Santa Catalina Island: Aztecs Are Gone and So Is Sugarloaf Rock

By STEWART SLAVIN

Did you know the birthplace of the Aztec civilization was Santa Catalina Island where the buffalo roam?

You’d be forgiven if you didn’t.

In September 1899, both the Chicago Sunday Tribune and St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran banner headlines declaring the discovery.

“After nearly 400 years of patient search, the home of the Aztecs has been discovered. It was the island of Santa Catalina, 30 miles off the coast of Southern California,” the Post-Dispatch announced. “From there, they journeyed into Mexico where they lived for centuries, until their power was destroyed with their civilization by the Spaniards in the 16th century.”

The “discovery” was credited to Dr. Charles W. Zaremba of Illinois, described as an antiquarian and profound student of ancient American history who spent 20 years traveling in Mexico.

“His Polish name and title is Count Zaremba Kalinowsky. One of his ancestors was the King of Poland. The great Pulaski was his grand uncle,” the newspaper noted.

Evidence for his claims was the matching of key geologic formations on Catalina to pictures found on parchment and deerskins drawn by Aztecs some 600 years prior. The natural formations on Catalina were known as Arch Rock, Eagle’s Nest and Sugarloaf Rock at the northern end of Avalon Bay.

“Arch rock and Eagle’s Nest, as photographed on Santa Catalina Island, show exact likenesses to an arched rock with an Aztec warrior standing below, of which the Aztecs left pictures in numerous places in their hieroglyphic histories,” the Chicago Tribune wrote.

“The Sugar Loaf of Santa Catalina in appearance is the same as that pictured by the Aztecs on many coats of arms,” the newspaper continued. “They carried the impression of that strange rock with them, and in many of their cities today it is to be found combined with other figures as a sign of the place of their nativity.”

Now it must be noted here that there is no other reference to this discovery that I could find in my investigation. In fact, there is no confirmation that Aztlan, or the land of origin of the Aztecs, has ever been located and it may be a mythical place like Atlantis.

What is known is that Catalina Island is not 30 miles off the coast as mentioned in the story, nor 26 miles as described in the Four Preps’ 1958 hit song 26 miles (Santa Catalina). The song’s composer, Bruce Belland, explained: “It’s really like 22.3 miles, but you try singing that. Think about that meter!”

And, as the Aztecs are gone from the island, if they ever were there, so too has Sugarloaf Rock left the landscape.

The volcanic monolith that rose 50 feet in height was once the most recognizable landmark on the island and became a tourist attraction in the 1890s with visitors braving a dangerous climb to the top. The rock had previously been a survey station starting in 1856.

Each Fourth of July, a fireworks show turned Sugarloaf into an erupting Mount Vesuvius with its summit ablaze and fiery hues of red, white and blue streaming down its sides.

A staircase was soon built onto the rock — named after Mount Sugarloaf in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — to help climbers get to the top. But getting down from the promontory proved more difficult than going up and the town’s children would often charge climbers to help in their descent.

Sentential rock, as guidebooks called it, harbored a crystal-clear marine wonderland of brightly colored sealife, including striking tangerine-colored garibaldi, that elicited oohs and aahs from passengers aboard the world’s first glass bottom boats.

But all good things must come to an end and sometimes ancient landmarks have to give way to modern ones. Sugarloaf Rock went out with a bang.

Chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr., who bought the island in 1919, always had a love-hate relationship with the rock. He built the iconic Catalina Casino right next to it in Art Deco style rising 12 stories high and featuring the world’s largest circular ballroom that could accommodate 6,000 dancers.

Big Band leaders Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and Les Brown and His Band of Renown were headliners there. During the 1930s and ’40s, crowds arrived on steamships, including the S.S. Catalina, to shimmy on the dance floor until 1 a.m. to the sounds of the “Chattanooga Choo Choo” or “In the Mood”.

The Avalon Theater on the ground floor is the first ever built specifically for “talkies”. The acoustics are so good that a voice without amplification can be heard throughout the theater. The Casino has never been used for gambling, however, with the name derived from the Italian word for “social gathering place”.

Although the Casino is surrounded on three sides by water, Sugarloaf Rock blocked patrons’ view of the harbor and of the steamships carrying visitors from the mainland. This irked Wrigley and in 1929 on his orders, the landmark monolith was blasted into oblivion by dynamite.

Actually, Wrigley had built an earlier casino on the spot but found it too small for the growing tourist trade on the island. An avid bird watcher with his wife, Ada, Wrigley had the octagonal steel frame of the dance pavilion at the old casino dismantled and hauled inland where it became part of the world’s largest bird park. The attraction in Avalon Canyon covered seven and a half acres and was home to nearly 8,000 birds from all over the globe.

Catalina is an island of firsts. Big game sportfishing was also born here.

In 1898, the Avalon Tuna Club was established that attracted the membership of U.S. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William McKinley and Grover Cleveland, as well as notables like Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill, Cecile B. DeMille, Charlie Chaplin and Bing Crosby. They went after trophy-size yellowfin and bluefin tuna, marlin, swordfish, calico bass and others species.

Zane Grey, the author of Westerns who made a home on Catalina, battled five hours aboard his 50-foot fishing boat Gladiator, equipped with a crow’s nest, to bring in a world-record broadbill swordfish weighing 582 pounds. Grey had quit the Tuna Club because rules stipulated the use of light tackle for big game fish while he pressed for heavier gear.

On another occasion, Grey brought in a monster sunfish tipping the scales at more than 2,000 pounds and displayed it at the pleasure pier at Avalon to the amazement of thousands of visitors.

Winston Churchill was wearing a three-piece suit, bow tie and puffing away on a cigar in 1929 when he hooked a 188-pound striped marlin an hour out from Catalina and landed it 24 minutes later.

Catalina also boasts flying fish that can soar 50 feet above the water for distances of several thousand feet, enthralling visitors as they pass by their boats coming to the island. These fish actually don’t fly, but glide after leaping from the sea. Their fairylike gossamer wings are long fins that spread horizontally from their bluish bodies like glider wings.

On land, Catalina features a wide array of wildlife over its 76 square miles, from the Santa Catalina Island fox and mule deer to wild boar, mountain goats and the northern elephant seal.

But most amazing are the buffalo that roam the island from its lowest point on volcanic mounds lining the shore at China Point to its highest on Mount Orizaba, rising 2,097 feet above sea level.

Just how did the American bison get to the island?

We caught up with cowboy Jack White who was rounding up the island’s buffalo herd that had scattered during a rare snowstorm and blizzard in January 1949.

The tall and lean cowboy spoke with Los Angeles Times reporter Bill Dredge at Blackjack Ranch at the time after he had sheltered the herd in the safety of Skull Canyon.

The wrangler recalled that the island’s first group of 13 bison, all bulls and stags, were left behind in the canyon wilderness by a motion picture company in 1924. (The buffalo were believed to have originated in Yellowstone National Park.)

“Their Hollywood cowboys got ‘em over here on a boat, but they couldn’t round up cattle well enough to get ‘em back aboard,” White said.

“Worst insult a fella ever paid me was to ask me didn’t he know me in Hollywood.”

As he talked, Jack oiled a 30-30 rifle before a roaring pot-bellied stove. The weapon was one of a half dozen he added to his already filled gun locker during the first hectic weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack.

He indicated he had been prepared to make a last stand on the island should the Japanese invade.

Back to the subject of the buffalo, White recalled that in 1934 William Wrigley decided to build up the herd “to go with the wild pigs and mountain goats and deer that have made this a real spot for wild animal hunting.” (The buffalo, however, were never legally hunted although one was once found with an arrow in its head.)

“So I made a deal with him in Colorado, where there’s a big herd of wild ones. We bought 17 head — mostly cows.” He said five were dropped off at a resort hotel in Arizona to give it a western look, then the other 12 were shipped to the Los Angeles stockyards.

“There we packed ’em in big wooden crates and took ’em across the channel on the steamer,” White said. The buffalo were allowed to roam free and “they don’t pay attention to us, either,” he added.

“But once in a while one gets a little more lonesome and pokes down the hill to Avalon. Fellow down there was quite a heavy drinker a few years back. He walked out of the bar just in time to see a big old bull buffalo come gruntin’ along the waterfront. He went right back and bought him another drink. But they’re breeding right well. We counted about 60 head today.”

Today, the herd is maintained at about 150 to protect both the bison and the landscape of the island, which is eight miles wide at its widest and one-half mile at its narrowest point at Two Harbors/Isthmus, which was once the site of a Civil War barracks.

On Jan. 1, 1864, a detachment of 83 Union Army soldiers sailed from Wilmington Harbor to take possession of Catalina and secure the island for a proposed Indian reservation, which never came to fruition.

At the time, about 100 people lived on the island, mostly miners and ranchers, with some being evicted to the mainland. Another reported reason for the occupation was to thwart any Confederate attempt to take over the island. After World War II, the barracks were converted to the Isthmus Yacht Club.

Over the decades, many Hollywood movie stars and celebrities have visited the island or been seen off the coast in their palatial yachts. Among the most frequent visitors back in the day were Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Johnny Weissmuller, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer and John Wayne.

But one future star actually lived on Catalina. Before she became Marilyn Monroe, Norma Jean Dougherty, then 17, lived in an apartment in Avalon for less than a year while her first husband, James Dougherty, a merchant marine, was stationed on the island during World War II.

Dougherty recalled in his memoir that Norma Jean, although a dutiful housewife, “turned a lot of heads” among servicemen as she would walk to the commissary or to the beach. During one particular dance at the Casino, Dougherty said a sailor cut in on him and Norma Jean, then another, and eventually it seemed every soldier there wanted to dance with his wife. James shipped out to the Pacific in 1944, and their marriage ended two years later.

Spring marked the arrival of Wrigley’s Chicago Cubs Major League Baseball team, which trained on the island from 1921 to 1951 with the exception of the war years.

Some of the greats of the sport played there, such as Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rogers Hornsby, Dizzy Dean and Hack Wilson. A young sportscaster, Ronald “Dutch” Reagan, was covering the team on Catalina when he lined up a screen test for Warner Bros. That led to the future president’s first movie role — playing a radio announcer — in the 1937 film Love Is on the Air.

Speaking of sports, the Catalina Island Country Club and Golf Course, built in 1892, is the oldest operating golf course west of the Mississippi River and the former home of the Bobby Jones Invitational.

No story about Catalina would be complete without addressing the mysterious death of Hollywood actress Natalie Wood that at one time occupied an entire wing of the Catalina Museum of Art and History. Wood gained fame co-starring with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, and later starred in Splendor in the Grass and West Side Story.

As of 2024, the 43-year-old case remained open and unsolved — with Wood’s husband, actor Robert Wagner, now 94, cleared of suspicion. Here are the basic facts.

The body of the actress, 43, clad in a long flannel nightgown, mukluk-style boots and a life jacket was found in the cold waters of Two Harbors on Catalina’s West end some 100 yards offshore on the morning of Nov. 29, 1981. Searchers had previously located the inflatable dinghy from the couple’s yacht Splendour.

Leading up to her death, Wood had just finished shooting the sci-fi movie Brainstorm when she and her husband, along with co-star Christopher Walken and boat captain Dennis Davern, took a Thanksgiving weekend cruise to Catalina.

The couple and Walken had dinner and drinks at Doug’s Harbor Reef restaurant at Two Harbors on Saturday night, Nov. 28, with all three consuming a large amount of alcohol. After returning to the Splendour, Wood retired to the stateroom to sleep.

Walken and Wagner, meanwhile, began arguing, which was heard by other boaters in the area. There was speculation the argument centered on the friendly relationship Wood and Walken enjoyed that angered Wagner. But the pair “calmed down” and went to bed, according to Wagner.

At some point during the night, Wood went up on deck and never came back.

Wagner later said he believed Wood went topside because she couldn’t sleep due to the dinghy banging against the side of the yacht and fell in the water while trying to retie the dinghy to the cleat. The actress had a fear of the water, couldn’t swim, and had refused to do a water scene in Brainstorm.

Wagner said when he realized she had left the stateroom he went to look for his wife but couldn’t find her and noticed the dinghy was also missing. He contacted the Harbor Patrol, which was unable to find her, and then the Coast Guard joined the search.

Shortly before dawn on Sunday, authorities contacted Doug Bombard, who owned the restaurant the trio dined at and also was general manager of Two Harbors with extensive knowledge of the area. Bombard found the body, alerted by a red-colored “bubble” floating on the surface of the water that turned out to be Wood’s life jacket.

The Los Angeles Coroner’s Office originally ruled the death accidental drowning, but the case was reopened on the 30th anniversary of her death in 2011. No new evidence was found at the time to contradict the original conclusion.

Then, in a surprise announcement in July 2012, the Coroner’s Office changed the cause of death from “accidental drowning” to “undetermined.” The reason for the change was stated as being “some of the bruises on Wood’s body were inconsistent with death by drowning.”

In 2018, Sheriff’s Department Detective Ralph Hernandez declared Wagner a person of interest after interviewing witnesses who claimed Wood had been arguing with Wagner at the edge of their boat before she disappeared.

But in 2022, Wagner, who has long denied any wrongdoing, was cleared. “All leads in the Natalie Wood case have been exhausted, and the case remains an open, unsolved case,” Lt. Hugo Reynaga said.

My personal memories of visiting Catalina go back more than 65 years as a Boy Scout with Troop 2 in Santa Monica. We spent a week at Emerald Bay, canoeing, swimming and making crafts in the late ‘50s.

I remember hallowing out a piece of sandstone for my Scout neckerchief and affixing a seahorse to my Aussie-style straw hat. In later visits, I would snorkel in the bay, take in the sights of Avalon and journey to the other side of the island. To see the buffalo, of course.

(Editor’s note: Stewart Slavin, perhaps one of the gutsiest people to graduate from Palisades High School, made news even as he reported on it from the far corners of the globe. Slavin was the third editor-in-chief of the PaliHi student newspaper The Tideline in 1963-1964 before embarking on a career as a reporter, editor and foreign correspondent for United Press International. He is the author of two books With or Without Camel: Reporting from India, Atlantis, The Santa Barbara Jail and Memory-Go-Round — Ride of a Lifetime.)