The Bixby Land, From Tongva Territory to Long Beach Zip Code

Two adobe buildings survive from the rancho era in what is now Long Beach. They sit a mile and a half apart, both open to the public as house museums, both carefully maintained, both telling versions of the same story. The story they tell, and the story that surrounds them, are not quite identical.

The land began as Tongva territory. For thousands of years, the coastal plain that would become Long Beach was occupied by the Tongva people, its villages, trading routes, and gathering grounds woven into a landscape they had shaped over generations. In seventeen eighty-four, Manuel Nieto received a grant of one hundred sixty-seven thousand acres from the Spanish Crown, in recognition of his military service, about fifteen years after the Gaspar de Portola expedition. After Nieto's death, Mexican authorities partitioned the grant into five separate ranchos. For several decades, the ranchos operated as cattle operations, supplying hides to the hide-trade ships that worked the California coast.

Then came the drought of eighteen sixty-three and sixty-four. Two years without rain collapsed the cattle economy across Southern California. Rancho families who could not service their debts lost their land to Yankee investors who had the cash and the legal infrastructure to acquire it at distressed prices. The Flint-Bixby Company purchased Rancho Los Cerritos in eighteen sixty-six. The Bixby family's landholdings became so extensive, and their presence in the development of this part of California so pervasive, that their name became a geography: Bixby Hill, Bixby Knolls, Bixby Village in Long Beach, and Bixby Creek Bridge far up the coast in Big Sur, built through land the family helped develop.

The two adobe houses are genuinely beautiful. They preserve a real period of California history. What they do not usually name is what came before the Spanish grant, and what the grant displaced. The Tongva territory under the subdivision is a different story, told in a different building, at institutions that specialize in it.