Few individuals connected with the history of Catalina Island lived a life as colorful and as riddled with contradictions and mystery as the archaeologist Ralph Glidden.
Catalina Island is about twenty-six miles off the coast of Los Angeles. For the Gabrielino/Tongva people (who called the island Pimu) it was home for at least 9,000 years until the arrival of the Spanish in 1542; their imported diseases and forced relocations had by the 1830s all but erased the Tongva presence.
What happened in 1923?
We made it another year. It is now 2023. I remember reading 2001: A Space Odyssey and feeling that that date was so far into the future. Well, I thought this would be a good time to look back 100 years, to 1923.
