The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island: The True Story Behind Island of the Blue Dolphins

In the late summer of 1853 a small schooner came into Santa Barbara with a passenger nobody in California could talk to. She was a Native woman of about fifty, dressed in a gown she had sewn from cormorant feathers, and she had been living by herself on San Nicolas Island, the most remote of the Channel Islands, for eighteen years. She smiled at almost everything. Within seven weeks she was dead, and with her, as far as anyone knows, went the last fluent speaker of her language.

She is remembered as the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island. The mission priest who baptized her on her deathbed gave her the name Juana María, and a century later Scott O’Dell turned her into Karana, the heroine of Island of the Blue Dolphins, a novel with millions of copies in print that is still assigned in many California classrooms. The novel is moving, but it is fiction. The true story is stranger, darker and, thanks to two decades of digging through mission registers and sand dunes, much better documented than it used to be.

An island at the edge of the map

San Nicolas sits about 61 miles off the California coast, a low, wind-scoured mesa of roughly 22 square miles. Its highest point, Jackson Hill, reaches only 907 feet. Sebastián Vizcaíno’s expedition sighted it on December 6, 1602, the feast day of Saint Nicholas, and named it accordingly. Today the island belongs to the U.S. Navy, which runs it from Naval Base Ventura County as a test and training site, with a 10,000-foot runway and a small staff. It is one of the Navy-run islands most people can never visit, and boats are required to keep their distance from its shore.

People were living there long before Vizcaíno. Archaeologists have recorded hundreds of sites on the island, and the record of human occupation goes back more than 8,000 years. The islanders, now called the Nicoleño, fished, hunted seals and sea lions, gathered shellfish and traded with the mainland and the other islands. The scraps of their speech that survive suggest a language of the Takic branch of the Uto-Aztecan family, the same branch as Tongva and Luiseño on the mainland.

The island also had something outsiders wanted badly: sea otters. Otter pelts were among the most valuable furs in the world in the early nineteenth century, prized above all in China, and the kelp beds around the Channel Islands were full of them.

The otter hunters and the massacre of 1814

The Russian-American Company, which ran Russia’s colonies in Alaska, had learned that the fastest way to harvest otters was to send Alaska Native hunters, many of them from Kodiak Island, down the coast in kayaks under Russian supervision. In 1814 the company brig Il’mena, a former Boston ship, carried a party of these hunters to the Channel Islands. One group, overseen by a Russian named Yakov Babin, was working San Nicolas.

What happened next is known only in outline. According to the Russian records, the islanders killed one of Babin’s hunters, and in retaliation the remaining hunters killed many islanders. No one recorded the dead man’s name, what set off the fight, or how many Nicoleños were killed. When word reached Alexander Baranov, the company’s chief manager in Alaska, he wrote in May 1815 that Babin should be reprimanded for his act of madness, since the expedition’s leader had been ordered to remove the islanders without causing them any harm. Babin blamed his men, saying he had been unable to control their anger. He was demoted to an ordinary sailor.

Whatever the exact toll, it was devastating. Historians estimate that the island had a few hundred people before the otter hunters arrived; after 1814 only a few dozen were left. The Nicoleños who survived lived on in a community missing many of its men.

1835: the ship called Better Than Nothing

By the 1830s California was part of Mexico, the missions were being secularized, and the remaining Nicoleños were isolated and dwindling. In 1835 a small schooner named Peor es Nada, roughly Better Than Nothing, sailed to San Nicolas to bring them to the mainland. It was chartered by the otter hunter Isaac Sparks and commanded by Charles Hubbard, a German-born captain who had become a Mexican citizen. Why the islanders were removed is still debated. The usual explanations are compassion, worry about further raids, and the missions’ need for workers, and the truth may be some mix of all three.

The schooner landed its passengers at San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles, in late November 1835. One woman was not aboard. The oldest firsthand accounts say simply that she was mistakenly left behind, after a storm came up and forced the ship to leave the island in a hurry.

The version most people know, in which she leaped overboard and swam back to shore to find a child who had been left behind, came later. It first appeared in print in 1847, and it was popularized by Emma Hardacre’s 1880 magazine story Eighteen Years Alone. Scott O’Dell used it in his novel. Accounts collected from Native people decades later said that she had stayed with her son, and that the boy later died, but none of these versions can be confirmed.

Nor is it clear why no one went back for her. A popular explanation holds that Peor es Nada sank soon afterward and no other boat was available. The schooner was indeed lost, capsizing at the entrance to San Francisco Bay in 1836, but other ships did sail to San Nicolas in the years that followed. One of them, the Bolivar, went there in 1843 with George Nidever and Isaac Sparks aboard. Nobody seems to have made finding her a priority.

The people who did reach the mainland

For more than a century, books repeated that the Lone Woman was the last of her people. The historian Susan Morris and her colleagues went looking in the mission and parish registers, and in 2016 they published what they found. At least five Nicoleños can be traced after the 1835 removal. One was a boy of about five who was baptized at the Plaza Church in Los Angeles on December 13, 1835, as Tomás Guadalupe. He grew up in a Los Angeles household, went to work in 1859 in the vineyards of Antonio Coronel, a former mayor of Los Angeles, and married Refugio López in June 1860.

Another Nicoleño man, known as Black Hawk, lived at San Pedro and died around 1845 after a fall. He was buried on Dead Man’s Island in the harbor, a landmark later dredged away when the port was enlarged. As the 2016 paper put it, numerous secondary sources claimed the Lone Woman was the last of her people, and it is clear that she was not.

Eighteen years alone

Meanwhile one woman lived on in the fog. On the mainland her story became a legend, and now and then sailors claimed to have seen a figure on the island. In 1850 Father José González Rubio of Mission Santa Barbara reportedly paid a sea captain, Thomas Jeffries, to look for her. Jeffries found nothing, but his talk of seals and otters on San Nicolas caught the interest of George Nidever.

Nidever, born in Tennessee in 1802, had come to California in 1833 and settled in Santa Barbara as a hunter and rancher. In 1852 his crew found human footprints on a San Nicolas beach. In 1853 they came back with a seven-man otter-hunting crew that included several Native men from the mainland missions. A Prussian-born sailor in the party, Carl Dittman, was the first to spot her.

She was sitting outside a shelter she had built from whale bones and brush, skinning a seal, and she shared roasted roots with the men. Nidever later described her as being of medium height but rather thick, about 50 years old but still strong and active, with a pleasing face, because she was continuously smiling. Her teeth were entire but worn to the gums.

How she survived is easier to reconstruct than why. San Nicolas has seals, sea lions, seabirds, abalone and other shellfish, and small springs of fresh water. Nidever’s accounts say she also used a cave on the island, and she apparently cached tools and supplies in several places. Her clothing was made of bird skins and feathers sewn together with sinew. She had baskets, bone needles and a woven basket for carrying water.

Seven weeks in Santa Barbara

She came back with Nidever to Santa Barbara and lived in his adobe with his wife, Sinforosa, and their children. Townspeople came to see her, and she seemed to enjoy the attention, singing and dancing for her visitors. A sea captain reportedly offered Nidever $1,000 to take her to San Francisco and put her on show, according to Nidever’s memoir. She stayed in Santa Barbara.

What nobody could do was talk with her. Chumash people from the area could not understand her, and neither, by most accounts, could Native people brought from Los Angeles who had family ties to the southern islands. Only four of her words were written down: tocah, for an animal hide; nache, for man; toygwah, for sky; and puoochay, for body. Two songs were also remembered. Decades later a Chumash elder, Fernando Librado, sang one of them, now called the Toki Toki song, for the ethnographer John Peabody Harrington, who recorded it on a wax cylinder in 1913. Linguists have compared those few words with Luiseño, Cupeño and Tongva, but they are too few to settle exactly where her language belonged.

The diet of the town did not agree with her. She fell seriously ill, probably with dysentery. Near death she was conditionally baptized by Father Francisco Sánchez and given the name Juana María. She died about seven weeks after reaching Santa Barbara and was buried on October 19, 1853, in the Nidever family plot in the cemetery at Mission Santa Barbara, in an unmarked grave. The burial entry records that she was baptized conditionally since there was no one who could understand her language.

Her belongings scattered. Her feather dress is said to have been sent to Rome, though no record of it has been found. Other things, including her basket water bottle, ended up at the California Academy of Sciences and were destroyed in the fire after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. In 1928 the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a plaque at the mission in her memory.

Digging for the Lone Woman

Because she lived in so few documented places, archaeologists have long hoped the island itself might fill in her story. In 1939 the archaeologist Arthur Woodward found what he believed was her whale-bone hut, 19 whale bones on a high ridge at the western end of the island. Decades later, the Navy archaeologist Steven Schwartz spent more than twenty years searching for the cave mentioned in Nidever’s account.

The breakthrough came from a dusty map. A University of California archaeologist showed Schwartz the field notes of a 19th-century U.S. Coast Survey mapmaker, who had placed one of his survey stations 100 yards eastward of the large cave formerly inhabited by a wild Indian woman who lived there alone for 18 years. Following those notes, Schwartz’s crew found a cavern at least 75 feet long, filled with windblown sand. They hauled out roughly 40,000 buckets of it. Near the entrance they found carved initials and a tapered glass bottle of the kind that held pepper sauce for sailors in the mid-1800s. In 2012 Schwartz said he was 90 percent sure it was her cave.

Separately, in the winter of 2009 to 2010, two redwood boxes were found eroding out of a sea cliff on the island’s northwest coast, under a whale rib. They were probably made from old canoe planks and held together with beach tar. Inside were more than 200 objects, including stone blades, bone fishhooks, harpoon points of a kind used by Alaska Native hunters, and a brass button. The archaeologist Jon Erlandson called it perhaps the most amazing find of all from the Channel Islands. Whether the Lone Woman packed those boxes is unknown; it is, in his words, at least a reasonable hypothesis.

Then the digging stopped. In 2012 the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, who say they are culturally affiliated with the Nicoleño, raised concerns about the excavations, and the Navy halted work at the cave. In 2015 the Navy concluded that the Pechanga were culturally affiliated with the remains and objects it held from the island, a finding that some historians and anthropologists who study the island dispute. Newer federal notices list several Luiseño bands and other California tribes. Schwartz retired, calling the end of the project a heartbreak. The cave remains on a closed military island, its floor still partly unexcavated.

From history to Island of the Blue Dolphins

Scott O’Dell came across the story while living in California and published Island of the Blue Dolphins in 1960. It won the Newbery Medal in 1961 and was filmed in 1964. O’Dell gave his heroine a name, Karana, a dog, Rontu, and a voice, and he made her years alone into a story about grief, self-reliance and making peace with animals. In 2016 the University of California Press published a reader’s edition, edited by the historian Sara Schwebel, that places the novel alongside the historical records.

The real woman did not get to tell her own story. What survives is a handful of words, a song recorded secondhand, a few objects, a burial entry and a bronze plaque. Her story has been told by everyone who met her, by those who never did, and by a novelist who made her famous.

Her story has been told by everyone who met her, by those who never did, and by a novelist who made her famous.

Hers is a story of a people nearly destroyed by the fur trade, a removal that left one person behind, and a town that welcomed a stranger without being able to ask her a single question.

The same theme runs through some of the strangest stories in natural history: the tiny colony stranded on Clipperton Island, the insects that hung on for decades on Ball’s Pyramid, and the last aurochs, a lone animal outliving the rest of her kind. San Nicolas is still off limits to visitors. But somewhere under its sand there may yet be more traces of the woman who waited there for eighteen years.

Further reading