The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island, whose solitary 18‐year stay on an island off the coast of southern California was commemorated in Scott O’Dell’s novel, Island of the Blue Dolphins, has been of considerable interest since she was abandoned on the island in 1835 and brought to Santa Barbara in 1853. We examine one of the factors that may have contributed to the Lone Woman’s abandonment and discuss several newly‐translated Russian American Company (RAC) documents, one of which gives details of a long‐rumored deadly con ict between a Russian‐led crew of Alaskan native otter hunters and the San Nicolas Island natives (Nicoleño). All three documents contain important new information about the nature of the sometimes violent interactions between the Spanish, Russians, Americans, California Indians, and Alaskan natives in the early nineteenth century.

When the last San Nicolas Island resident, known as the ‘Lone Woman,’ was brought to Santa Barbara in 1853 after 18 years of solitude following the 1835 removal of her people to the mainland, efforts were made to locate speakers who could communicate with her. That search was reported to be unsuccessful, and the Lone Woman died seven weeks later, unable to recount her story. After the Lone Woman’s death, many accounts presumed that everyone from San Nicolas Island had died. Recent research in provincial Mexican papers, Los Angeles documents, American records, and church registers has uncovered original primary source information that details the experience of the Lone Woman’s people in Los Angeles. Five men, women, and children are con rmed or are likely to have come to the Los Angeles area from San Nicolas Island in 1835, and the parents of a newborn girl baptized the following year also may have come from that island.

Analyses of 15,314 electron velocity distribution functions (VDFs) within ±2 hr of 52 interplanetary (IP) shocks observed by the Wind spacecraft near 1 au are introduced. The electron VDFs are fit to the sum of three model functions for the cold dense core, hot tenuous halo, and field-aligned beam/strahl component. The best results were found by modeling the core as either a bi-kappa or a symmetric (or asymmetric) bi-self-similar VDF, while both the halo and beam/strahl components were best fit to bi-kappa VDF. This is the first statistical study to show that the core electron distribution is better fit to a self-similar VDF than a bi-Maxwellian under all conditions. The self-similar distribution deviation from a Maxwellian is a measure of inelasticity in particle scattering from waves and/or turbulence. The ranges of values defined by the lower and upper quartiles for the kappa exponents are κec ~ 5.40-10.2 for the core, κeh ~ 3.58-5.34 for the halo, and κeb ~ 3.40-5.16 for the beam/strahl. The lower-to-upper quartile range of symmetric bi-self-similar core exponents is sec ~ 2.00-2.04, and those of asymmetric bi-self-similar core exponents are pec ~ 2.20-4.00 for the parallel exponent and qec ~ 2.00-2.46 for the perpendicular exponent. The nuanced details of the fit procedure and description of resulting data product are also presented. The statistics and detailed analysis of the results are presented in Paper II and Paper III of this three-part study.

Alfvén waves are fundamental plasma wave modes that permeate the universe. At small kinetic scales, they provide a critical mechanism for the transfer of energy between electromagnetic fields and charged particles. These waves are important not only in planetary magnetospheres, heliospheres and astrophysical systems but also in laboratory plasma experiments and fusion reactors. Through measurement of charged particles and electromagnetic fields with NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, we utilize Earth's magnetosphere as a plasma physics laboratory. Here we confirm the conservative energy exchange between the electromagnetic field fluctuations and the charged particles that comprise an undamped kinetic Alfvén wave. Electrons confined between adjacent wave peaks may have contributed to saturation of damping effects via nonlinear particle trapping. The investigation of these detailed wave dynamics has been unexplored territory in experimental plasma physics and is only recently enabled by high-resolution MMS observations.