The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 372

VC SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1995 B7 i n. "-'5 LOS, ANGELES TIMES -v- i Muiiaii bimi historian Pat Havens points to a site on early map of area. SIMI: City's Bicentennial Celebration Finally Begins Continued from Bl happened was someone someone else a piece of paper." KiBut organizers say they have peen working hard to rescue the celebration, hoping the rich story (pf Simi Valley's colonial roots will shine through before the last three months of the bicentennial year iiiriftaway. -Tiey handed out history packets last fall to elementary school history teachers city wide. They also designed a bicentenni-1 at Togo featuring the city's oldest I adobe, emblazoned it onto T-shirts, Photos by TONY RIVETTI ForTheTliW Stratheam Historical Park docents Barbara Willis, left, and Sari Schnepf show off T-shirts.

Plans were kicked into high gear this week. memorative plaque. But it's a little late in the year to spend that kind of money on special postal imprints and banners that will be outdated in three months, council members said. They suggested the organizers try getting donations from the city's civic clubs instead. Bicentennial organizers say they are doing just that.

"We're a little late in requesting money and getting going, but the people that are involved really have their hearts in this," Freed said. "Our goal is to make as many people as possible aware of our community's history. It's important to be aware of those who came before us, and how we got to where we are today." Today's Simi Valley began as a gleam in the eye of Santiago Pico, a Spanish army private. For 10 years, Pico labored with King Carlos' soldiers. Pico and 240 other settlers trudged up and down the California coast behind Father Junipero Serra and Capt.

Gasper de Portola as the two set up religious missions and military lapel pins and coffee cups and put them out for sale. They cut a documentary video that traces the Valley's history from Spanish settlement to thriving 19th-century cattle country. Monday, they asked the City Council to spend more than presidios in hopes of strengthening Spain's somewhat tenuous claims on the vast wilds of California. And at some point, Pat Havens; said, Pico must have marched1 through the big, dry valley containing the little Chumash village known as Shimiji, because he re-, membered it later. And he wanted the land enough to ask colonial commanders upon! his retirement in 1785 to give it to him.

1 Request denied. For 10 years longer, Havens said, Pico stayed in Los Angeles with his wife and seven kids as part of a police force of retired soldiers, keeping the peace in the often-rowdy pueblo. Then, in 1795 the exact day is unknown, since the only evidence is a fleeting reference in a document written 26 years later Pico got his wish. The Spanish colonial government decided that Simi Valley lacked enough water to support a mission between Ventura and San Gabriel, and chose San Fernando instead. i And the Spanish governor declared that El Rancho Simi stretching from sites now known as Rocky Peak to Grimes Canyon Road, from the Santa Susanna Mountains on the north to the Conejo Valley's border ridge on the south was the 63-year-old Pico's to use as his own.

Chumash natives who already lived in the valley probably went to work on the cattle ranch run by Pico and three of his five sons, Havens said. And upon his death in 1815, Pico's massive ranch passed onto his family, who continued raising cattle, horses, goats and grapevines there even after Mexico won independence from Spain in 1822. By 1850, California had become one of the United States, and El Rancho Simi had been bought by the family of Jose de la Guerra, a Spaniard who ran cattle there. But a vicious drought in 1863 and 1864 forced the family to sell the rancho to East Coast investors. The Americans renamed it.

El Rancho Simi Land and Water Co. And over the decades since, Havens said, it was divvied up among land speculators, cattle ranchers, citrus growers and other forebears of today's Simi Valley and Moorpark land owners. The delay in celebrating the bicentennial of El Rancho Simi. "is disappointing," Havens But the work exploring and exposing Simi's 200-year-old origins will inform generations to come, long after the bicentennial year is past, she said. Havens added, "It's not like, it has a beginning and an end." $5,600 on banners, flags and 1 'plaques to be thrown up around towii 1 The city said no.

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