Burial Mounds and Ancient Canals Described in Southern California
NIn the plain at the mouth of the Saticoy River, twelve miles below San Buenaventura, and five or six miles from the sea, are reported two mounds, regular, rounded, and bare of trees. One of them is over a mile long and two hundred feet high, and the other about half as large. If the report of their existence 696is correct, there seems to be no evidence that they are of artificial formation, except their isolated position on the plain, and a native tradition that they are burial-places. One writer suggests that they are the graves of a people, or of their kings, whose cities are buried beneath the waters of the Santa Barbara Channel. The site of the cities presents some obstacles to exploration, and the details of their construction are not fully known. Twenty miles farther up the Saticoy is a group of small mounds, ten or twelve in number and five or six feet high. They "seem to have been water-worn or worked out by running water all around the mounds so as to isolate each one." Near these mounds, on the Cayetano rancho, is a field of some five hundred acres, divided by parallel ridges of earth, and having distinct traces of irrigating ditches, supplied by a canal which extends two or three miles up the Sespe arroyo. It is said that the present inhabitants of this region, both native and Spanish, have no knowledge of the origin of these agricultural works
