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The animating force behind much of the history of Beverly Hills is a somewhat surprising one: water.
For millenniums, dew collected in the canyons and defiles of the Santa Monica Mountains trickled down the slopes to feed a series of streams that merged at the foot of the hills, forming a pool the Tongva people called "The Gathering of the Waters."
The waters supported a village, which Juan Crespi -- who was a member of the Spanish expedition that made contact with the Tongva in 1769 -- noted in his diary was surrounded by a "large vineyard of wild grapes and an infinity of rosebushes."
The village was nearly decimated by smallpox carried by the Spaniards, and missionization resulted in the removal of original inhabitants. The openly running streams, so rare in the Los Angeles Basin, were soon used to water livestock.
Oil prospectors came calling during the black-gold rush of the 1900s and, finding more water than petroleum, shifted quickly into the land speculation business.
The former bean field was renamed Beverly Hills, and a planned community was laid out according to Olmstedian principles of landscape architecture.
The luxurious Beverly Hills Hotel was built on the site of the pool of the Tongva, and the town's nascent glamour industry received another boost when...