ON THE BOULEVARD, IT'S ANCIENT HISTORY.

Byline: Glenn Gaslin Daily News Staff Writer

A shirtless man wearing an American Indian headdress heavy with feathers bends his knees and pushes one hand into the grass.

``Reach down and touch the ground,'' Mati Weya says to a few dozen spectators. ``You're touching your own being, Mother Earth.''

The Chumash dancer looks out at the semicircle of kids and parents and a few people wearing 19th-century costumes. He pauses.

``You're making contact,'' he continues. ``Contact with Mother Earth.''

Or, rather, contact with Ventura Boulevard.

The grass between their fingers grows only yards from four lanes of Saturday-afternoon traffic. The ducks swimming in a nearby spring-fed pond need only fly a few feet off the ground to see the teeming, sweaty main street of the San Fernando Valley. And the buildings behind the pond, the 19th-century limestone house and smaller adobe (both nursing severe earthquake wounds) seem odd between the Shell station and Smart & Final megastore parking lot.

Last on the list of things you might expect to find on Ventura Boulevard - where almost anything imaginable can be bought and sold - would be ``a state park'' where an American Indian is touching the ground while two kids in fox skins bang sticks and chant.

But there it is, right in the middle of Encino, obscured by a long brick wall and labeled with a small, brown government-issue sign reading ``Los Encinos State Historical Park.'' The lush plot serves as a natural center for centuries of cultural conflict, archeology and suburban progress, a window between the Valley of the frontier and the Valley of the future.

And on a Saturday afternoon, a small crowd of history buffs and regular folks gather to celebrate the past.

``We didn't expect a big turnout,'' says Walter Nelson, event organizer and a volunteer docent. ``Most people don't know about this place.''

Nelson wears the outfit of an 1870s Basque shepherd, complete with a vest, crook and dusty bowler hat. Like many of the participants, he adheres to the theme of colonial Los Angeles, when the Spanish, Americans and Indians battled for the last frontier.

The park still holds its past despite decades despite the trampling of traffic, commerce and growth.

Ventura Boulevard didn't exist before Nov. 11, 1916. The path had been part of El Camino Real, the King's Highway, the dirt path connecting the Franciscan missions of Spanish settlers in the 19th century. It carried travelers from Los Angeles to Ventura and the north.

As the highway became more of a trade route, restaurants and lodges emerged. A roadside plot of Rancho El Encino, 4,460 acres for grazing sheep and servicing travelers in the mid-1800s, a sort of proto-truck stop. Ranchers Phillipe and Eugene Granier built a limestone house there, modeled after their home in France, and created a lake from natural hot springs. An adobe, built by previous owner Vincente de la Osa, served as a roadhouse on the old El Camino Real. About five acres survive as Los Encinos today.

As agriculture and then development came to the Valley, the highway took on regional names - Ventura County Road, Los Angeles and Ventura County Road, and California State Highway. It was heavily traveled but relatively barren.

In 1916, a Los Angeles ordinance brought 17 miles of dirt road together under a single name, borrowed from 13th-century Franciscan priest Saint Buenaventura.

In 1945, the last family owners of Rancho El Encino, the Amestoys, unloaded the land to real estate developers, and only a small portion became the park.

And on the same day as the living history festival, Jeannine Amestoy MacKinnon enjoys snacks and chit-chat with a few picnic tables' worth of family members. She was only 3 when her father sold the property, she says, ``but we still come here all the time.''

During her lifetime, The Boulevard has long since buried its frontier image, its missionary past. In the 1960s, the parallel Ventura Freeway (101) lifted some of The Boulevard's traffic burden. Roadhouses made way for hipster hangouts, fast food and mini-malls and shops.

Only this small patch of nature remains.

During the sparsely attended history event, Sylmar High School teacher Bill Howard sings Irish sea songs, naturalist Kent Christenson shows kids how to start a fire with a few sticks and oak leaves, and small girls chase chickens across a field. And the Indians dance, tell stories and perform a ceremony to respect the winds of the four directions (Encino, Woodland Hills, Northridge, Sherman Oaks).

``We just want to make you aware of the Indians in the Valley before Spanish conquest,'' says Mati Weya. Mainly Chumash and Gabrieleno tribes roamed the area, and, quite possibly, spent a lot of time on what is now Ventura Boulevard.

Twice in the past two decades, artifacts from American Indian settlements have halted development on the street. In 1984, construction workers stumbled upon bones and tools south of Ventura Boulevard at Balboa Avenue. Archeologists removed and cataloged millions of remnants from one of the largest, oldest settlements in Southern California, the Lost Village of Encino.

The spot now hosts First Financial Plaza, a shiny high-rise.

In 1990, another, smaller deposit of artifacts turned up across the street, right next to Los Encinos. Park ranger Russ Kimura suggests that these may, too, fit into the Lost Village. Period maps suggest that a large hill may have been removed from the area when Spanish settlers built El Camino Real along what is now the almost-sea-level Ventura Boulevard. The mound, and whatever lay within, may have been spread out for miles to make room for progress.

Two buildings from the era still stand, the Granier brothers' home and adobe. Across a short field of green, chain-link fence surrounds the houses, still damaged from the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. A sampling of historical photos - usually exhibited inside the buildings, now red-tagged and empty - hang inside a tent. Tours of rooms full of period artifacts haven't run in two years.

But, says Nelson, the pause allows the docents and rangers to rethink history.

``Nobody wants to watch rooms full of furniture do nothing,'' he explains. Living history, the type of costumed and informed re-enactments that define Virginia's Colonial Williamsburg and the occasional events at Los Encinos, could bring the Valley's past into better perspective.

``And what better place than the middle of Encino?'' he asks.

A couple sitting on a nearby park bench illustrate this possible future, both of them sporting detailed outfits considered casual in the mid-1800s.

``We want to start something like Williamsburg,'' says Darla Kruger, a member of the Living Arts History Association. ``We'd like to have living history all the time. And this is the only place in the Valley you can do it.''

Here, on Ventura Boulevard, she wears the dress of a middle-class woman living in the West, perhaps traveling Ventura Boulevard 50 years before it existed, in the year 1860 or so.

``Everything's authentic,'' she says, showing off her rumply, poofy garb, ``right down to my underwear.''

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos, Map

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) MOTHER VENTURA

The nature, history and wisdom of The Boulevard

(2) Chumash Indians dance during a living history event at Los Encinos, a five-acre park that was part of the 4,460-acre Rancho El Encino in the 1800s.

David Sprague/Daily News

(3) In 1928, the area that would become Studio City was a rural outpost in the undeveloped Valley.

Studio City Chamber of Commerce

Map: Los Encinos State Historic Park