History buffs researching sites in the Foothills communities were surprised by what they found on a historical marker noting the terminus of the Old Spanish Trail at the northwest corner of Ninth Street and North Second Avenue in Upland: a series of tiny swastikas.

The defining symbol of the German National Socialist Party, the swastika has an ancient lineage in Asia and North America that preceded the hated Nazi movement by thousands of years – and has nothing to do with its counterclockwise swastikas (the Nazi swastikas are clockwise). These ancient swastikas were symbols of good fortune among the native tribes of the southwestern deserts.

The enthusiasm for swastikas in the southwest originally sprang from the 1884 publication of “Ramona” by Helen Hunt Jackson, a novel she hoped would bring attention and sympathy for abused and displaced southwestern tribes, much as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” did for the abolitionist movement of the 1850s.

So influential was Jackson’s novel that over a half a century later, the San Bernardino I-10 Free way was originally called the Ramona Freeway.

With the rise of the Nazis in the 1920s and ’30s, the swastika became associated with hatred and anti-Semitism. Even so, the 1960s saw a brief and dubious vogue with the symbol among outlaw motorcycle clubs who used it to display their disdain for the emerging “love and peace” hippie movement.

The counterclockwise swastika’s reign as an American symbol came to an end in 1940 when leaders of the Navajo, Papagos, Apache and Hopi tribes officially banned its use in opposition to the Nazis, whose misappropriation of the symbol had evoked global evil.