Fernando Librado’s so-called “sitting cave” is located in the local mountains, a hidden spot chosen carefully by a man who knew the area well. A member of the Chumash tribe whose parents were from Santa Cruz Island, Fernando was born in 1839, baptized at the mission in Ventura, then raised at Mission La Purisima. Sometimes known as Kitsepawit ― he may have been given the name Librado in acknowledgment of his ability to read ― he spent much of his later life on ranches near Lompoc and Las Cruces, working as a sheepherder and handyman, with an occasional expedition to Tranquillon Peak (on what is now Vandenburg Space Force Base) to gather medicinal plants endemic to its slopes.
My anthropologist friend Larry Spanne had boyhood memories of the sitting cave. “My dad took me out there,” he said. “The guy that told my dad and me about it was John Begg, and John Begg knew Fernando personally, and I interviewed him. He told me Fernando was the ranch midwife, medicine man, and doctor. He treated people, sheared sheep, and did a lot of things. But he lived in that cave.”
Although he represented the third generation of Chumash after the initial European colonization of California and therefore had no firsthand knowledge of Chumash life before European contact, Fernando listened attentively to the teachings of his elders and retained a wealth of stories and knowledge in his head. When ethnographer-linguist John P. Harrington encountered him, he became a crucial source of information about Chumash culture and traditions that might otherwise have been lost to time, passing along precious knowledge of the language, religious beliefs, ceremonies, legends, plants, and hands-on crafts. In 1912, he famously directed the building of what he called a “house of the sea”, i.e., a functional tomol based upon the traditional plank canoe construction he recalled from his childhood. Fernando would have been in his seventies when he died in 1915, but there are stories that claim he lived well beyond his hundredth year — and in a way, he certainly did.