Colonel Theodore Pickens and Doctor Benjamin Briggs were two of La Crescenta's earliest settlers whose very different actions shaped the area. Pickens arrived in 1871 and claimed a homestead at the top of Pickens Canyon, where he controlled the valley's only significant water source and required others to pay for its use until a dispute with Amoretta Lanterman was settled. He then turned to logging, cutting down the thick forest of Big Cone Douglas Fir trees on his homestead and in the surrounding area to sell as fuel in Los Angeles, destroying in little more than a decade a long-established forest that later efforts could not restore. After he decided to leave, he sold his land to Briggs, though the canyon kept his name. Briggs, whose life had been marked by his wife's death from tuberculosis and by constant pain from a bullet lodged in his spine, gave up a successful fruit ranch and devoted himself to treating lung diseases. After searching widely for a healthful climate, he came to the Rancho La Canada area in 1881, bought Pickens' land to establish a hospital, purchased the entire western half of Rancho La Canada, surveyed it, laid out streets still used today, built the ranch house known as Briggs Terrace, and renamed the area La Crescenta after the crescent shapes of the mountains. In less than twelve years he also established the first school, church, public park, and full-time medical facility, and planted numerous trees. He died in 1893 after deciding to remove the bullet that had remained in his body for more than four decades, at age 66, and Briggs Avenue bears his name. The area's natural stream, once a year-round waterway that supported forests, wildlife, trout, and seasonal Tongva camps, became the focus of long disputes after settlement, especially under Pickens's monopoly, until the Crescenta Valley Water District created a more equitable system in 1950; most surface water has since been drawn off, leaving only a fenced cement channel that occasionally fills during heavy rain. Pickens's logging stripped about five square miles of centuries-old Douglas firs, and although later federal protection ended further logging when President Benjamin Harrison designated the San Gabriel Timberland Reserve and President Theodore Roosevelt later renamed it the Angeles National Forest, the forest has never successfully grown back.