Dominguez Slough was used as a hunting and fishing ground by the indigenous
Tongva-Kizh people; at one point skeletons and relics were found nearby. Research into the historical ecology of the watershed has found that between the 1890s and the 1920s, "large Dominguez Slough converted in a mere 30 years to being mostly open water to mostly wetland or sump or wet meadow." The wildlife value of the wetland was recognized by a newspaper editorial writer of 1894, who stated: According to an 1895 report in the
Los Angeles Times, the slough then covered about and may have been spring-fed as, "In winter the water would be renewed and in summer it would be reduced by evaporation, although a constant inflow of what is estimated to be 60
miner's inches, coming up through the bottom, has kept the quantity of water up to a certain point." In 1903 a county survey stated that the soil at Dominguez Slough was "somewhat unique in its formation, the material having been carried into the lake by the streams, chiefly by
Los Angeles River, and there deposited. It may therefore be considered a
lacustrine deposit."
Ornithologists who visited in 1914 described the slough as about long and generally about wide with a total of about of land under cover of water, writing "South Nigger Slough is much larger than north slough.
Los Angeles boulevard divides both lakes. South slough is about four miles long, extending from the Los Angeles boulevard to Wilmington and the north slough lies two miles south-southeast of Gardena. There are several small marshes adjoining Nigger Slough proper." They observed
least bitterns,
white-faced ibis, russet-backed thrush,
black-headed grosbeak,
Pacific yellowthroat,
song sparrows,
marbled godwit,
mockingbirds,
burrowing owls,
turkey vultures, snakes, snapping turtles,
coots,
black-necked stilts,
killdeer,
yellow-headed blackbirds,
ruddy ducks,
cinnamon teal,
pied-billed grebes,
redwing blackbirds,
plover, and
purple gallinules. A 1916 account stated that the waterline of Nigger Slough was roughly
above sea level. The report also described three 19th-century dikes that had been constructed by the
rancheros to exclude Los Angeles River floodwaters from the slough. A man who lived near the slough when he was a kid in the 1920s described to the
New York Times in 1964 how "the boys got through it on foot or on rafts made of boards or in pole boats. It abounded in
foxes, swamp rats, skunks, owls, herons, egrets and thousands of red‐wing blackbirds.
Ken Stager, now chief curator of the ornithological division in the
Los Angeles County Museum, did his first
bird‐watching in that
swamp. To add to its fascination, Mr. Litton recalls that sheriffs were forever tracking down criminals who were reputed to be in hiding there." The slough was indeed considered more or less impassable to law enforcement in the 1920s as it remained a "dense entanglement of
tules, high grass, and
willow brush...for years has been a refuge for men hunted by officers". The name change was proposed in 1938 as part of a plan to turn the area into a bird sanctuary. The construction of the long-planned drain took place between 1949 and 1967 and cost $26.4 million. or simply
Dominguez Channel, a chute to the sea bordered by "oil refineries, industrial sites, and tract housing." Dominguez Slough survives in fragmentary form in the
Gardena Willows Wetlands Preserve,
Madrona Marsh, "'Devil's Dip' at Chester Washington Golf Course...a wetland inside a mobile home park [Carson Harbor Village]...Victoria Regional Park/Golf Course in Carson [was] also part of it." Devil's Dip is part of Anderson Wash, considered a
tributary of Dominguez Slough. == Additional images ==