Bowers Cave
Hasley Canyon
Bowers Cave, circa 1962. Unidentified "explorers."
On May 2, 1884, brothers McCoy and Everette Pyle, a pair of young ranchers, stumbled upon Bowers Cave in the Hasley hills behind Castaic. Inside they found a treasure trove of native American artifacts, believed to have been deposited there by Tataviam Indians, the dominant peoples of the Santa Clarita Valley from about A.D. 450 to the early 19th Century. Among the artifacts were flicker feathers and four sun sticks, used in religious ceremonies. Nothing so important had ever been found in connection with the Tataviam — and nothing since.
Sold to Dr. Steven Bowers, for whom the cave was named, most of the collection found its way to the Peabody Museum of American Ethnology at Harvard University. In the 1950s, the Peabody traded one of the sun sticks to a museum in Australia (traded for what, we don't know); the rest of the collection is presumably still there.
Bowers Cave is on private property along the northeastern border of the Chiquita Canyon Landfill.
Read more about Bowers Cave here.
AP0812: 9600 dpi jpeg from copy print
