SANTA CRUZ ISLAND
While traversing the shore of Santa Bárbara channel, the Portolá expedition of 1769 took time to make trips to the islands and bestow names upon them. The island of Santa Cruz received its name from a rather trivial circumstance. By some chance the padres lost there a staff which bore a cross on the end. They gave it up as irretrievably lost, so were the more pleased when the Indians appeared the following day to restore it. From this they gave the island the name of Santa Cruz (Holy Cross).
RANCHERÍA DE LA ESPADA
Of the Ranchería de la Espada (village of the sword), Captain Fages, of the Portolá expedition says: “Two and a half leagues northwest of Point Conception, another glen is found with a population of twenty hearths, with 250 Indians, more or less. The natives of the settlement here are extremely poor and starved, so that they can scarcely live, being without canoes, in rugged land, and short of firewood. While here a soldier lost his sword, leaving it carelessly fastened, so that they took it from his belt. But the Indians who saw this theft themselves ran in pursuit of the thief, and deprived him of the article in order that its owner might recover it.” From this the place received the name of the Ranchería de la Espada, and the little story is still commemorated in the name of Espada Landing.
MATILIJA
Matilija Creek and Matilija Springs, in Ventura County, derive their name from an Indian village, one of those mentioned in the mission archives. The name is best known as applied to the Matilija poppy, that flower of the gods which has its native habitat along the banks of the creek. This giant poppy, by reason of its extraordinary size and delicate beauty, has a just claim to be called “queen of all California’s wild flowers,” as the Sequoia is king of her trees. It is a perennial plant, of shrubby character, and grows wild in the southern part of the state, from the Santa María River southward, extending into Lower California, where it spreads over large areas. It flourishes in particular luxuriance in the Matilija canyon, but the popular idea that that spot was its only habitat is erroneous. The shrub reaches a height of eight or ten feet, has gray-green foliage, and bears splendid, six-petaled white flowers, often six or seven inches in diameter, “of a crepe-like texture, pure glistening white, with bright yellow centers.” “It not only grows in fertile valleys, but seeks the seclusion of remote canyons, and nothing more magnificent could be imagined than a steep canyon-side covered with the great bushy plants, thickly covered with the enormous white flowers.”—(Miss Parsons, quoted by J. Burt Davy, in Bailey’s Cyclopedia of American Horticulture.)
POINT PEDERNALES
Captain Fages, of the Portolá party, says of this place: “Going two leagues through high land, and with a good outlook over the sea-coast, a flowing stream appears, with very good water, and near it a poor settlement of only ten houses, probably numbering about sixty inhabitants, crowded together. We stopped at the place near where a strip or point of land extends to the sea. There we gathered a multitude of flints, good for fire-arms, and so this place is called Los Pedernales (the flints).”
Point Pedernales still remains as the name of “that point of land extending into the sea,” a few miles north of Point Conception.