People have been living on Santa Catalina Island for more than 7,000 years. Early groups of people exploited the rich resourses of the sea-from abalone and other mollusks, to small and large fish, and marine mammals such as sea lions. The Island offered limited plant resourses, so the Islanders traded sea products, and, in later years, steatite for their other needs. The Islanders made the twenty mile voyage to the mainland in well crafted plank canoes. Over the millenia, as people migrated through California, different groups of Native Americans would have made their homes on the Island. For several thounds of years, before the European contact, the Las Angeles basin and the Southern Channel Island appear to have been inhabited by people of the linguistic afinity Aztecan language family. Various areas would have has their own dialects of the same language family and would have shared other cultural traits. The matieral culture of these hunter-gatherer people would have varied with the environment throughout the basin, but the maritime adaptations on the Islands and the immediate coast had much in common. At the time of the first European contact, it is thought that the people living on Santa Catalina ISland called their Island Pimu and called themselves Pimungans. They were excellent seamen and paddled their plank canoes skillfully across the sometimes treachorous channel to trade. After Spanish colinization, their apparently flourishing population declined derastically with the introduction of new diseases to which they had little immunity. As the mission system altered the econoic landscape of Southern California, the Pimungans' trade and social networks were disrupted.

    One of Catalina's most noteable transactions occured in the year of 1887. Investors of the Lick estate resold Catalina Island to George Shatto for $200,000. George Shatto, a bussiness man and entrepreneur, was perhaps responsible for making Catalina Island how we know it today. He intended to make the Island a tourist resort. Now Catalina Island is a fun place to go on a vacation to have fun and relax.