The people indigenous to the island of San Nicolas, which is about fifty miles off of the coast of Los Angeles, were sailors who often traded with the mainland. Their abundance of otters caused hunters from Russian settlements in Alaska to sail down to the island to hunt otters for their pelts. One group of these hunters clashed with the Indians living on the island and devastated the small population of Indians. Their population steadily declined after this confrontation. Eventually, the missionaries on the mainland sent a ship to remove the Indians from the island and bring them to the mission. The accounts of sailors report that a woman left the ship just before its departure in order to find her missing son. In 1853, eighteen years after the ship and removed all of the Indians from the island, an otter hunter found a woman living on the island who would have been the same age as the woman who was left behind on the island. She lived on the mainland with the captain who found her for seven weeks before she passed away from disease. Some of her tools and her dress were given to the California Academy of Sciences as a gift, but they were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.