GRGUREVICH, LUKE Fisherman-Sheep-Brooks Island

Most people in the San Francisco Bay Area are familiar with Yerba Buena, Treasure Island, Angel Island and, of course, Alcatraz, but only a handful know about the other islands-The Brothers, The Sisters, east and West Marin Islands, Brooks Island and red Rock. Tiny outcroppings in the Bay, they range in size from Brooks Island, 45 acres of forest, to West Sister, little more than a rock. Two are privately owned, one is opened as a park this year. The rest are accessible by boat; in some cases permission from the Coast Guard is necessary. South of The Brothers, three quarters of a mile off Point Richmond, lies Brooks island a lush 45 acres with two fresh-water springs. East Bay Regional Parks bought the land for $625,000 in 1968 and plans to open it to the public this summer.

The island was the site of several Indian villages from about 3000 B.C. to 70 A.D., according to George Coles, an anthropologist at Contra Costa College who has been excavating on the island for many years. The first piece of Indian rope found in California was on Brooks. The fresh water has crated a marsh that is the home for cormorants, mallards, Canadian geese and mourning doves. Mussels, clams and oysters can still be gathered along some parts of the two miles of shoreline.

Records show a Mr. Brooks lived on the island in the middle of the 19th century. He constructed a four-room house and raised goats, then left the Bay Area around 1870. A Croatian immigrant, Luccas Gargurevich, and his wife moved in and raised sheep and 10 children. His son Anton claimed, in a short history of the island he wrote in 1965, that his father was cheated out of the land by one of the Big Four railroad companies. The family then moved to Berkeley.

Luke Gargurevich died in West Berkeley, November 30, 1919, Luke Gargurevich born in 1841, dearly beloved husband of the late Domencia Gargurevich, and loving father of Antone, Mitchell, Luke and Victor Gargurevich, Mrs. Annie S. Illich and Sophie E. Haiens, a native of the Island of Lastovo, Dalmatia, Croatia, aged 80 years and 10 months. A member of Slavonic Illyric M. B. Society of San Francisco. Friends and acquaintances respectfully invited to attend the funeral tomorrow (Wednesday), Dec. 3, 1919, from the parlors of Ferrari & Alison 1548 Stockton, at 1 p.m.; thence to K. P. Hall, 115 Valencia st., where services will be held under Slavonic I. M. B. Society, commencing at 2 p.m., thence to Croatian Church of Nativity for blessing. Internment, Holy Cross.

BROOKS ISLAND - SF

By Dennis Drabelle

We're standing on the edge of people's lives," says George Coles, who is standing at the head of a gully crisscrossed by weathered boards. "From the evidence we estimate that about 100 people were living in this village at any given time, and that makes about 500 people a century. The site was occupied for 3,000 years, which means we're on a spot where 15,000 people lived and died."

The spot is a knoll above the eastern shore of Brooks Island, a 45-acre triangle of land located in the Bay about half a mile south of Richmond harbor. It is also a unit of the East Bay Regional Park system. George is an archeologist on the faculty of Contra Costa College in Richmond. He, his wife Corrine, and the park district's Neil Havlik are conducting a tour of the island, with emphasis on its Indian archeological sites.

"Why did they locate their village here?" George muses. "It's a comfortable, protected site on the leeward side of the island. White people have sited their houses in the same area-as you saw, the present caretaker's house isn't very far from here. There's also a spring nearby. These people were quite good at finding the best places to live." George calls them simply "the people" because about 200 years ago they were driven off the island so quickly that their proper name was lost. "Most of the names we've given to California Indians are arbitrary," he says. "Pomo is not even a word in the language of the people that go by that name."

This site and a second one on the island were first noted by archeologist N. C. Nelson in 1907, when the place was known as Sheep Farm Island. (No one knows where the name Brooks comes from; shipping charts back in the 1850s refer to the island that way.) This was after the occupation by Yugoslav immigrant named Anton Gargurevich, who claimed the island, built a home on it, lived on it, raised cattle and goats on it, but neglected to file a deed for it. Like the Indians, he was eventually ousted. (In early 1960s George located one of Gargurevich's daughters, aged 90, and to her delight brought her back to the island for the first time since 1893. She gave him a long statement on what it was like to grow up in the middle of the bay.

Express, September 21, 1984