WAY BACK WHEN, 100 years ago today on December 17, 1918, the local paper mentioned the visit of author N.H. Chittenden. "At present, he is engaged in writing a defense of the early inhabitants of the West, defending them against what he calls the slanderous misrepresentation of the moving picture films. He declares that the early inhabitants of California were kindly, law-abiding citizens, who have been converted into 'roughnecks' and bandits by the imagination of scenario writers." More about the author in "Way Back When: Santa Barbara in 1918." (Photo of a Cocopah man. Image: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, 1901)