 2017.
5.
L. J. Weinman and E. G. Stickel, Los Angeles-Long Beach Harbor Areas Cultural Resource Survey (Los
Angeles: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, April 1978).
6.
Henry P. Silka, San Pedro: A
Pictorial History (Los Angeles: San Pedro Bay Historical Society, 1984).
Although the designation finally was granted in 1853, the San Pedro port would
never compete with San Francisco, the state’s first official Port of Entry,
where the “world rushed in” during the Gold Rush.
7.
Accounts of the port’s history include William
F. Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910 (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1994) and “The Los Angeles ‘Free Harbor Fight,’”
California History 70, no. 1 (Spring
1991): 12–29; J. M. Guinn, “The Lost Islands of San Pedro,” Annual Publication of the Historical Society
of Southern California 10, no. 1/2 (1915–1916): 95–100; Anna Marie Hager,
“A Salute to the Port of Los Angeles from Mud Flats to Modern Day Miracle,” California Historical Society Quarterly
49, no. 4 (December 1970): 329–335;
Los Angeles Harbor Department, The Port
of Los Angeles: From Wilderness to World Port (Los Angeles: Los Angeles
Harbor Department, 1983); Charles F. Quenan, Long Beach and Los Angeles: A Tale of Two Ports (Northridge, CA:
Windsor Publications, 1986).
8.
San Pedro was part of the first Spanish land grant
in California. In 1784, King Carlos III granted 75,000-acres to Juan Jose
Dominguez, a retired Spanish soldier. The
Spanish named Rattlesnake Island La Isla de la Culebra de Cascabel (Isle of the
Snake of the Rattle) for its large number of rattlesnakes. When the island was
purchased from the Dominguez heirs in 1891 by the Terminal Company, it was
renamed Terminal Island on the expectation that it would become the terminus
for a rail route from Utah to Los Angeles.
See Guinn, “The Lost Islands of San Pedro,” 98–99; Hirahara and Knatz, Terminal Island, 30–35.
9.
Geraldine Knatz, “The Capture of Mormon Island,” History of the Port of Los Angeles,
unpublished manuscript, 2017.
10.
Hughes, D. E., Memorandum on Resurvey of Mormon Island, July 4,
1916, David E. Hughes Papers (1880–1942),
University of California Riverside, Box 1, Item 7, in email correspondence from
Geraldine Knatz to the author, October 3, 2017. The memorandum includes
handwritten addenda dated May 26, 1930. In his
capacity as civilian engineer, Hughes built breakwaters and fortifications for
Los Angeles-Long Beach Harbor.
11.
Hirahara and Knatz, Terminal Island,
67.
12.
Holly Rose Larson, “The Dear Old
Jib-O-Jib (Squatters at the Harbor),” https://autrylibraries.wordpress.com/2011/01/20/the-dear-old-jib-o-jib-squatters-at-the-harbor/, accessed
October 1, 2017.
13.
Charles Fletcher Lummis Papers, 1888–1928, Braun Research Library Collection, Autry
National Center, Los Angeles, CA; MS.1.
14.
Hirahara and Knatz, Terminal Island,
21–22.
15.
Knatz, “The Hermits of Terminal Island.”
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