San Fernando & Santa Clarita Valleys
Tataviam and Tongva country behind the hills — Mission San Fernando at the village of Achoicominga, California's first gold and first oil well, and the Owens Valley water that arrives at the Cascades.
The Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians is headquartered in San Fernando, across from the city hall, and its citizens' lineages run through both of these valleys and out into Simi and the Antelope Valley beyond. Mission San Fernando Rey de España was founded on September 8, 1797 at the village of Achoicominga, and the nation's own account of what followed uses the word enslaved — people taken from every surrounding lineage to build the mission and to run it. The Spanish called them Fernandeño after the place that took their labor. The valley's southern rim is Tongva ground and the country west of the Simi Hills is Chumash; the lineages traded and married across boundaries that were never lines.
The drive is two valleys and the pass between them: the 101 across the San Fernando floor, then the 5 climbing over Newhall into Santa Clara River country. Everything else here follows from that gap in the hills. Every era cut its own way through — Phineas Banning's notch of the 1850s, deepened toward ninety feet under Edward Beale and dug largely by Chinese laborers; the San Fernando railroad tunnel of 1876; the Newhall Tunnel after it; the freeway interchange standing there now. At Lang on September 5, 1876, Charles Crocker drove a ceremonial gold spike to finish the Southern Pacific's San Joaquin Valley line and link Los Angeles to San Francisco by rail for the first time. Chinese crews built that too, and went uncredited for a century.
Gold came first and almost nobody remembers it. In March 1842, six years before Sutter's Mill, Francisco López pulled wild onions in Placerita Canyon and found gold clinging to the roots — California's first documented discovery, worked afterward by Sonoran miners. Oil came next. Pico Canyon's fourth well was completed on September 26, 1876, ran for a hundred and fourteen years, and made this the birthplace of the California petroleum industry, with a company town at Mentryville and the state's first refinery down at Newhall.
Water came last, and it came from somewhere else. On November 5, 1913 the Los Angeles Aqueduct emptied into the north valley at the Cascades in front of some forty thousand people, carrying Payahuunadü — the Owens Valley, the land of flowing water — south to a city that had bought it out from under the people who lived there. The dam built to hold that water in reserve failed just before midnight on March 12, 1928, and the flood down San Francisquito Canyon killed more than four hundred and fifty. It remains the worst civil engineering failure in twentieth-century America, and it ended William Mulholland.
What to See in San Fernando & Santa Clarita Valleys
10 places across the region, grouped by what they are.
Geology & Rock Formations
Historic Sites
Industry & Mining
Stories from San Fernando & Santa Clarita Valleys
San Fernando & Santa Clarita Valleys rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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